Mapping Space

 I started the Star Guard campaign without a map, which is an extremely bad way to start a game (or a story), because without a map you can't tell how long it takes to get to places, and that leads to sloppy and inconsistent plotting. You basically end up with Star Wars, where a journey takes exactly as long as the plot needs it to take, and usually you don't even mention how long that is. It's ok in a blockbuster fantasy movie, but pretty terrible in a game (or any kind of hard-ish SF story).

Well, there was a kind of map of Known Space. At the start, this is all I needed. It showed me how much space I had to move around in, which let me work out how fast starships could sensibly travel (this was covered in an earlier journal post, Measuring Space). 

But as I said at the conclusion that earlier post, "This is where it could all go horribly wrong."

And it did go horribly wrong. I should have started constructing a map as soon as I had two planetary systems, so I knew exactly how far apart things were. Instead, I kept adding new systems and separating them by how far I needed them to be for story purposes. After two years of play, I had this:

Pairs of star systems with the travel time between them. It should be immediately obvious why this is doomed to fail. Pick any three systems. I know the distance from A to B and B to C. What's the distance from A to C? It's literally impossible to calculate. You can construct infinite triangles made up of those three vertices, with infinite variations of length AC.

So I started slowly and painfully putting these systems into a spatial relationship to each other, maintaining the distances I had already established between each pair. It took a lot of trial and error, adding systems to a map and then erasing them and moving them somewhere else when the numbers didn't add up. I was convinced it would actually be impossible. But after a lot of work, I got this:

(This is just a small portion from the middle of the page.)

And, miraculously it worked. Everything is the right distance from everything else, matching every distance I had recorded.

This is pure luck. There's no way it should have worked. 

But now I had a map, with consistent spatial relationships that supported every piece of travel time data currently established in the game. Now, I could fight a proper interstellar war...

One more point: my map is on a flat piece of paper, and space is of course three dimensional. Making a 3D map would have been an order of magnitude harder, and for story purposes it's not necessary. Because due to the nature of hyperspace, travel distances between stars map to a two-dimensional galactic plane. Why? Because they do. It's my hyperspace, and it works however I decide. Make your own game if you don't like it!

Coming soon: hex maps!