[GZG] Space, Excel, and the reoccuring project

Little over a year ago, I mentioned some work I was re-attempting with
Excel with no formal training/experience. Offers of help were given,
none
were followed up by me. So, I'll put forth some of what I was doing, and
anyone who wants to give it a shot, or point out where it's already been
done, fire away!

My original plan was to use real star lists to generate a space
campaign.
Taking WInchell Chung's HabHYG file,

http://www.projectrho.com/smap06.html

I dropped the list into Excel and began to massage. Before going on, let
me
explain that I'm very comfortable with even near accurate X, Y, Z
coordinates over RA/D/P, and while he gave instructions on how to
convert,
he'd done the work for me. "...serious researchers should go back to the
primary sources." I've been called a lot of things, never 'serious'.

Also, I figure I can give one player XYZ, another XZY, another -YZX,
etc,
and unless someone is TRYING to cheat, folks won't know each other's
whereabouts until fairly far along.

So, I  sort-largest-first by the habitability index, and select to about
18
parsecs, roughly the size of Niven's known universe, and I get about 300
stars. I then set up three cells that convert a particular star's XYZ to
0,0,0, and the propagate over the whole table to get all the other
stars'
relative position. And then I quit.

What seems appropriate is a) figuring a way to get that info with each
star
without having to manually repeat the process 300 times, b) give each
star
a home coordinate pattern and a way to convert any location to the given
star's offsets, and c) come up with some guidance on choosing stars as
empire starters: not too close, too far, roughly equal number of nearby
stars to start empires.

Part of me says I should really be investigating whatever-M
$-is-flogging-as-VBA and doing a database, and at some point, I'm sure I
should, but I'd hope I could get started with just a spreadsheet.

The_Beast

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