Quote from: DavetheLost;974018Silly Rabbit, the galaxy isn't spinning. The ship is. The camera is looking out a window, and being fixed to the deck is rotating with the ship, giving the illusion that the galaxy is rotating. Doesn't anyone understand film?

No, it's not rotating that way, the disk of the galaxy is visibly rotating around the center of the galaxy, to make it look "cooler" and because Gronan doesn't care.

https://youtu.be/cmbl8tLOfFE?t=1m48s

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Typical rule of thumb for Traveller and science fiction authors I've found is 6 months travel time from Capital to Frontier. If you have 1 parsec per week travel speeds, then your interstellar polity can be about 24 parsecs in radius. If you have 6 parsec per week travel speeds, then your interstellar polity can be about 144 parsecs in radius.

Uh, that's not a galaxy.  In the other shots, you see stars all around the fleet and that spinning disk, they're still in their galaxy.  It's a star with rings, a nebula making a star or something meant to look spacey.  They're not hanging out in the Void so far from their own galaxy they can see the whole thing like the Tyranids or Reapers.

Quote from: Biscuitician;973896How so?

In Traveller a sub-sector has 80 hexes and about 40 stars. With empty hexes a ship that can only jump 1 hex may not be able to get to every star and will have to follow certain paths. This creates choke points and back waters. When you add the space lane rules from 1977 things become even more interesting.

Quote from: ffilz;974041In Traveller a sub-sector has 80 hexes and about 40 stars. With empty hexes a ship that can only jump 1 hex may not be able to get to every star and will have to follow certain paths. This creates choke points and back waters. When you add the space lane rules from 1977 things become even more interesting.

Why would he have to follow certain paths?

I'm not familiar with these hexes or Traveller at all really. Why would there be choke points?

Traveller starmaps are overlaid with a hex grid of 1 parsec per hex. Traveller FTL uses Jump Drives which can "jump" a certain number of hexes before requiring refusing. Starship fuel is hydrogen. So, a ship must jump from star system to star system in order to be able to refuel. A short range ship will find some systems too far away. Longer range jump drives are more expensive, and the limit is usually Jump 6, or 6 parsecs/hexes. Each jump, regardless of how far the jump is, takes one week. Starless sections of space may be too wide for ships to cross, so routes around the gap will have to be found.

Some space lanes will simply not be profitable and so will see little travel. Think about the situation of a planet that is not located between two desirable destinations and has little too offer to make itself a desirable trade partner. It will becoe a backwater.

A purely battery powered electric car is a good analogy. You can only drive so far before you need to plug in and recharge the batteries. If the next recharge station is farther away than you can get on one battery charge, you can't get there from here.  

This creates a very different logistic situation than say Star Trek where starships seem to have effectively unlimited range.

Quote from: Biscuitician;973993But what reason would there be for black lotteries? Surely (assuming I haven't misuderstood you), just kicking people out chosen at random seems counter productive. Criminals, I can understand. But you might end up selecting Joe who was 99% on the road to curing space cancer.

That was only one of the things that bugged me about Rein*Hagen's Exile...

Quote from: Biscuitician;974081Why would he have to follow certain paths?

I'm not familiar with these hexes or Traveller at all really. Why would there be choke points?

Behold The Traveller Map! Zoom in and despair!  

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;974086That was only one of the things that bugged me about Rein*Hagen's Exile...

Yes, i wish it was less arbitrary than an advanced society inexplicably writing to you to evict you from space heaven. It seemed there were hints at there being something more to it,but I never saw that if it was there. It was just an excuse to get you to the Grange wherein the Hegemony was active anyway.

Quote from: jeff37923;974095Behold The Traveller Map! Zoom in and despair!  

:eek:

Quote from: Biscuitician;974081Why would he have to follow certain paths?

I'm not familiar with these hexes or Traveller at all really. Why would there be choke points?

Huh. So I think all my admonishments to check out Classic Traveller -- which has all the conceits to deliver exactly what you're looking for -- weren't really working out!

Well, here's a blog post that goes into detail about Traveller starship travel and communication and the implications for the setting they provide.

And here's a sample Traveller subsector map:




In original Traveller it assumed that the PCs are venturing into patches of space off the beaten path and away from cosmopolitan culture. Most ships that are easily available have Jump ranges of 1, 2, or 3 parsecs, with most limited to 1 or 2. (On the map, one hex = one parsec.) A ship's Jump capability is limited by the available Tech Level (which can vary from world to world; and setting by setting as determined by the Referee), the size of the ship, and cost.

Interstellar ships are more like ships from the Age of Sail and often don't have regular schedules. (Mail between worlds is often carried by independent Free Traders -- like Packet Boats carrying mail when there was no routine or regular way to carry mail, again like in the Age of Sail.)




Regarding the map above: Notice that a Jump-1 ship will not be able to cross some of the gulfs on the map, and even a Jump-2 ship will be limited. Characters wanting to travel directly across the subsector will have to buy passage on ships that have Jump-3 drives. The question however, given the remote quality of the subsector, how many Jump-3 ships are available? How often do they travel? What worlds do they travel to? It won't be all of them. Using the original 1977 rules, the red lines represent common trade routes. Those not connected by such routes will depend on sparse, infrequent traffic and private engagement of ships.

(The map is of the Five Sisters Subsector located in the Spinward Marches of The Traveller Map linked to above. Note that I have removed the Communication Routes added the rules in the 1981 edition of the game and used instead the Trade Lanes rules of the 1977 edition. In general, when I am speaking of Traveller I really am speaking of Traveller Books 1, 2, and 3 (a mix of the 1977 and 1981 editions). I find that the later materials, while awesome, pull the game away from the core conceits that I found so compelling when I first read the rules in the original box version years ago.)


I will curtail one point of conversation at this moment: Yes. It's 2D space. I will tell you, and Marc Miller will tell you (he came up with the format when he designed Traveller back in 1977) that at some point the trouble of building a 3D map isn't worth the convenience of having a tool you can use easily and effectively for evenings of RPG fun. Every game makes its concessions between the "texture" of reality and what it needs to keep moving. For a lot of good reasons (here's a blog post about them) 2D maps work fine for the game.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;974119I will curtail one point of conversation at this moment: Yes. It's 2D space. I will tell you, and Marc Miller will tell you (he came up with the format when he designed Traveller back in 1977) that at some point the trouble of building a 3D map isn't worth the convenience of having a tool you can use easily and effectively for evenings of RPG fun. Every game makes its concessions between the "texture" of reality and what it needs to keep moving. For a lot of good reasons (here's a blog post about them) 2D maps work fine for the game.

I've always thought of the 2d map as more of a representation of the trade relationships and jump proximity rather than actual positions in the night sky. When going from Penelope to Karin, for example, I can be going in any 3d direction physically. What's important, however, is that a) Karin can be reached via jump 1 ship from Penelope, and b) there's a trade relationship between them.

Quote from: SavageSchemer;974127I've always thought of the 2d map as more of a representation of the trade relationships and jump proximity rather than actual positions in the night sky. When going from Penelope to Karin, for example, I can be going in any 3d direction physically. What's important, however, is that a) Karin can be reached via jump 1 ship from Penelope, and b) there's a trade relationship between them.

The 2D map can be justified a bazillion different ways. (And have been.) The key for me is to not get hung up on the fact it's 2D map.

As Miller said in a White Dwarf Magazine interview from 1981 (which I quote in the linked blog post above):



That for me is the true logic right there. But as for how Jump tech really works, what the 2D map represents, how psionics work in the setting (if the Referee even uses them)... that's all up to the Referee to build out as far as he wishes. He can ignore or drill deeper as he wishes.

As a side note: In this quote Miller points the focus of Traveller as originally envisioned not on "the space stuff" but on the exploration and adventuring on particular worlds. When I talk about how the game line changed focused over time, I would point to The Traveller Map as an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. In the original rules (Traveller Book 3, 1977) the Referee was told: "Initially, one or two sub-sectors should be quite enough for years of adventure..." Which, if one focuses the adventures of the PCs on worlds, is true! But over time the Referee was supposed to draw up a sector (sixteen sub-sectors). Or use the Spinward Marchers. Or begin touring all of the The Third Imperium...

Quote from: CRKrueger;974038Uh, that's not a galaxy.  In the other shots, you see stars all around the fleet and that spinning disk, they're still in their galaxy.  It's a star with rings, a nebula making a star or something meant to look spacey.  They're not hanging out in the Void so far from their own galaxy they can see the whole thing like the Tyranids or Reapers.

That's what I assumed for a long time. That'd make much more sense, and would also be just as good a place to hide from Imperials, given the correct "there are billions of places to hide inside a galaxy" observation.

But, sadly, there are plenty of people, including the director and other people involved in writing or producing _Star Wars_ content, that talk about it as either "a galaxy" or "the galaxy", though at least one of them has a more-logical-sounding ID of it as the Rishi Maze ... though apparently that's a dwarf galaxy or star cluster. See https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/74385/is-the-galaxy-depicted-at-the-end-of-empire-strikes-back-a-real-galaxy for example.

I am afraid of falling into a rabbit hole that can produce no benefits...

But are people trying to make the Star Wars movies "make sense" using the standards of actual science?

I'm not trying to be "that guy" and saying "It's just a movie." I'm saying, as a movie Star Wars set its boundary up clearly in the first frame of the film "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." (that is, as a fairy tale with fairy tale logic), along with the "WHOOSHING" of starcraft in space and old wizards with magical swords, the raid on an enormous evil fortress, and a young boy who wins the day literally by making the irrational choice.

I mean, we all know that judging the Star Wars movies by the bar of "science" or "logic" can't really get us anywhere.... right? Right?