Reciprocal of Real Stars in Traveller Space

[sudnadja]

The "Real Stars in Traveller Space" thread got me thinking about an approach to select candidate real stars to map to traveller stars.

One method would be to optimize parameter differences, and to try it out with an easy set of parameters, I'll try traveller jump distances in parsecs from three systems (Sol, Prometheus, and Barnard's Star) for which real positions are known, and see which real world stars come closest to those distances.

Trying this out with Gashidda (purported to be delta pavonis), about 7, 9 and 8 hex-jumps away from Sol, Prometheus and Barnard respectively.

The most optimum candidate there turns out to be Mu Cassiopeiae.

{{0.564652,\[Mu] Cassiopeiae},{0.564805,Gl 53 B},{0.747833,HIP 7981},{0.776894,NN 3378},{0.902346,HIP 3765},{0.940919,HIP 12781},{0.952008,NN 3417},{1.0561,HIP 12114},{1.05684,Gl 105 B},{1.11813,HIP 101180}}

So that didn't work out well, but just for a sanity check let's try out a closer star, Junction, or Wolf 359 - 2,2, and 3 hex-parsecs from our fiducials.

This time, it worked:
{{0.749244,Wolf 359},{1.35684,Lalande 21185},{1.52722,Luyten 726-8 A},{1.52722,Luyten 726-8 B},{1.69302,HIP 92403},{1.79959,Sirius},{1.79973,Sirius B},{1.83222,Lacaille 9352},{1.9549,HIP 57548},{2.01773,\[Epsilon] Indi}}

I'm guessing that by taking fiducials further apart more accurate candidacy will work out.

Has anyone tried something like this already? How did you approach it?

 

[sudnadja]

Candidate star for Capital

Moving on with this, I thought I'd try to identify a candidate star for Capital, given three reference stars: Sol, Cambria (Epsilon Scorpii) and Ishadar (Epsilon Cygni). I used the Jump-6 parsec distance from each of those to Capital - which will be a touch off and I'll work out a better method, to find the best fitting known star at the appropriate distance from each of those.

The best one is a K class star (which doesn't fit) - HIP 88871. Discarding that and the other stars that aren't at least G class the best is HIP 87490, a G5 star that is according to wolfram not a member of a multiple star system but according to simbad is an eclipsing binary.

HIP 87490 has a wolfram absolute magnitude of ~2, which seems suspiciously bright for a G5, implying it really is a binary or it is not on the main sequence, but further refinement might be needed. It is, at least, in the constellation Ophiuchus, which has been forever associated with the Imperium in my mind.

The black arrow on this plot is the direction to Sagittarius A*, the galactic center, and the yellow arrow is toward HIP 87490, 135 parsec from Sol - not that far off from the Jump-6 path of 137 parsec. Note that this candidate Capital is directly coreward in TravellerMap, but 45 degrees off from Coreward in the real universe, which fits with the anomalous 45 degree rotation that others have reported.