Yep. Brings to mind the observation that there's a natural tendency to think of current scientific data as some sort of pinnacle that will tower above both the past & future when, undoubtedly, in 100 years or so current info will be viewed the same as we view data from 100 years ago, ie: "They did pretty well considering how ignorant (due to inadequate/inaccurate data) they were."
From: Jim Catchpole (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2018 2:20 PM
Subject: Re: [TML] Meta & The Traveller Adventure
Accurate as known then, as was the
2300AD map (mostly, they did apparently cheat a little).
Unfortunately, as well as being hidden away from most of us in
professional catalogues, the data then available just wasn't that
accurate. It wasn't until Hipparcos was published that an accurate
catalogue of distances for nearby stars actually existed. I had
typed up the 2300 star list in the late 80s and written a program
to project them, including routes of given distances onto the
screen. I tried the same with Hipparcos and found what others did,
the result was completely different! There was a big debate a few
years back on the 2300 list as to whether a reboot of the game
would be better sticking with the map as originally published, now
known to be horribly inaccurate, or redo the map and rejig the
colonial atlas. The general opinion was that the latter just
wasn't possible, the differences were too great...
On 12/02/2018 08:44, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:
On 12/02/2018 08:44, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:
When SPI published the S&T mag, they also published sci-fi products, incl a mag named 'Aes'. They had an rpg titled 'Universe' (c. 1980) which I purchased solely cuz' it incl an 3D astronomically accurate starmap.
From: Caleuche <xxxxxx@sudnadja.com>
To: "xxxxxx@simplelists.com" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2018 12:02 AM
Subject: Re: [TML] Meta & The Traveller Adventure
I'm sure it could have been done - the catalogues already existed and they did publish right ascension, declination, proper motion, RV spectrometer and parallax data. The problem was those catalogues were not in machine readable form and you do have to do (not much but some) math for each star to get its {x,y,z} and {x',y',z'} coordinates. So while it could have been done, the task would have been painful, error prone and enormous. Just having the data in machine readable form would have made the task doable, but I suspect it probably wasn't. (possibly a good reason to have taken a local university astronomy class).
-------- Original Message --------
On February 11, 2018 10:54 PM, Rupert Boleyn xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
I remember trying to put together a 'real world' star map centred on
Earth for a game some time in the early 80s. I had my local library as
my only data source and in the end gave up. There were plenty of books
showing skymaps, with the stars, constellations, etc., but none that
gave much in the way of distances other than a few lists of "10
brightest stars" and "10 closest stars" that had distance.
The university library might've had something useful, but I expect if it
did I'd have had to compile all the data I needed from several books,
all by hand, after finding the volume that were actually useful.
These days I can find all that, already done, on the net with only a
little effort.
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