Been thinking a bit about spaceship directional navigation and terms. Mostly just in general, but I would like to get better at techy speak and the like.
Most of them seem fairly self-explanatory and be taken from seafaring vessels. Starboard (left), Port(right), Aft(back), Forward/Prow( front).
But what about up/down and diagonal directions? Do we immediately start talking about trajectories and angles of approach or use a 3d coordinate grid? How does the crew refer to certain celestial objects approaching from certain direction, or just to communicate position accurately?
Do we start talking in galaxy-sized terms? Hub-ward and rimward movement? Or in terms relative to the nearest celestial body?
Because of the vastness of space, it becomes increasingly hard for me, who has a relatively small amount of aeronautic and travel experience to even know how to talk about these things. What experiences have you had in games when it comes to this? How do you handle your jump travel?
Well, there are the classics…
memory-alpha.wikia.com – Bearing
I kind of like how Space Opera did their sector atlas. They put a bright star at 0,0,0 in the middle of the page and then all local stars around that sector/beacon/guide star had coordinates that were within +/- 50ly on the XYZ axis.
For UW, I created this handy toy if you like Traveller style maps…
tangent-zero.com – Tangent Zero – Map Gen
Todd Zircher I have not yet experienced the game Space Opera. Kinda piques my interest though. Your “handy toy” is indeed quite useful, thanks for sharing, as well as the basics of the star trek bearing page.
I’m not entirely sure what the 3 dialogue boxes to the right of ‘Start’ indicate, and how they effect the generating of the maps. Additionally, I am unfamiliar with the ‘end’ tag at the end of some of the generated locations specifically in the Uncharted Worlds portion of the generator. (Most of the other locations are ‘hub’ or ‘lane’. Does this indicate that it is the end of known space, or the end of a ‘space lane’?)
I’ve been doing some more digging and I think I am starting to get the picture.
The bearings in the context of star trek and other related sci fi shows being based off angles defined by two hypothetical 360 degree circles based around the center of the ship as shone in the image above.
Just some more thoughts and things.
The first two are XY values if you’re starting to build a much larger grid map. The third is the same and creates an offset for hex numbers if you want to start on a different value (9090 is the largest practical one.)
The program does not draw lines for connecting systems. So you get the fun activity of connecting ends to lanes and hubs. (And lanes to more lanes, a single end, or more hubs. Hubs can connect to anything,)
Example. I imported the text map into MS paint and added space lanes based on the description.
i265.photobucket.com
In the hex example above, reduce the size of the beginning hex offset to something under 5 digits and it should like up fine. That’s why 9090 is the practical upper limit for a starting hex because it will end up on 9999 at the bottom.