Star Trek Maps in the style of S&S

[Falconer]

I have been working on a project to take Star Trek Maps (1980) and recast it as a Starships & Spacemen-style map, where 1 hex = 1 ly. Rather than over-explain, I’ll show you a rough sample of one area I did. I linked to STM if you would like to poke around it. It’s well worth the time.

Here is a small section from STM, basically the immediate vicinity of Sol:



Let’s zoom in on the sector I’ve circled (not sure if they call them sectors):



Now let’s project the coordinates onto the S&S scale:



I eventually want to have one giant (giant!!) map which covers the whole thing. But I’ll do it sector by sector if I have to.

[Falconer]

Here’s another… Sol Sector!

[finarvyn]

I love what I see so far. I wish I had a way to make cool hex maps.

[Falconer]

I’ve done all of FASA’s The Triangle.



I won’t post them all here, but just to give you a sense:



Here is Map 7:



I expanded the scale by a factor of 4:3. Any bigger would have required an unwieldy number of maps, but I wanted it expanded a bit in order to creating a pleasing sense of distance, of space. So far it has been working out great. The players are a little bit daunted by some of the distances (non-neighboring sectors seem so far away), but that’s a neat effect which you don’t otherwise get from the FASA map. And it will be less daunting once they have been around a bit.

[blackbat242]

I need all of those maps... to go with my copies of The Triangle Campaign & The Triangle!


I do have the large folding color version of the map you started with... but I like yours as well.

[ThrorII]

Those Star Trek Maps look so crowded, until you subdivide the sectors in to 1 LY hexes!!

[Falconer]

Hahah, yeah! And even one light year is a distance almost too vast for the human mind to comprehend.

[bazbaziah]

I'm likeing what you are doing here and have been planning a 1ly cartesian hex map centered on Sol for a long while but not found a suitable piece of software to make the blank hex maps.
Can I ask what you have been using to produce yours? I'm a big fan of hand drawn maps and plans being an old timer but a project of this kind is a massive undertaking on paper.

Jim

[Falconer]

Thanks, well, I am just using GraphicConverter (a Mac software similar to Gimp or Photoshop) and just copying/pasting stuff. If you look closely you can see some of the lazy pasting because the lines are off.

[aramis]

Aug 28, 2021 23:39:53 GMT -5 Falconer said:

Thanks, well, I am just using GraphicConverter (a Mac software similar to Gimp or Photoshop) and just copying/pasting stuff. If you look closely you can see some of the lazy pasting because the lines are off.

That and Pages are the two mac programs I miss most having been (financially) unable to remain a mac user.

[Falconer]

New maps for tonight’s game! This is the area immediately west of The Triangle. Cf. FASA’s Decision at Midnight and The Orions. The four independent planets on the eastern edge of map A3 form the “Asparax Confederation.”

[Falconer]

I rendered new maps of the Federation Core (based on that map from STM that I posted at the very top of this thread). I am experimenting with half-scale, meaning each map has 20-pc sides and is made up of 2-ly hexes. This is somewhat less useful for the immediate vicinity of Sol (Sol is on the border of maps 12 and 13), but as you go further out, it pretty quickly becomes sparse. There would be a lot of empty maps at the previous scale.

[Falconer]

Here is an area just west of Orion Space, where FASA’s Conflict of Interests, Mines of Selka, and The Strider Incident all take place.

I also laid the groundwork to map the rest of Orion Space.

[bazbaziah]

@falconer
Got side tracked on other things and returned once more to this earlier.
Having another look at your maps I can see one problem I didn't see originally? You are using one hex to a light year but the FASA maps are one square to 10 parsecs (3. 62 light years), this means your scale is wrong.

North Pasadena to K'linsann (map 7) is 10 parsecs (36 light years) on the FASA map but your map has them only 4ish light years apart?

Jim

[Falconer]

Hey, Jim. Unless I am having a brain fart, FASA coordinates are in tens of parsecs. So 8.8S and 8.9S are one parsec apart.