2300AD Star List/Map question

[worjtrav]

Hello,

I'm new to 2300AD and am about (well, 2 weeks off) to run my first game. I'm trying to get a feel for how far space goes. OK - that was loaded. Specifically, I "get" the three human arms and the various alien spaces that butt against them but it's not clear to me what is out there between the human arms and beside/beyond the alien realms.

That is, is the near star list (and this is NOT a question about its current accuracy or lack thereof, of that list) a list of ALL stars (as known back when Traveller 2300 originally came out) within 50 or so light years of Earth? Or is it a list of stars that can be gotten to, one way or another, via stutterwarp?

I've been reading 2320 and various articles online about tugs and brown dwarves, and Anders Sandberg has put online several 2320 maps with entire clusters, both embedded in near space and in further-out space, that considerably increase the accessable star list.

I understand that the accessable stars are the important ones i.e. we simply can't (via stutterwarp) get to the others, but I'm curious what the near star list (or even the extended 2320 star lists) would look like if all stars were shown (assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that they're not).

Any suggestions/thoughts are welcome.

Tx!

- Bill Rutherford

PS: I hope I'm posting in the right place; the 2300AD forum seems all about non-2300AD games, not sure why...

 

[Reynard]

Right place. 2300 is a Traveller mechanic based system so under the Traveller banner. The list in the back of the book does fill 14 pages for something like 500 systems so I think it's fairly representative for the volume of space. Lots of worlds are focused on and many, many more exist for filling in. They are there, getting to them might be the adventure. I think it was grand someone gave up a normal life to produce such an extensive list.

 

[worjtrav]

Brilliant! It didn't even occur to me to look at the lists - way more stars on the NSL than on the three arm maps!

Thanks for gently pointing that out!

- Bill

 

[Nathan Brazil]

That is, is the near star list (and this is NOT a question about its current accuracy or lack thereof, of that list) a list of ALL stars (as known back when Traveller 2300 originally came out) within 50 or so light years of Earth? Or is it a list of stars that can be gotten to, one way or another, via stutterwarp?

I've been reading 2320 and various articles online about tugs and brown dwarves, and Anders Sandberg has put online several 2320 maps with entire clusters, both embedded in near space and in further-out space, that considerably increase the accessable star list.

I understand that the accessable stars are the important ones i.e. we simply can't (via stutterwarp) get to the others, but I'm curious what the near star list (or even the extended 2320 star lists) would look like if all stars were shown (assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that they're not).

'
Specific answer to your question. I have all the books from the old game and most from the new one.

It is all the stars in-universe, but not all the stars in the real world,
The orignal 2300 list of stars was derived directly from the 1969 version of the "Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars" (look it up on Wikipedia). During development of the game, the arms and fingers and potential planets are derived from the positions of the known stars from the catalog. So it is "complete" based on the source used and in-universe.
However in real life as you suspect and stated, detection of new more dimmer stars with more powerful instruments, the inclusion of brown dwarfs and such have increased the list of nearby stars.

It is your game to do with as you want, but consider the impact of introducing new stars to your universe. Simple example. You have two stars (and important planets) A and B that are 11 ly apart in the catalog. Normally you cannot get from one to another without doing a six star trip travelling 30ly. In your universe you introduce this new star C that exists in real life which is 6ly from A and 7ly from B. You now have a 2 hop route that only takes 13ly travel time. This would change how space was explored, your arms and fingers might have developed historically, etc.

With that in mind, regarding alien sentients. You should consider that there are no other space travel capable species in local space. If they were around at all, their impact must be extremely, extremely minimal because if significant, humans would dominate them (like the Sung), fight them (like the Kafers), or be friendly/guarded (like the Pentapods). Or maybe they are in a 2 or 3 star cluster that is inaccessible to regular without the brown dwarf tugs (which they do not have) or other limitation. Planet bound primitives would be "safe" to add, because they simply have not been detected yet.

Just my opinion, it is your game.

 

[Reynard]

It seems someone took the trouble to recalculate the map with all new information. As realistic as it is, everyone kind of agreed it doesn't add anything special so Mongoose just kept the original lists. Fun wins over SCIENCE!.

If you really, really want to explore, exploit and expand in THAT direction then as Game God, place a brown dwarf conveniently in the right place. Little buggers are so hard to see anyway.

 

[fusor]

All the stars in the Near Star List are ones that were known at the time, so yes, that represents the full set of what is in the 2300AD universe (even though we know now that there are many more stars, or have more accurate positions for most of the ones we knew before that would change where they would be located).

I would strongly recommend that you check out the 2300AD Facebook group - it's very active and most of the discussion about the game goes on there (and the author posts there a lot). There's also a G+ group, but that's quieter.

Useful links (that you may already know about):

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2300AD/
https://plus.google.com/communities/112087249954476241434?hl=en
http://evildrganymede.net/wp/category/rpgs/2300ad/
http://www.aleph.se/Nada/Game/2300AD/

 

[worjtrav]

Good points by all. Somebody (I forget who - and not in this thread) said that if we're still playing the game in 20 years the star listings will have changed, likely significantly, again, so as Reynard noted, fun wins out over science!

Fusor - I appreciate the pointer to FB. I'm not a user (one of about five in the world, I think) but I'd wondered where 2300AD online discussions went! I will check it out.

To all, thanks!

- Bill

 

[fusor]

Good points by all. Somebody (I forget who - and not in this thread) said that if we're still playing the game in 20 years the star listings will have changed, likely significantly, again, so as Reynard noted, fun wins out over science!

Probably not, actually. The differences between the positional data from the 1980s (1960s, actually since it's an older catalogue) and the current data is likely to be far greater than the difference between current data and data that we'd know 20 years in the future. We'd probably know for sure which nearby stars had planets by then, but we've already catalogued most of the stars in our neighbourhood by now that we hadn't done in the 1960s (brown dwarfs are harder to find, but we know of at least some of those).

So I would say that a modern (2010s) near star map wouldn't be too different from one made 20-30 years in the future.

 

[AndrewW]

Fusor - I appreciate the pointer to FB. I'm not a user (one of about five in the world, I think) but I'd wondered where 2300AD online discussions went! I will check it out.

Ah, well there's all those that don't have internet access as well. But interesting if there be only 5 in the world and two of us are on here...

 

[FallingPhoenix]

So I would say that a modern (2010s) near star map wouldn't be too different from one made 20-30 years in the future.

Could be... on the other hand, they may very well have said the same thing in the 1960s.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

We’re at the stage where we’re chasing after decimal places now, rather than brand-new nearby stars. Aside from some pretty esoteric finds here and there, that won’t significantly change. All the mainstream stuff nearby has been found and cataloged, and it’s just a matter of shaving down a few more decimal places, and tracking changes due to minuscule movements.

 

[fusor]

So I would say that a modern (2010s) near star map wouldn't be too different from one made 20-30 years in the future.

Could be... on the other hand, they may very well have said the same thing in the 1960s.

They couldn't have. They were well aware of the fact that we hadn't found all the stars in the stellar neighbourhood. The brightest ones, sure - but the dim ones were hard to find. Nowadays we're so good at finding dim stars that we've found quite a few brown dwarfs (some of which are exceedingly dim).

So in 20-30 years time we probably would have filled out the last few percent of 'missing stars' from our neighbourhood. And we should be getting a big update soon from the Gaia astrometry mission (which is going to update the existing Hipparcos stellar dataset), which should give us very accurate xyz positions of nearby stars (hopefully most of the ones we have near Sol are already pretty accurate so it'd only change a few decimal points). I'd imagine the realistic star charts for stars within 50ly would probably look very similar to what they do today - I think right now the main issue is that the stellar data is scattered across a lot of different sky surveys and really needs to be consolidated into a single dataset.

Think of it like the exploration of the coastlines - initially we had a very poor understanding of what the continents looked like because mapmaking and surveying sucked. Over the centuries though, we could pin down a ship's position more accurately and take better bearings, and the maps got better and better til they actually vaguely resembled the real world. And then in the last couple of hundred years it's really become super accurate. Look at the geography of a world map from the 2000s and it'll look very similar to one from the 1950s because there wasn't much incremental change in quality since then - but it'll look quite different to one from say, the 1800s, which would look very different from one from the 1700s, which would look even more different from one from the ancient world. (granted, going forward the coastlines may change due to climate change, but we'll still know where the continents all are!).

 

[crazy_cat]

Fusor - I appreciate the pointer to FB. I'm not a user (one of about five in the world, I think) but I'd wondered where 2300AD online discussions went! I will check it out.

Ah, well there's all those that don't have internet access as well. But interesting if there be only 5 in the world and two of us are on here...

Three of us - what are the odds of that!

 

[AndrewW]

Three of us - what are the odds of that!

Wonder if the other two are also lurking on here.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

The discussions of the newer info showing more dim stars is very evident if you really LOOK at the published NSL for the game. There are almost no M-color (Red Dwarf) stars shown in the 40-50 ly range, because they hadn't been detected yet. There are STILL likely to be quite a few that we don't know about.

SO, if you want to keep the existing NSL from the game, feel free to add these dimmer stars or Brown Dwarfs just about anywhere you want, but especially farther away from Earth.

There is a great list at the RECONS website of the 100 closest stars. Even if you don't want to use that for Earth, it could give you a good indication of what any 'nearby space' would look like just about anywhere.

 

[FallingPhoenix]

We’re at the stage where we’re chasing after decimal places now, rather than brand-new nearby stars. Aside from some pretty esoteric finds here and there, that won’t significantly change. All the mainstream stuff nearby has been found and cataloged, and it’s just a matter of shaving down a few more decimal places, and tracking changes due to minuscule movements.

You guys are likely right, but near the end of the nineteenth century, physicists were also basically saying "we're chasing after decimal places now," and then...WHAM!

So, probably in 20 years the map will be basically the same, but, you never know...

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

“Wham”? “Wham” what?

 

[fusor]

You guys are likely right, but near the end of the nineteenth century, physicists were also basically saying "we're chasing after decimal places now," and then...WHAM!

So, probably in 20 years the map will be basically the same, but, you never know...

We're just looking for stars here, not talking about whether we've understood all there is to know about physics.

 

[Reynard]

Time to build a new V'ger.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

The discovery of Brown Dwarfs changed things a lot. There are brown dwarfs relatively close to earth, and there are likely many more to be discovered that would fit on the 2300AD star map, to me, that just gives the Referee options within their game.

Personally, I have redone the Near Star List using the RECONS data and keep my games within that sphere.