It seems to me to be more accurate perhaps to say that the 2D starmap is intentionally a game board.
Vote Your Canon #1: Empty Hex Jumps (consensus: YES)
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It seems to me to be more accurate perhaps to say that the 2D starmap is intentionally a game board.
In the end, in the large, individual space flights are a 2D problem.
A 3D map isn't really a referee problem. 2300 somehow managed to use one.
In the end, what you have is a list of systems and the distance to its nearest neighbors (for some value of nearest). Then flight plots are taking the ship from system to system. A->B is X distance, B->C is Y distance, C->D is Z distance. You don't really need to know how far it is directly from A->D (perhaps because the ships can't go that far). It's no different than a Jump route.
Can you "see" it with a quick glance at a hex grid? No. But it wouldn't take much study either.
But you can look it similar to a "warp point" game like Starfire, where intersystem distance isn't a direct issue, it's the gates that connect them.
In the end, the "3D" just falls out of the problem. You just have a graph of routes that are routinely used.
A 3D map isn't really a referee problem. 2300 somehow managed to use one.
In the end, what you have is a list of systems and the distance to its nearest neighbors (for some value of nearest). Then flight plots are taking the ship from system to system. A->B is X distance, B->C is Y distance, C->D is Z distance. You don't really need to know how far it is directly from A->D (perhaps because the ships can't go that far). It's no different than a Jump route.
Can you "see" it with a quick glance at a hex grid? No. But it wouldn't take much study either.
But you can look it similar to a "warp point" game like Starfire, where intersystem distance isn't a direct issue, it's the gates that connect them.
In the end, the "3D" just falls out of the problem. You just have a graph of routes that are routinely used.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
You can have a written list of distances between destinations.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
As I see it, jumping to an empty hex is the only way of reaching planets that are two parsecs apart when all you have is Jump-1 drive.
Yes, it IS a referee problem. It was a huge impediment to letting players loose with a ship in 2300.... at least for me and a few friends who ran it.
It was also a referee problem in FGU's Space Opera.
And in ICE's Spacemaster.
I don't have any others coming to mind with full 3d mapping, but I'm certain I have at least a couple which are not memorable and have xyz coordinate systems in use.
It was a huge issue in 1987, when most calculators had 5 math functions ([+][-][×][÷][%] ) and 3 non-functions ([C][CE][=])... only a few had a [√] without being full fledged (and expensive) scientifics...
I did have one, but didn't think to use it. I just ran my 2300 games either in the OTU (rather than the 2300AD setting), or ran th e2300 setting on a single world per campaign.
Later, I used a square root table, once I finally grasped the hypotenuse formula doesn't care how many dimensions...
While it's ambigous in LBBs 1-5, other CT literature assumes jumps into empty hexes are possible.
Page 13 in TCS explicitly discusses using collapsible tanks to allow a J2 ship to bridge a 4-parsec gap between worlds. "With collapsible tanks, a ship with Jump-2 could negotiate the distance in two sequential jumps, the first to deep space half way across, where the collapsible tanks provide the fuel for the second jump." In the discussion of the Island Clusters campaign later in the book, there's reference to bridging a 6 parsec gap with two Jump-3s.
Page 13 in TCS explicitly discusses using collapsible tanks to allow a J2 ship to bridge a 4-parsec gap between worlds. "With collapsible tanks, a ship with Jump-2 could negotiate the distance in two sequential jumps, the first to deep space half way across, where the collapsible tanks provide the fuel for the second jump." In the discussion of the Island Clusters campaign later in the book, there's reference to bridging a 6 parsec gap with two Jump-3s.
One reason I included a list of 550 star systems closest to Earth in xyz coordinates, as now the number can be cut and pasted into an online 3D coordinate calculator. Though funnily enough, one can often tell the provenance of datasets by the orientation of the stars, as there is disagreement in the astronomy community on just how the galaxy is rotated.
