Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge

I was recently asked a question by a reader on Twitter. (And that still feels so good to say that word, reader, like I actually have people reading my work, and liking it). He asked if I did star maps for the Exodus series. And my answer was: yes, no and maybe. Since I wasn’t really sure what he meant by star maps, I really didn’t have an answer. Do I draw a map of the Empire and label every important star on it. Well, no. The Empire is four thousand light years from end to end, and over three thousand light years thick, containing over forty billion cubic light years, with hundreds of millions of stars within that expanse. Now most of the stars are red dwarves, like much of the stellar bodies in the Galaxy. Not of much interest on the whole, though there will be some exceptions. I have a mention in book three about how survey teams visit these stars about once a decade, just to make sure nothing bad is going on. There will also be Blue Giants and Supergiants, again not of much interest, unless one happens to be near an inhabited system (as these stars tend to die early and violent deaths). There will be a book in the series that deals with this kind of problem. There would still be some odd millions of stars in that area that would be of interest. In Exodus I make about ten thousand of the stars in the Empire either having inhabitable, alien home worlds, sources of resources of special interest, or containing worlds that can be terraformed. Not sure if this is a hgih estimate, low or just right. I guess no one will know the ratio of inhabitable planets to stars in the foreseeable future. Still a lot of systems, and not really what I can keep track of. So what do I do to keep track of them?
There was a file on the internet some years ago, back in the late 90s, called the Astrogator’s Manual. There was a cool little three dimensional cube in the manual that represented all the stars within a twenty-five parsec on a side box, with Sol in the middle. Now the box was divided into smaller boxes, each five parsecs on a side. And then it showed one layer of boxes with all the stars in those areas represented, then the next section, until all five sections of twenty-five smaller boxes were covered. It did this from front to back, then from top to bottom. I did something like that with my core systems, all ninety some odd of them represented. I also did a chart of when they would be colonized based on how far they were from the central star, these being important for determining length of cultural development and population density of the planets. I haven’t used this box map much, but when I need it its there. I drew a look down map of the Empire and surrounding powers on a piece of graph paper. All very cool, except that stellar empires are three dimensional entities. So I do a slice of the empire from and surroundings starting at one end and doing another slice every two hundred light years, from coreward to rimward. Not all that detailed, but enough to get my mind around it. Finally I did one big map of the section of the Galaxy where all the action was occurring, showing the New Terran Empire in relation to old Earth and the Ca’cadasan Empire. And that’s it for now. I have a program that is supposed to make star maps and allows the user to input data and change parameters. Only problem is the stupid thing takes forever to run on my two years ago was fast computer. But when I buy my state of the art gaming machine in a month (you know, for work), then I will try it again and see what happens. Until then mapping and drawing allows me to keep my little boy’s mind active and develop ideas. Of course I didn’t discuss the smaller maps, the map of the Supersystem showing the stars and their orbits, solar system maps, some planet maps, and a map of Capitulum, the capital of the Empire. Not all the planets of course, but when I need one I will draw one, just to have the reference.