WIP A Distant Galaxy

[icosahedron]

This sounds like a common theme in SF called 'gate' technology. (See the TV series Stargate, for example). It's probably the best system for travel over galactic distances. Generally in SF, gates (and perhaps routers) work via wormholes and travel between them is effectively instantaneous. This cuts out any worries about speed and broken connections. If the idea works for you, go for it.
Neat backstory.

[lizardman]

Hey, just stumbled in here. Nice to see somebody used my galaxy tute for the same purpose that I had in mind. I'm designing a SF RPG and needed a galaxy so that's why I came up with that tutorial eventually.

Here's the first version of the galactic map. Many of the worlds shown are already decided but this map is now out of date since I want to re-position worlds and sectors to conform with the storyline and probably give it a whole new look.

This is actually quite a lot influenced by the Star Wars galaxy but I want to distance myself from that again so it really reflects my own IP.

There's also a sector map which is a WiP of a sector map that is used to show several of the sectors on the galactic map in more detail. The navigation system will zoom in from the galactic map down to any single planet step-by-step: galaxy map -> sector map -> star system -> planet.
I know it sounds as if I'm just copying Mass Effect here but I actually had the idea for this already about 10 years ago.

Either way I hope this will give a bit of inspiration to others.

[Uomaru]

Beautiful maps! Your tutorial is the best I've ever stumbled across in my opinion. It's also the only "galaxy" tutorial that creates realistic galaxy maps that I’ve ever seen. It gave me huge inspiration to make this SF setting. What a coincidence that we had the same thing in mind with the mapping part (as in a previous post I'm also going to have inspiration from Mass Effect). I wish I had Photoshop so that I could accomplish the same result as your maps/tutorial

[Uomaru]

icosahedron; Yes, something like that. I've watched several episodes of Stargate, but I want it o take some time to travel on the "highways", a day or more (and not million of years without routers ).

[wormspeaker]

That's a pretty sweet map there Lizardman.

[ottobot]

icosahedron; Yes, something like that. I've watched several episodes of Stargate, but I want it o take some time to travel on the "highways", a day or more (and not million of years without routers ).

well one thing that you could do, if your not to realistic, is faster than light speed ships. then it would take time to travel this galaxy but not much.

[Uomaru]

That's a good one, but how will they acquire light speed? I would like it to be both a little realistic (since when did lightspeed traveling become realistic?) but also mysterious, unknown. Alien perhaps?

I don't know a lot about these things, and this project goes forward very slow, as I have a lot to do in school for the moment. I also run another fantasy project alongside this, and I'm currently working on that one! I'll soon return to this one

[Redrobes]

Without faster than light travel everything gets too long. Since our closest star (bar sun) is 4ly then its all a non starter when looking at galactic ranges. This is also true for communications as well. If going for a gate model then you need a gate next to everywhere you want to go. I think reality has to be thrown out.

[wormspeaker]

Well, it depends on what kind of story you want it to be Redrobes. Larry Niven has written a number of stories where humans explore space with light speed or slower ships. Of course you don't end up with a human empire spreading across the stars in that case, rather each star is a lonely island. The person on the ship traveling at relativistic speeds experiences a much shorter time-frame from origination to destination than the outside universe, but time continues unabated beyond the hull of the ship. For example in _A World Out of Time_ Niven has his protagonist fly to the center of the galaxy and back to earth. Of course three million years had passed by the time he got back. Not conducive to having empires, but humans can indeed spread throughout the galaxy.

[Nyrath]

Hi! Sorry for the thread necromany.

I have some notes on making an SF universe on my website:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ab.html
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3bb.html
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3v.html
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3bc.html
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ac.html

I manage to make a quick galactic map using a NASA image and a program called Blender (see attachment).

I made a tedious complicated map by writing a computer program to digest star catalogs and plot astronomical items.
http://www.projectrho.com/smap12.html#map04