[FT universe] was [URL] New Star and Campaign Maps

On 10 Sep 98, at 9:20, Tim Jones wrote:

> Being that the current maps are 7pc and a
> very big FTL jump is 7ly (~2pc) what sort of
> radius do we think the FT background covers.
> 
> 25pc? more?? (thats a lot of stars dudes)

This is something I've been giving some thought about.. how big is 
the (human) explored area?

Well... how fast do FT ships go FTL? I've been working on a 
guestimate of 1ly per day, which I think roughly fits with the rough 
campaign rules in one of the FT books.

How long have humanity been exploring?
>From the timeline.... it starts properly about 2070, and it's 'now' 
2183 (ish) that's about 40,000 days. Rather a long time. Actual 
exploration during this time is limited by:
1) Getting the infrastructure in place for each successive forward 
base to explore from.
2) Budgetary considerations. (Exploring in all directions from the 
center of a sphere can take a lot of ships/probes) also, setting up 
the forward bases to stage from can mount up in cost.
3) Interruptions due to the balkanised warfare situation in FT.
4) Navigational problems?, is the length of a period of FTL limited to 
only between stars a certain distance apart? this can dramatically 
slow exploration. Other PSB reasons abound.
5) Corporate policy / political will. Variable as hell ;)
6) Something I haven't thought of... hey, I'm working this out as I go 
along, don't hassle me :)

However, my feeling is that the long of the short of it is.... probes 
and explorations ships could have gone a LONG way... perhaps a 
few hundred ly. The furthest ones will only just be getting their 
results back to the core. However, there isn't going to be anything 
much in the way of colonies out that far.... getting the infrastructure 
in place means ferrying lots of resources back and forth, which 
takes time, and money. There will also be some pretty big gaps of 
knowledge on a frontier that big... encompassing thousands of 
stars means there hasn't been enough time to explore many of 
them.

Which makes me take a step back... this is unmanageable if you 
actually want to map the FT 'universe' for a campaign game... so 
finding reasons to limit the size to something we can cope with 
needs to be put in place... strengthening some or all of the 
numbered points above can be enough to drop the 'developed' core 
regions to perhaps a hundred or so ly across, with spiderwebs of 
'frontier' explorations tracing out from it. 
Depending on how you feel... you can put the alien races humanity 
just contacted on the end of a finger hundreds of ly away, or in a 
gap between them, far closer, that they didn't happen to explore 
yet.

Using the excellent chview program and fiddling about with sizes of 
area, length of jump (if you want to use that as a limitation) natural 
clusters of interesting/valuable/strategic systems etc, and you get 
a feel for the scale of the problem/opportunity ;)

Just some (unstructured) thoughts to chew on...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Richard Slattery	     richard@mgkc.demon.co.uk
Canada has never been a melting pot; more like a tossed salad. 
     Arnold Edinborough
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