Down in Stellar Cartography...

[Ags]

I am working on a little website for online science fiction role playing games, and have been trying to find a format for displaying the millions of star systems in my map. This is my effort so far, showing the Lava/Hot Zone (red), habitable Zone (Green), Cold Zone (where a small body like Titan can still have an atmosphere) and the Outer Zone. You can see rocky bodies, gas and ice giants, a habitable world and habitable moons, and asteroid and dust belts. This is just a screen capture, the original is coded in SVG and Javascript. Only habitable planets get proper names, Nimerigar is a gas giant with two habitable moons; the next planet out has a ring system. In the interactive online version (not deployed yet) you can click planets and moons for more details. The moon Nimerigar/0 is currently clicked in the screen capture.

Edited June 8, 2020 by Ags

[bf79]

That looks pretty cool, certainly looks like it would be easy enough to follow

 

one of my favourite PC games is an old star trek game called Birth Of The Federation, which involved exploring the galaxy and colonising systems, i’ll add some screen shots i found below of the set up of that. They show the info displayed when you click on an explored system to get information on the planets to determine its suitability for terraforming / colonising. 

Looks like a more basic version of what youre designing

[bf79]

Bye the way, if you've never played it I highly recommend it, you can download it for free now. It was created by a company called Microprose who went bust and a few dedicated fans have created a site to make it available and keep it going.

For a 21 year old game its really addictive 😀

[Ags]

Microprose went bust? The name makes me think back to happy times with my 486...

[bf79]

Yip, far simpler times 😀

 

I always lived in hope that a sequel would have been made to BOTF then was gutted when i heard they went bust 🙁

 

[Ags]

Still working on this. It is now morphing into a board game, with the premise of being lost in space and needing to gather resources and find a home planet. So the game flips between the map above showing the individual solar systems and a map showing the interstellar view. I have come up with this map style: