Game in the Brain

I just found:

Lifted from the Site.

SECTION 0: INTRODUCTION
The aim of this project is to map the stars around Sol in a manner that preserves their direction and distance relative to eachother as much as possible. The existing canonical GDW maps of the Sol subsector and its environs are extremely distorted compared to reality – direction is not preserved, and distances from any given star become increasingly distorted beyond J2 range. The inaccuracies of the GDW map are largely due to stellar positions being distorted by “flattening” of a 3D space into a single 2D map, inaccurate stellar location data to start with. and possibly some other unknown factors – it also obviously omits any low mass stars discovered in astrometric searches between 1977 and 2003. Either way, the positions of the stars on the GDW Sol subsector map bears little resemblance to the real spatial distribution of stars around Sol.
In Section 3 I present a series of stacked 2D maps of a 3D volume around Sol using the latest available astrometric data of the stars in the vicinity of Sol. This avoids any “flattening” issues since each layer will preserve the vertical position of the maps, and the data will be much more accurate since it is based on HIPPARCOS and other catalogues. The resulting maps are very different to those presented in Traveller canon – thus they are entirely non-canonical – but are much more physically accurate. As a result, you will not find any attempt to link any star positions on the canonical GDW map with this realistic map.
This dataset is aimed at anyone interested in astronomy or who is interested in adding nearby stars to their own RPG or sci-fi/Traveller universes – the raw data in particular is easily adaptable to any sci-fi setting or RPG. Every effort has been made to make the maps as simple to interpret as possible, though jump routes have not been calculated.

found this through Winchell Chung G+ page,


personal note: I’ve been hoping to use a realistic star map for my B3M sandbox. I think it will help if I can use Blender to map this, (I wish I could use Sketchup but I cant get it to run in my Ubuntu 10.04).