2300AD Realistic Near Star Map

[jwlovell]

http://evildrganymede.net/2013/08/11/2300ad-new-realistic-near-star-map-project-introduction/

This guy did a fantastic job of fixing the mess that's 2300AD astrocartography.

"OK, 2300AD fans – you may recall that last year in my 2300AD Near Star Map post I examined how the Arms in 2300AD shaped up when compared to our current knowledge of stellar distribution and discovered that they were actually pretty wrong, with lots of missing stars and broken links.

Also over the past year I’ve been (slowly) tracking down and compiling Star Catalogues on my Stellar Mapping page so I can figure out where the stars around Sol actually are."

 

[Reynard]

This was mentioned in an earlier thread and is a great revision. Not sure if I'm ready to redo that spreadsheet I made years back from the original Near Star List but it would be interesting how much changed.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Did players spend a lot of time confused in the past with the map?

 

[Reynard]

I believe, at least, the main routes were mapped out but players and refs needed to do some math to find other viable ones for many places they want to go. The confusion would be in the work involved dealing with actual 3D distances. Now, the stars have repositioned and all those routes have to be recalculated.

I actually find that a fun challenge.

 

[Reynard]

I believe, at least, the main routes were mapped out but players and refs needed to do some math to find other viable ones for many places they want to go. The confusion would be in the work involved dealing with actual 3D distances. Now, the stars have repositioned and all those routes have to be recalculated.

I actually find that a fun challenge.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Did players spend a lot of time confused in the past with the map?

It only matters if you have an arbitrary rule that states that you can only dump excess energy within the gravity field of another star, with classic Traveller all it states is you need x amount of fuel per parsec jumped, and you need to stop at a gas giant to refuel, I don't know why 2300 did it differently, the fueling requirement seems to make sense much more that saying you can only get rid of your excess radiation in a gravity well. Basically both Traveller use the hop skip and jump principle for interstellar travel. Basically FTL drives in science fiction work on the principle of covering x distance requires y fuel, and if you run out of fuel you suddenly stop and can go no further, at STL speeds, the laws of motion take hold, you expend energy to build up a velocity, and then your expend some more energy to slow down again at your destination, getting there requires simply waiting a long enough time between acceleration and deceleration phases. FTL drives are modeled after how we move on Earth, that is if we step on the gas, we move forward, if we run out of gas, the car slows down and comes to a stop due to air friction.

I one time proposed a variation on the hyperdrive, it requires one to accelerate to 1% of the speed of light. You activate the hyperdrive and it takes you from 1% of light speed to 100 times light speed. At 100 times the speed of light it takes 11.899 days to cross a parsec or 3.26 light years, but if you use your maneuver drive after your crossed over into hyperspace you can get travel faster. If you don't accelerate you simply wait the required time to cross the distance and then you jump out of hyperspace, your maximum range is limited by how long you can stay in your spaceship, things like power requirements, food supplies and life support determine how far you can go.

 

[Reynard]

"Despite making use of the Mongoose Traveller rules, 2300AD is not Traveller. It is set in a universe of its own, without any relation to the Official Traveller Universe (OTU)."

They wanted a very different set of rules and reality for their parallel game including physics and technology. They did not want Traveller Jump and someone thought let's use a real maps of near stars and have a drive to get there. I never had an issue with this and welcomed the concept. There's no need to change that system to make it more Traveller-like. It works just fine.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

"Despite making use of the Mongoose Traveller rules, 2300AD is not Traveller. It is set in a universe of its own, without any relation to the Official Traveller Universe (OTU)."

They wanted a very different set of rules and reality for their parallel game including physics and technology. They did not want Traveller Jump and someone thought let's use a real maps of near stars and have a drive to get there. I never had an issue with this and welcomed the concept. There's no need to change that system to make it more Traveller-like. It works just fine.

So basically its a warp drive with a rubber band attached to the last star that it visited, it can only stretch for far before it "snaps. I wonder why Star Trek doesn't have this?

 

[Reynard]

"Stutterwarp drives operate on the same principles as the tunneling phenomenon that can occasionally be observed in some sub-atomic particles. The tunnelling effect allows a physical
mass to be moved from one location in space to another, instantaneously, without passing through the intervening space."

Yet another parallel physics. That's what science fiction is all about. And it's neither Jump or a warp drive nor is it tied to the last gravitational source. The tie with gravity is effects on the system's efficiency plus the dynamics need a gravitational source to discharge waste energy build up. Originally, 2300AD was a whole different game mechanic. Mongoose decided not to reinvent the game wheel and based it on Traveller mechanics while preserving the flavor of 2300. Works for me.

 

[Yatima]

I wonder why Star Trek doesn't have this?

The answer is limitations – the designers of 2300 wanted specific limitations and the writers of Star Trek wanted none.

The 2300 universe is deliberately designed to create an interesting geopolitical setting for future war – one in which space is an ocean, planets are islands or continents and traffic must follow lanes to move between the islands and continents, ensuring fleets can encounter each other to give battle.

The stutter warp makes interstellar travel possible, the 7.7 ly limit creates the arms, and the gravity well discharge forces FTL ships to approach planets, making them equivalent to islands and continents in an ocean. Without the discharge limitation, FTL ships could stay in the vastness of space and avoid contact with the enemy, therefore avoiding battle. Not terribly interesting.

Conversely, the writers of Star trek are careful not to eliminate plot possibilities by defining too much about their universe. If the plot of a show needs it to happen, and nothing written so far contradicts it, then the writer can have it happen with a simple "make it so, number one".

Classic Traveller's Jump drive is designed largely to accommodate the same sort of gameplay as 2300 AD, it's just determined somewhat by the fact the designer used a 2D Hexagonal grid to design his universe.

J

 

[Lord High Munchkin]

2300AD uses probably the most "sensible" FTL method yet in 'Traveller' (OK it's still FTL, but given that, it makes slightly more sense). It's a much "harder" type of Sci-Fi (personally I think the OTU is pretty solidly "retro-space opera"), the limitations are part of the 2300AD setting's appeal.

 

[Anonymous]

And as much as I applaud EDG's work, if you insert the updated near star map you break the arms and the setting fails. 2300's NSL works well in the context it was intended for and the game IMO doesn't need to be brought up to date, it's fine the way it is. Just as so many of our ideas on technology have changed so much since the 3rd Imperium came to be, if you introduce the ideas you make a lot of work for yourself bringing the 3rd Imperium out of the 1970s.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I wonder why Star Trek doesn't have this?

The answer is limitations – the designers of 2300 wanted specific limitations and the writers of Star Trek wanted none.

The 2300 universe is deliberately designed to create an interesting geopolitical setting for future war – one in which space is an ocean, planets are islands or continents and traffic must follow lanes to move between the islands and continents, ensuring fleets can encounter each other to give battle.

The stutter warp makes interstellar travel possible, the 7.7 ly limit creates the arms, and the gravity well discharge forces FTL ships to approach planets, making them equivalent to islands and continents in an ocean. Without the discharge limitation, FTL ships could stay in the vastness of space and avoid contact with the enemy, therefore avoiding battle. Not terribly interesting.

Conversely, the writers of Star trek are careful not to eliminate plot possibilities by defining too much about their universe. If the plot of a show needs it to happen, and nothing written so far contradicts it, then the writer can have it happen with a simple "make it so, number one".

Classic Traveller's Jump drive is designed largely to accommodate the same sort of gameplay as 2300 AD, it's just determined somewhat by the fact the designer used a 2D Hexagonal grid to design his universe.

J

STL ships can stay in the vastness of space too. This technique is fragile if throwing additional stars in the mix ruins it. Its not the stars fault that the FTL system designed for the setting was brittle. The stars don't care what arms you set up, they are just there. So in order to preserve the 2300 political setting, we are forced to use an obsolete star map, that is just wrong!

What if we simply had those stars suddenly appear in the setting, that way the polities would have to adapt rather than us having to go back and edit history.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

2300AD uses probably the most "sensible" FTL method yet in 'Traveller' (OK it's still FTL, but given that, it makes slightly more sense). It's a much "harder" type of Sci-Fi (personally I think the OTU is pretty solidly "retro-space opera"), the limitations are part of the 2300AD setting's appeal.

They could have used wormholes, I think that would be harder still. One of the important limitations on wormholes is how hard they are to make, and what methods are used to prevent them from being turned into time machines. But with wormholes you could have arms too, but there is no distance limitations on them, you are limited to travel to systems that have wormholes to them, otherwise you use STL.

 

[Reynard]

"Its not the stars fault that the FTL system designed for the setting was brittle."

Wait a minute, brittle? The 2300AD system was designed with the best knowledge of star locations at that time. It was good hard science. I would love to know what went into the process for the 7.7 Ly limitation but, with their NSL in hand, they made it work. They still use the old list because their universe IS that NSL and it would be a major pain in the donkey to completely revise the 2300AD star community for very little game gain.

The new NSL is a work of love and is great for those who are willing to redo their community of stars. If I ever get rambunctious enough to redo that spreadsheet for the NSL, I would love to reanalyze the impact of relocations and the new routing.

Unless you MUST have the revised list and you MUST have all those official worlds connected in a certain way, the system would work just fine and most certainly is not brittle. You do NOT need to homebrew the game to fit a new list.

 

[Epicenter]

There seems to be a bit of confusion regarding this revised star map. If you're already familiar with 2300, skip this post.

It's not intended in any way for players of Traveller using the Third Imperium-based technology assumptions like Jump Drive, anti-gravity, and so on. You can use it if you wish, however. I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes.

It was intended to be used in conjunction with the 2300AD campaign world which uses a different FTL system (Stutterwarp with a 7.7 light year per-trip limitation as well as requirement to "discharge" the drives around a certain strength of gravity well). In the original 2300, GDW's writers used one of the more then-accurate star maps to place all the stars to help 2300 feel more grounded in "reality" as it was GDW's attempt to make a "harder" sci-fi game than traditional Traveller.

Decades later, Mongoose decided to update 2300 with a new writer. This new writer was fully aware that since the 1980s when 2300 was first published, our astronomical knowledge has increased and we're more accurately able to place stars in relation to Earth. However, as tempting as updating the 2300 Near Star Map was, it couldn't be done without altering / breaking the setting significantly, as one of the features of the setting was that Stutterwarp's limits created natural chokepoints, inaccessible areas, and so on, forming "arms" of explored space (strings of stars accessible from Earth). To keep the "feel" of the origin setting, the writer went with the old Near Star Map to keep the setting intact with as few changes to the how the setting functions (he similarly made some changes to how Stutterwarp works to explain the scarcity of Stutterwarp ships as well as the ways that Stutterwarp is discharged to solve the "brown dwarf" and "rogue planet" issue).

Dr. G's map utilizes a number of more modern catalogs to place to stars to the extent of our current knowledge in the spirit of 2300 being a "hard" sci-fi map that isn't using an old (and inaccurate) star map. It's meant as an alternative for GMs running 2300 who want to keep their setting "harder" by using an accurate star map. It'd require GMs to fiddle around the 2300 setting and move worlds around; I've tried it myself, it's quite a bit of fun but I enjoy world-building; we lose old chokepoints and crossroads and instead get new ones.

 

[Yatima]

The stars don't care what arms you set up, they are just there. So in order to preserve the 2300 political setting, we are forced to use an obsolete star map, that is just wrong!

What if we simply had those stars suddenly appear in the setting, that way the polities would have to adapt rather than us having to go back and edit history.

It'd be like painting the Forth Bridge – a never ending task. You'd end up revising the setting again and again as new stars and new exo planets are discovered by new technologies. Even now, Red Dwarf stars are under represented on the NSL as you get further from Earth because they are dimmer. Who knows how many brown dwarfs should be in there, but aren't.

In any case, the original list had duplicate stars, misplaced stars and totally fictional stars in it. It was based on the best knowledge of the time, but was a crafted thing. It never was a completely accurate model of our stellar neighbourhood and to strive for that would be to miss the point, I think.

It's a work of fiction, I'd leave it be.

J

PS: If anyone's really interested in the accurizing or extending the NSL, check out the work of Anders Sandberg who mathematically modelled and analysed the current NSL, updated and extended it:

http://www.aleph.se/Nada/Game/2300AD/Escape/Escape.pdf

On the 7.7 LY limit, he says:

The 7.7 stutterwarp distance seems an awfully precise to fit the percolation threshold of stars in the galactic disc. Maybe the properties were designed that way? (This is actually the real explanation, when you think of it.) It limits civilizations to smaller regions, yet allows expansion. It makes denser parts of the galaxy natural hubs while large regions just above or below the galactic plane are disconnected.

In fact if you reduce the 7.7 limit just a little, there are no arms, just isolated pockets of stars. if you extend it just a little, the arms disappear and ships can hop pretty freely from star to star. I guess the limit was decided by trial and error back in the day.

 

[dragoner]

In fact if you reduce the 7.7 limit just a little, there are no arms, just isolated pockets of stars. if you extend it just a little, the arms disappear and ships can hop pretty freely from star to star. I guess the limit was decided by trial and error back in the day.

Yes, it was created to create the star map, we fooled around with it back then, and found it to be the same way.

 

[Epicenter]

In fact if you reduce the 7.7 limit just a little, there are no arms, just isolated pockets of stars. if you extend it just a little, the arms disappear and ships can hop pretty freely from star to star. I guess the limit was decided by trial and error back in the day.

I'm always impressed by how GDW arrived at this number. I don't think they really had fancy, easy programs to use back then to plot out the stars. Someone actually had to produce that NSL mostly by hand. It's crazy. I'm guessing once they had the locations of stars within a 0.1ly they could just take an average of all the stars and the product was probably something around 7.7ly which is what they went with for Stutterwarp.

 

[Reynard]

I wonder if it was ever mentioned in the original books' designer notes how and why they came up with 7.7 Lys. I so wish my copy hadn't 'walked' away years ago. Oh to have access to that person!