Banathu (June Challenge Redux)

[Greason Wolfe]

So I was encouraged to finish this map, and have had every intention of doing so. The last few
months, however, have been extremely hectic, leaving me little time for anything other than work
and dealing with personal tasks (nothing bad, fortunately). I’ve finally had a bit of time over the
last few days to put some effort into this. And I’ve made some changes based on a desire to try
something other than the traditional approach to “mapping the stars.”

Traditionally we use a square grid that represents two of a star’s cartesian coordinates and define
the third cartesian coordinate as part of a label. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this
approach other than having to do a little math to determine the distance between two stars, and it
has the benefit of being a “one size fits all” method of mapping stars. The only downside to this
approach is if a number of stars share (or have very similar) cartesian coordinates on the grid.
When this happens, they may end up “stacked” on top of each other and be difficult to identify at
a glance.

After playing around with a few different ideas, I finally settled on a hybrid polar chart similar to
those used to map constellations. Rather than showing Right Ascension and Declination,
however, I am showing Right Ascension and distance with Declination defined as part of a label.
The advantage of this approach is that not only do you have the star’s position, you also don’t
have to do any math to determine how far away it is. The downside is that this approach doesn’t
afford the “one size fits all” results. The positions and distances of the stars only hold true in
reference to the star located at the center of the chart. Theoretically, in a setting that used this
approach to mapping the stars, the Navigational Computers would be able to shift the reference
point from star to star as travelers moved through interstellar space. There would likely be hard
copies with each star system as the reference point that could be used as a backup in case the
Navigational Computer goes down/off-line.

Anyways, it’s something different and, despite a few early math headaches, has been kind of fun
to work on. I’ve put about 10 hours into this so far, and probably have another 10 to 20 hours
worth of work to do on it before I can call it finished. As a side note, the little chart in the lower
left corner shows the star systems in a traditional format. Note how significantly the “clustering”
changes between the two versions.

Banathu Redux 001.jpg

Edit: And by lower left, I actually mean lower right. Maybe I should have spent a few of those hours sleeping, yes?