On 12Feb2018 1938, Caleuche wrote:

> Where this is going is that it was remarkably easy to pull that data
> and put together a simple analysis - not only are computers much more
> powerful than they were but programming languages are much easier to
> deal with. I do sometimes have perhaps unkind thoughts as to the lack
> of solid astronomy in the Traveller and the world that grew up around
> it, but I'm starting to think that even simple catalogue searches and
> sorting of stars in the timeframe of the original traveler universe's
> creation was probably quite difficult.

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.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief