I was joking about the Imperium and 2 dimensions, that was intended to be a light hearted remark regarding the 2d vs 3d Traveller discussion.

I'm actually fairly familiar with the local star density in 3 dimensions, I'm in the process of importing the Gaia DR1 data ( https://i.imgur.com/zLgB7cD.png ) in order to get a good look at the data with one purpose being an attempt to map an imperium onto it, though I've paused that until DR2 is available, which has data from the RV spectrometer as well (with DR1 you can't get a full 3d solution for both position and velocity, which I need).

I'm sure an Imperium could be retrofitted onto 3d space yet keep the concept of remote government, but that would be throwing out several decades worth of material. I do like 3d space for gameplay reasons, you can plot a local sky map from any point and note important stars and how they appear in a random sky and given the random tilts that the various ecliptic planes that we know of have it feels like it fits spaceflight a bit more if you're not always immediately heading away from your launch point in the same plane.

I mentioned in an earlier thread, but with Traveller 5 rules at least, Jumpspace and realspace are 1:1 mapped to each other, at least by implication, as you can travel between stars slower than light and there's no indication that the distances should be treated differently than they appear on the sector maps.

-------- Original Message --------

On January 28, 2018 9:25 PM, Douglas Berry <dberry49xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 7:42 PM, Caleuche <xxxxxx@sudnadja.com> wrote:

No society that believes that space is 2 dimensional can really be thought of as enlightened. Most of the imperium is the TL15 version of the flat earthers.

Jumpspace is a 2-dimensional plane that roughly maps to the location of stars in our universe. Since the only important facotr in planning jumps this the coordinates on the flat topogrophy of jumpsapce, maps used by travelers ignore the realspace position in favor of the more usful map. Much in the way that railroad maps ignore irrelevant terrain features as they can't interact with them.

Today's lesson brought to you by Handwavium.

If you really want to use a 3d map with a Cartesian coordinate system, go for it. But understand that it changes the game radically. There are an estimated 14,600 stars within 30 parsecs of Sol. if they were all settled, you could cross human space at Jump-2 in about 4 months. A far cry from the "remote government" mentioned in Mercenary.

Expanding the sphere only makes things worse. you are very quickly into the realm of millions of star systems.

One thing 2300AD got right was setting it as Earth was just starting to seriously colonize and explore. This limites the size of map and the number of worlds easily accessable.

Douglas Berry

dberry49xxxxxx@gmail.com

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