Traveller Mapping

[Vile Traveller]

You may or may not know that we have a little "Traveller 1977" subsector-creation group project happening over at the Ruins of Murkhill boards. This is randomly rolled according to the first, 1977, edition of the Traveller Worlds and Adventures LBB, so pre-OTU. It's ticking along nicely, most of the worlds have been claimed and we even have a few alien races and adventures.

Now, I'm putting the whole thing together as a free PDF in Classic Traveller LBB-style format, which of course means we should have LBB-style subsector and planetary maps. It would be nice if we could do colour versions of both.

Anyone here have any experience with these sorts of maps? 8)

[creativehum]

For Subsector Maps, use the awesome Poster Maker from The Traveller Map.

By entering data in the proper format you can create lovely, colored subsector (and sector) maps.

Here's a sample of one I made:



To make it:
1) Go to the linked Poster Maker Page
2) Use the Header line and the dotted lines I've pasted below. (You can also get the header by selecting a subsector from the stored Traveller Map and copying the header from that.
3) Enter your data, system by system, like the example below. Note that you have to enter the data under each heading, space by space. So, four hex numbers, and then a space, and then the name of the system, and them add spaces (NOT TABS) until you get to the UWP spaces, enter the UWP spaces. (Not every column needs to be entered (for example, Stellar can be left blank) but you must have spaces under for each "column" of space, and dashes where you see Dashes.



4) You can get a good handle on what the columns/codes mean and what features are available by looking at the Data Categories on this page.
5) You can make Space Lanes using this tool. (The default will be green. If you go inside the coding, you can change the colors up.)
6) When printing it out, you can make it color on black, color on white, black and white, a draft version that looks like the rough notes of the original notes from GDW's Spinward Marches, and the old FASA. (If you're only doing one subsector, select subsector A and that will produce that data as the sole subsector).

Like I said, it's pretty awesome.

[Vile Traveller]

Oh, that looks neat, creativehum! I'll have to go an play with this.

[ffilz]

I use sec2pdf

Here is an example that I converted to jpg:

https://plus.google.com/103968574990660180814/posts/ZL9HFus97xX

sec2pdf is a not horribly complex script. It has a fair amount of configurable parameters, and I have hacked the script to add more customization for my purposes.

Frank

[eris]

Oct 22, 2016 0:24:35 GMT -6 Vile Traveller said:

Oh, that looks neat, creativehum ! I'll have to go an play with this.

You can do Jump Maps at Traveller Map, too!

Location of the Online Map Maker
travellermap.com/make/poster

If you have non-OTU SECTOR files, make a standard SEC...

1. Paste the SEC file into the poster maker

2. Preview the sector (pdf for an option)

3. Set the jump map width and center

4. Render jump map


Here is a J3 map centered on Regina. Created as PDF and converted to PNG...

[flightcommander]

Wow, that came out looking really nice!

[ffilz]

Here is some more details on how I make maps:

I generate my maps using sec2pdf:

dotclue.org/t20/

With these changes:

pastebin.com/bsULE5Su

And this style file:

pastebin.com/D2zxdWni

And these are the commands I use to generate pdf and jpg:

./sec2pdf -S mymap.style -d $1.sec -f 0128 -t 18x13 --landscape -o $1pdf

convert -density 300x300 -quality 100 $1.pdf $1.jpg

Note: -f specifies the upper left hex to be prionted, -t specifies the COLUMNSxROWS and --landscape specifies landscape printing. Different COLUMNSxROWS might want to default to portrait format.