Composite map based on JRMN

I have finally finished building the composite Honorverse map I've talked about a couple times. I based the map on the one published in some editions of Jayne's Royal Manticoran Navy. Take a look at version 1.0 of the map.

I think most people have largely ignored the map in Jaynes Royal Manticoran Navy on the assumption that it is not canonical. I have long suspected that it was more accurate than people thought, and have wanted to try to make a composite map based on it for years. I got motivated to finally do it when Evergreen and Top Cow published maps which were derived from the JRMN map. That gave a little more credibility to treating the map as canonical. As I worked at it, I gained evidence that the map is similar to David's master map, at least as of Shadow of Saganami.

The JRMN map has unlabeled stars scattered across it. At first glance, the stars look like mere decoration. The only stars that are labeled are the capitals of major systems, the termini of major wormholes, and the stars near the Manticoran Alliance. But it turns out that at least some of the unlabeled stars match the maps. Most of the stars from the Silesia map (HAE) are marked on the JRMN map, with no name labels. All the stars from the Talbott Cluster map (SOS) and the Maya Sector map from David appear on the JRMN map, too, except for those that fall off the edge of the JRMN map or in the gap between the left and right parts of the map. The match between maps is quite good, with only a few exceptions.

JRMN was published in 2006. SoS was published in 2004 and the Maya Sector map was also released by David in 2004. I conclude that one of two possibilities is true:
A) Ad Astra created their own composite map, as I was doing, but didn't label the stars from the Maya Sector, Talbott Cluster, and Silesia, or
B) Ad Astra created the JRMN map based on David's own master map.

If (A) is true, then Ad Astra did not have any extra information, which means that most of the unlabeled stars are mere decoration--except for Silesia, the Maya Sector, and the Talbott Cluster. That seems a little odd--why go to the trouble of carefully determining and marking the locations of those stars but not labeling the star names? So (B) seems a lot more likely--which means that the unlabeled stars probably come from David's own map!

So I have created my own cleaned-up version of the JRMN map, labeling the stars from all the published maps (except the Illegible Map, which I'll explain in another post). Stars with white centers are ones which did not appear on the JRMN map which had to be added.

Thank you for working on this for us.

Good work.

The Illegible Map is a problem, for lots of reasons.

Sawa had trouble fitting the Illegible Map to the rest of his composite map, mostly because he trusted the location of Mesa on David's hand-drawn strategic map (I don't trust that map to be to scale). I have a different problem with the Illegible map (besides the fact that some of the names are illegible).

The stars on the Illegible Map don't match the JRMN map (or the SoS map). They almost match, if you rotate and scale it right, but only in sections. For instance, you can get about half of the Talbott Cluster to match, but if you do, the rest of the Cluster and most of the stars outside the Cluster don't match. In general it seems that you can find a match for small sections of the Illegible Map, but the transformation for each section is different from the other sections. In short, the Illegible Map appears to be distorted from the JRMN map in a way that cannot be resolved by a simple transformation (an affine transform, if you want to be technical).

David said when he released the Illegible Map that this was a section of his attempt to transfer his map into a new computer mapping program. There are three possible explanations for why the Illegible Map does not match the SoS map (and the JRMN map):
A) David accidentally misplaced stars as he copied his physical map into the computer program, or
B) David deliberately adjusted star positions as he copied the physical map into the program, perhaps trying to change into 3-Dimensional coodinates, or
C) When David printed out this section of the map, he distorted the star positions somewhat, perhaps to reduce the danger of giving fans too much information.

This leaves the possibility that even if the composite map I've made is fairly accurate as of SoS, it may not match David's current master map on the computer.

About Lynx and Sasebo--

The positions of Lynx and Sasebo on the composite are based on the Top Cow and Evergreen maps, respectively.

The SoS map does not mark a star for Lynx; it just has an arrow. If I put Lynx at the arrow, it would fall inside the Outer Protectorates of the League. We know that some stars within the zone of the Protectorates (perhaps even within the Shell) are independent, but it seemed odd for Lynx to be there. The Top Cow position for Lynx puts it within the golden zone for the Talbott Cluster, which makes more sense. The zone for the Cluster also comes from the Top Cow map, but I had to extrapolate the outer part of the zone to include Pequod, New Tuscany, Marian, Tillerman, and Scarlet.

Nice job. Thanks for the time and effort spent on this. It definitely helps me to visualize the situation I'm reading about.

The Midgard Federation seems fairly large (i.e. in that it's a multi-star system nation with a good astrographic spread). I'm surprised they're not mentioned more often and/or are bigger players (at least via the Andermani who are the closest).

SWM wrote:I have finally finished building the composite Honorverse map I've talked about a couple times. I based the map on the one published in some editions of Jayne's Royal Manticoran Navy. Take a look at version 1.0 of the map.

Very cool. Thank you for this.

SWM wrote:I have finally finished building the composite Honorverse map I've talked about a couple times. I based the map on the one published in some editions of Jayne's Royal Manticoran Navy. Take a look at version 1.0 of the map.

I think most people have largely ignored the map in Jaynes Royal Manticoran Navy on the assumption that it is not canonical. I have long suspected that it was more accurate than people thought, and have wanted to try to make a composite map based on it for years. I got motivated to finally do it when Evergreen and Top Cow published maps which were derived from the JRMN map. That gave a little more credibility to treating the map as canonical. As I worked at it, I gained evidence that the map is similar to David's master map, at least as of Shadow of Saganami.

The JRMN map has unlabeled stars scattered across it. At first glance, the stars look like mere decoration. The only stars that are labeled are the capitals of major systems, the termini of major wormholes, and the stars near the Manticoran Alliance. But it turns out that at least some of the unlabeled stars match the maps. Most of the stars from the Silesia map (HAE) are marked on the JRMN map, with no name labels. All the stars from the Talbott Cluster map (SOS) and the Maya Sector map from David appear on the JRMN map, too, except for those that fall off the edge of the JRMN map or in the gap between the left and right parts of the map. The match between maps is quite good, with only a few exceptions.

JRMN was published in 2006. SoS was published in 2004 and the Maya Sector map was also released by David in 2004. I conclude that one of two possibilities is true:
A) Ad Astra created their own composite map, as I was doing, but didn't label the stars from the Maya Sector, Talbott Cluster, and Silesia, or
B) Ad Astra created the JRMN map based on David's own master map.

If (A) is true, then Ad Astra did not have any extra information, which means that most of the unlabeled stars are mere decoration--except for Silesia, the Maya Sector, and the Talbott Cluster. That seems a little odd--why go to the trouble of carefully determining and marking the locations of those stars but not labeling the star names? So (B) seems a lot more likely--which means that the unlabeled stars probably come from David's own map!

So I have created my own cleaned-up version of the JRMN map, labeling the stars from all the published maps (except the Illegible Map, which I'll explain in another post). Stars with white centers are ones which did not appear on the JRMN map which had to be added.

Thanks for the Hard Work Steve!

Thanks for the map! It is still missing the junctions seized and or closed in ART and subsequent - still it is a marked improvement in what we have had available. My guess is that many of the scaling problems are associated with the 3-D to 2-D problems of the original notes. But I agree with your assessment of other possibilities. I had been happy with SAWA's map, but this is better in some ways, though it has to be downloaded to even read the names. Again, Thank You.

Love the new map! One question though: some of the stars are black-outline with white interiors while others are black-filled. Is there a difference? Other than the color of cours