My little project - a maptool for Honorverse

SWM wrote:Note that the borders depicted in that map are taken from the Jaynes books, published years before the Torch books. It's not something I made up.

MAD-4A wrote:I was aware of that, I have the same map on my comp & was wondering about it's accuracy.

SWM wrote:The circular borders that Sawa used in his composite map come from the drawing David made to show the general arrangement of the Solarian League.

MAD-4A wrote:I was not aware of that, an accurate map would be helpful (especially with a map tool, like your making).

SWM wrote:Just to be sure there's no misunderstanding--I'm not the one making the map tool. I made a composite map, using the Jaynes map as an original basis (with some rotation and scaling adjustment). Joat is making the map tool and posted the pictures you were commenting on; the circular regions on those pictures are derived from Sawa's composite map. I've made my composite map available to Joat, but I have no idea whether he will be able to use the borders from my map. They're a bit more complicated than simple circles.

I've begun measuring the borders of the different areas, I'm now on my second attempt on doing that since I didn't take into account that the areas are arcs with Sol as the center so they come out all wrong. I had planned to have this done by now but I had to visit a friend and help him with his computer that was acting up.

When I get enough functionality and stability into the map-tool I'm going to put up a download link for it so people can experiment with it. Currently it's Windows only but the plan is to make it work on all major platforms (Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android).

Progress update:

• Finished with the new dataset with all the systems from SWM's composite map (800+ systems). Ownership/sphere of influence of a large number of systems need to be added/fixed though.
• Preliminary dataset done for drawing spheres of influence, code not done yet.
• Some under the hood changes to handle internal references to unnamed stars or name of stars that are duplicates.

Some screenshots with the new dataset in place:
click to embiggen

click to embiggen


And now to a question that has been bothering me for a couple of days now while I have been working with the different maps:

Why do Manticore have several wormhole connections while Basilisk only have one to Manticore????

Joat42 wrote:[*]Some under the hood changes to handle internal references to unnamed stars or name of stars that are duplicates.[/list]

Oh, yes! I had almost forgotten about that complication. There are indeed several duplicate names on the maps, as you noticed.

And now to a question that has been bothering me for a couple of days now while I have been working with the different maps:

Why do Manticore have several wormhole connections while Basilisk only have one to Manticore????

That is the difference between a Junction and a Terminus. A junction can have connections to multiple termini; a terminus only connects to the junction. Junctions do not connect to other junctions; only to termini. A junction is a central node connecting multiple termini.

Manticore is the largest junction, with seven termini.

OBS says that it is theoretically possible to go directly from one terminus to another, without going through the junction between them. But so far no one has figured out how to do it.

A wormhole bridge is possible between one star and another, with no other termini connected. You could probably call that a junction with only one terminus, but I don't think you could say which one was the junction and which the terminus; they would both effectively be termini.

The exception to all of this is the Twins, the only known case of two separate wormhole termini in the same system. One of those termini connects to a junction (Felix), the other is a bridge to another terminus (Torch). Some of us have speculated that originally the Felix Junction connected directly to the Torch Terminus and somehow got split or interrupted at the hyper limit of the Twins.

Joat42 wrote:And now to a question that has been bothering me for a couple of days now while I have been working with the different maps:

Why do Manticore have several wormhole connections while Basilisk only have one to Manticore????

That's just how wormhole networks work. Manticore has a wormhole junction which connects to multiple locations; the largest known one too, with seven termini. There are a few others smaller junctions, but they are rare.

Direct transit from a terminus to another terminus(eg Basilisk to Trevor's Star) is impossible.

There is no known instance of two junctions being directly connected by a wormhole. The only freak in the wormhole catalog are the Twins(SGC-902-36-G), which connects to two junctions; Torch and Felix, although only the MAlign and MWW are aware of their locations, although Dr. Simoes may know the catalog number of the star.

Actually, I'm not sure Torch is a junction - in-universe rumours of three termini may not be accurate.

SWM wrote:

Joat42 wrote:
And now to a question that has been bothering me for a couple of days now while I have been working with the different maps:

Why do Manticore have several wormhole connections while Basilisk only have one to Manticore????

That is the difference between a Junction and a Terminus. A junction can have connections to multiple termini; a terminus only connects to the junction. Junctions do not connect to other junctions; only to termini. A junction is a central node connecting multiple termini.

Manticore is the largest junction, with seven termini.

OBS says that it is theoretically possible to go directly from one terminus to another, without going through the junction between them. But so far no one has figured out how to do it.

A wormhole bridge is possible between one star and another, with no other termini connected. You could probably call that a junction with only one terminus, but I don't think you could say which one was the junction and which the terminus; they would both effectively be termini.

The exception to all of this is the Twins, the only known case of two separate wormhole termini in the same system. One of those termini connects to a junction (Felix), the other is a bridge to another terminus (Torch). Some of us have speculated that originally the Felix Junction connected directly to the Torch Terminus and somehow got split or interrupted at the hyper limit of the Twins.

There's also a looser use of 'junction' for a set of bridge termini relatively close one another. (The Phoneix Junction is one example, counting the Henessey terminus of the Manticore Junction and Terra Haute one of the Erewhon Junction.) The ambiguity is fine for people planning routes - there's not enough difference between a layover at a proper junction to use another terminus and a short hop from one bridge end to the next - but it's probably a mistake that makes hyperphysicists and astronomers grit their teeth. The Twins could be considered a unique instance of something partway between a proper junction and that informal "junction".

munroburton wrote:Actually, I'm not sure Torch is a junction - in-universe rumours of three termini may not be accurate.

They're not. I can see four sources of them:
1 - Purely spontaneous rumor
2 - Deliberately planted Manpower/Mesan rumor - though the point of that eludes me
3 - An inference based on some knowledge of the peculiar signature of it that didn't pan out on further investigation, or
4 - Some garbled, leaked account of the Twins and Felix - you could get to SGC-902-36-G, Felix, Darius, and apparently two other spots almost without a second transit, and without having to re-enter hyper. So on the traffic-based, looser sense of 'junction', the Torch wormhole almost counts.

Some combination is also possible.

Wasn´t there some very loose mention somewhere of how junction to junction MIGHT be possible, but if it was the probability was so small it didn´t matter anyway...

Or something?

May have been something i read just here on the forum, but i know i´ve read it somewhere...

JeffEngel wrote: The Twins could be considered a unique instance of something partway between a proper junction and that informal "junction".

One of the main differences with the twins, is the two termini are not related. In a normal Junction, the entry loci for the portals of each of the termini are grouped in a small vicinity. At the twins, the 2 termini are very distant from each other, thus are NOT a single junction.

An analogy is a street intersection - it's a smallish patch of pavement with different roads branching off of it in close vicinity; there could be 3,4,5 even 6 different directions of travel. If you have a stretch of road with 2 other roads branching off of it 1/2 a mile from each other - that's not an intersection (ok, it's technically 2 intersections, but you get the idea... they're not related).

Theemile wrote:

JeffEngel wrote: The Twins could be considered a unique instance of something partway between a proper junction and that informal "junction".

One of the main differences with the twins, is the two termini are not related. In a normal Junction, the entry loci for the portals of each of the termini are grouped in a small vicinity. At the twins, the 2 termini are very distant from each other, thus are NOT a single junction.

Right. But the Twins are vastly closer than any other pair of termini outside a proper junction, and close enough, apparently, to have some interesting interactions or hyperspace effects.

It'd certainly be a junction in the loose sense, and yes, definitely not a junction in the strict one.

SWM wrote:That is the difference between a Junction and a Terminus. A junction can have connections to multiple termini; a terminus only connects to the junction. Junctions do not connect to other junctions; only to termini. A junction is a central node connecting multiple termini.

Manticore is the largest junction, with seven termini.

OBS says that it is theoretically possible to go directly from one terminus to another, without going through the junction between them. But so far no one has figured out how to do it.

A wormhole bridge is possible between one star and another, with no other termini connected. You could probably call that a junction with only one terminus, but I don't think you could say which one was the junction and which the terminus; they would both effectively be termini.

Though, annoyingly, some recent books have also used the term "bridge" to refer to a wormhole that we know is just one leg of a junction.


So under that usage apparently a bridge is any terminus to terminus link even when one terminus is really a junction.

Alternatively this is just sloppy phrasing; like referring to Phoenix as a "junction" and would make it just another mistake that makes hyperphysicists and astronomers grit their teeth.