 March 12, 2010 - 12:25am | Long ago I pulled someones 3D (xyz) frontier map coordinates off the web and plotted them with gnuplot. This allowed me to rotate the map and view it from different perspectives but lacked because each star is just a pixel in the plot. I added the star routes to help keep perspective. Unfortunately gnuplot is not user friendly for game play and such. I'd like to be able to zoom in/out, rotate, and click on stars for windows of system data and a system map. I am wondering is anyone has every come across a 3D star map program that they like? -iggy -iggy |
 March 12, 2010 - 7:43am | I found this post with a basic pdf download; http://forum.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?6226-Creating-3d-star-maps This person used inscape & Astrosynthesi 2.0 |
March 12, 2010 - 8:18am | I created a line drawing for the random star generator project I was working on (completed but need to pretty up the PDF). With patience you could do the same thing in Inkscape or Word's line art. Something like this.  |
 March 12, 2010 - 8:17pm | I've not worked with sketchup too much but I think once you're over its learning curve you could do what woot did with 10 minutes time or less. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
March 15, 2010 - 12:25pm | I took a crack at building the frontier map in 3D in sketchup a few months ago. It works for having something you can rotate all you want but I had problems with trying to make the stars click-able to open a web page detailing the system. At least I think there was a hyperlink feature, maybe there wasn't and that is what disappointed me. I'll have to play with it some more. Edit: I remember one thing I had problems with in sketchup. The stars are not attached to any other object and thus it is hard to precisely place them at each location (x,y,z). -iggy |
March 16, 2010 - 11:16am | I think I may have found the software I am looking for. I checked out Celestia again last night and tried out some of the user created extras. I was sold when I tried the 2300AD add on some one created. This guy did the star routes which is something I failed to imagine a way to do before when I last played with Celestia a few years ago. The current version of Celestia allows the addition of fictional stars, overriding the actual stars, creation of planets with texture maps, moons, comets, asteroids, artificial satellites, and more. All objects can have a hyperlink attached to them that is reached with a right-click select of info in a selection box. The navigation from star to star is very shiny and fun. I'm gonna tear into the configuration files and learn how it was modified for 2300AD. Celestia can be found here: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ -iggy |
 March 16, 2010 - 5:57pm | Yeah, I did a whole star system for a fantasy game world a friend of mine developed and built it into Celestia a few years ago. I wonder where that got to ... (Tom wanders off looking) Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
March 17, 2010 - 11:49am | TerlObar, Are you familiar with StarGen here: http://www.eldacur.com/~brons/NerdCorner/StarGen/StarGen.html ? I have been running sets of this from a script and grep-ing the output for worlds that match the stats listed in the AD planet list. I only have a couple of matches so far. I find the star types listed in the AD planet list are too broad for StarGen. I don't get habitable worlds for the stars too far away from G type. -iggy |
March 17, 2010 - 4:04pm | Never seen it before. I'll have to check it out. I'm not surprised you don't get a lot of matches. To get habitable planets around the redder stars, they have to be close in. It may be that the StarGen program doesn't handle them correctly or maybe he handles them correctly and it's just a lot harder to get a habitable planet there. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
April 29, 2010 - 12:42pm | OK, I have to post what I've been working on the past couple of months. I have all the stars of the frontier placed in a Celestia addon. The systems for Sundown, K'aken-kar, Belnafaer, Gruna Garu, Athor, and K'tsa-Kar have been generated with stargen and added as well. The addon is on my site here: www.winsor.us/~eric/rpg Here is a shot of the frontier in Celestia:  And of the planet Starmist: (The texture map is for one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn)  To view the frontier in Celestia do the following key stokes: <enter>view point<enter><g> <enter>Prenglar<enter><c> This will fly you to a point outside the frontier near the center of the galaxy and then point your view at Prenglar. Have fun. Let me know if you try this out in Celestia. I'll be adding more systems. -iggy |
April 29, 2010 - 1:31pm | Very, very cool. I'm going to have to grab Celesia again and check this out. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
April 29, 2010 - 5:10pm | Here is a cool shot. I grabbed a 3ds model of the Battle Star Galactica from the Celestia Motherload site and modified its ssc file to orbit Formad One A in close orbit. In the picture Formad One A is the star on the right. The label Formad One is the barycenter that Formad One A and B orbit. What would be cool is to get some 3ds models of an assault scout or a space station and orbit them around some of the planets. I imagine they are getting in close between the stars to hide from a Cylon Battlestar. -iggy |
May 25, 2010 - 12:39pm | A new release of my Celestia Frontier is on my site. http://www.winsor.us/~eric/rpg/index.html I've added Araks, Theseus, FS033, and FS035. FS033 is a system I found while searching the simulation results and I thought it was cool so I put it in one of the unexplored systems. FS035 is the result of buying and watching Avatar a bunch of times. Again placed in an unexplored system. FS035.1 is a hot jovian (see http://www.extrasolar.net/) that I have placed a number of moons around. Some are breathable. The exercise in creating FS035 has put me through a lot of study on the science of moons. I have since learned that the vast majority of moons will tidally lock to their primary and show only one face to the primary. Thus I will be revisiting FS035 to upgrade it in future releases. A tidally locked moon will have a different day period than the stargen simulation and thus the temperature profile will change which effects atmosphere retention. So, I need to re-simulate all the moons. Moons also slow down their primary so I need to redo the systems of Gruna Garu and Athor as they have moons. I need Hargut (Gruna Garu) and Yast (Athor) to have faster spin at formation so that their day length after adding their moon(s) will be cannon. The Earth would have about a 16 hours day if the moon had never existed. I am currently studying the stargen source code, Habitable Planets For Man, and other references to get a grasp of the science so I don't have to rely on stargen alone. So, I am very interested in knowing if anyone is interested in and using this Celestia add-on. If so, should I create a project here to track progress, coordinate with others, etc.? A final question about moon uses. Yast's moon Exib is listed as used for agricultural purposes. To sustain plant life with an atmosphere Exib would have to be about as big as Yast. If this were the case I'd expect Exib to be listed as a double planet to Yast. Thus I am presuming that Exib is a typical moon, smaller, no atmosphere, etc. When moons are listed as agricultural usage, how is this being done? Are there domes with farms in them a'la Silent Running? If so, how is this commercially viable? The cost of transporting the produce is going to be high. Maybe Yast has limited suitable farmland. Or, is the moon used for processing of the produce for shipment offworld? Is there a stock animal that grows better on a very low g like a moon and there are factories like our chicken industry on Exib? "Food for thought" -iggy |
May 27, 2010 - 5:14am | A final question about moon uses. Yast's moon Exib is listed as used for agricultural purposes. To sustain plant life with an atmosphere Exib would have to be about as big as Yast. If this were the case I'd expect Exib to be listed as a double planet to Yast. Thus I am presuming that Exib is a typical moon, smaller, no atmosphere, etc. When moons are listed as agricultural usage, how is this being done? Are there domes with farms in them a'la Silent Running? If so, how is this commercially viable? The cost of transporting the produce is going to be high. Maybe Yast has limited suitable farmland. Or, is the moon used for processing of the produce for shipment offworld? Is there a stock animal that grows better on a very low g like a moon and there are factories like our chicken industry on Exib? "Food for thought" I would think that a moon though airless might be terraformable- and Yast is a yazirian world and GODco mega corp is yazirian controlled and its whole raison detre is terraforming. An Issac Asimov novel comes to mind: Farmers in the Sky- it details the experiences of the first colonist on one of Jupitur's moons. I would also think that a gas giant could have a moon that would be be big enought to qualify as a planet I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 27, 2010 - 9:45am | I would think that a moon though airless might be terraformable- and Yast is a yazirian world and GODco mega corp is yazirian controlled and its whole raison detre is terraforming. An Issac Asimov novel comes to mind: Farmers in the Sky- it details the experiences of the first colonist on one of Jupitur's moons. Good point on the GODco tie-in. I'll start looking for the minimal mass, radius, temperature combination that retains a breathable atmosphere. That seems to match up with a moon that has been terraformed. The moon may still be cold and employ green houses, but it will become viable for farming it the economics of shipment can be worked out. We can rig that to our favour. I would also think that a gas giant could have a moon that would be be big enought to qualify as a planet Grab the zip for my Celestia add-on. The unexplored system I have designated FS035 (Frontier Star 35) has a large hot jovian with an Earth sized terrestrial planet orbiting it. I need to redo the temperatures for the planet because it should be tidally locked to the jovian and have a day length of 10 hours 54 minutes. This should make it warmer. Open the file FS035.html in Frontier.zip with a web browser and look at the first planet in the system. Better yet install Celestia, unpack Frontier.zip to the Celestia extras sub-folder and go visit it. -iggy |
May 27, 2010 - 11:09am | As long as you don't have to ship water, fertilizer, soil, etc back up to the moon, it is always easy to ship stuff "down" the gravity well to the planet. You just have to overcome the moon's lower gravity. However, I think that as you start looking, you're going to find that for the habitable zone of a star, it's going to take a fairly large object to hold an atmosphere. So much so that it would be a binary planet and not a planet/moon situation. Take Mars for example. It's mass is 11% that of the Earth and it's atmosphere is only 1/200th in density. And it has a "heavier" gas mix in the atmosphere (CO2 vs N2/O2 mix) that is easier to hold on to and it is colder. I think you'll need something bigger to hold a usable atmosphere and even putting Mars in orbit around the Earth would make it a binary planet. The moon is 1/10 the mass of Mars and the barycenter of the Earth-Moon system is only about 1000 km below the Earth's surface. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
May 27, 2010 - 3:10pm | From what I have seen in the simulations the moon would end up being bigger than mars to have a breathable atmosphere and it would be colder than Hoth. The result would then be a binary planet with the center orbit (the barycenter) almost half of the way between the two bodies. Thus if we go with the terraforming idea it would have to be in bio-domes. That is less science Hollywood and more hard science fiction. The terraforming would be in soil and atmospheric gas creation out of the existing moon materials. The terraforming is the science that makes the venture profitable because you don't have to haul soil and water up to the moon to build the farms.On a side note, I went through the SFMan index during lunch and found all off the systems published to date. I want to bring this material into my build. I will pull the SFMan material of Gruna Garu, Athor, Araks, and Theseus into my renditions of them. Some of these systems look to have been developed using Stargen as a source. If the authors can share with me the Stargen html output files I would gladly use them. I would also love to get the planet maps from the articles to turn them into planet textures for Celestia. In envision the info link from Celestia being an html file that give planet details much like in the SFMan articles. Then we expand them with more details using a wiki or such. -iggy |
May 27, 2010 - 3:47pm | Some of those star systems are online in the wiki. You should be able to get the images of the surfaces there for the ones that are. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
