Thursday, April 11, 2013

Space what is it good for!

Space!

This is my current project, and one that is consuming lots of my time. To start I have been thinking about a post I read some ware (this is how I refer to all posts as I never remember where I read them from or who wrote them). This post was about creating a codex of sort for all the races people are using in 15mm SciFi. Well that is how I read it, and I could have been wrong. Well the more I thought of this the more I liked the idea. But then I took it one giant step forward, by asking my self (my reply was a ton of work for me), would it not be cool to plot where these races lived? I replied to my self YES!

So I went to my digital pile of software, and installed and old program called Astrosynthesis V2. This is one heck of a program, and it requires some horse power to run smoothly on a PC. As I have to played with this in years, I had to kick the tire for a few days just to bring me back up to speed. I quickly found that it was a bit lacking, and saw there was an upgrade, so I got that and am now running Astrosynthesis V3.
This software comes from www.NBOS.com, and they offer a 14 day trial. I

So what does this software do you ask? Well in a nut shell it maps out space in a 3d map. It can create blank sections of space, or it can do a random generation of item in the map. As I can not think very big I did the later, and came up with a few random maps.

Once you have a map with items in it, is ware the fun begins, and the brain starts to hurt. I have to say I have created some 10 maps over the past few days, and finely ended with a very big one. Listed below are some stats on the system map I have created.

this Sector Map is covering an area of space 10ly Radius, or a circle 20ly across.
There are 476 systems, with a total of 12,852 bodies.
263 Habitable Terrestrial bodies.
81 of the having a population over 1k.
There is also 37 Space Station through out this sector.

All of the items in this map can be edited, or deleted, and new objects can be created. I have a sub sector for the Imperium called IMP, and that has a total of 16 systems in it. I am going to review a sub sector report I have printed to PDF, and find what items I would like to alter to fit my Armies. Once I have a placing for my Imperial type troops, I will move on to my green skin folk, Tau-re and other I would like to add.

Any way here are some screen shots of the software, and of the Space map.
A 2d map of the IMP sub-sector.
A 3d map of the IMP sub-sector.
A pulled back view of above.
Pulled back even more.
Her is a crappy video of some of the animation the software has built into it. Also this is ware the horse
power really comes into play.

As I get through my data, I will open up some of the systems, and offer them up to people who would like to have there armies placed into space on a home world. I will also make the current map file available to any one who would like to play with it. Also I will have a full system report in PDF up soon, for download. If you have any questions leave them in the comments, or ping me on G+.

Noel