Topic: Real Star Data

[Mungo]

Hi,

I spent the weekend trying to figure out which stars will have habitable planets in my campaign and where my players will start.

As a result I found a few good resources I would like to share with you:

On the Astrosynthesis website are csv files with all stars found by Hipparcos within 50, 100 and 1000 ly, incl. HIP ID, one other catalogue ID (mostly HD), cartesian coordinates, mass, radius, luminosity and spectral class.
(http://www.nbos.com/download/download-astro.htm).

On www.solstation.com you find the real names for many of the stars within 100ly as well as good articles, e.g. about where habitable planets can be found.

And a  Margaret Turnbull made her PhD about the most likely stars to have terrestrial planets within 100ly. The list (there are 132) can be downloaded from her homepage (http://skye.as.arizona.edu/~turnbull/). There is also another file with the raw data.

One remark: I thought about buying Astrosynthesis, but after some time with the trial version I think although the program is good, the price is much too high. Does anyone know an alternative tool to generate star systems?

BR
Juergen

[Rasyr-Mjolnir]

I do.

It is called Star Generator for Windows. I have a copied and have played with the 1.6 version. The author currently has a 2.0 version out that I have not had a chance to play with yet.

I think that this is a very nifty tool.

You can find it at:

http://www.lemoneyes-radio.com/stargen/

Here are a few screenshots from the 1.6 version of the program.



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[allenrmaher]

Another option, which has some legs in terms of in potential in game use is Celestia.

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

There are some nifty add in packs, including hundreds of thousands of known stars, sci-fi add in packs, and even a random solar system generator.... and it is free.  It requires OpenGL but the flybys and such are very cool.

[NicholasHMCaldwell]

On my other laptop, I have various star map programs, some trial, some free. I spent some time getting quite annoyed with the maps that the more extensive ones would produce, and ended up retreating to an ancient Windows-only program to figure out the stars for the human sector. The Nexus Sector is sufficiently distant that the catalogs become largely irrelevant. I was using a combo of Celestia, the solstation data, and chview21.exe by the end.

Best wishes,
Nicholas

[chk]

I do.

It is called Star Generator for Windows. I have a copied and have played with the 1.6 version. The author currently has a 2.0 version out that I have not had a chance to play with yet.

If I recall correctly, this program uses the star system generation rules from (Traveller) 2300AD, which would make it a derivative work? Fine for us end-users probably, but ICE might want to steer clear...

[Rasyr-Mjolnir]

I have no idea what rules he is using. And ICE isn't using it. I am, (remember the note at bottom of my posts  ) and it does include doing the alien output for Spacemaster. However, having used personally, I can recommend it accordingly.

The original poster asked if anybody knew of other star generation tools. I did, and so mentioned it.

[chk]

Sorry, I only brought it up because I come from a world where my employer owns my brain... .

I use that program (although I don't like the UI very much). I also use the very useful 3-D star data that came with 2300AD (based on the Gliese Catalog). Like you, I don't use them in any *official* capacity...

[Rasyr-Mjolnir]

As Nick pointed out, he used other things for HARP SF.

Though taking a look at his website, the author of the program I linked to does specifically and officially thank somebody for allowing the use of his formulas, so maybe he isn't using the GURPS stuff? I don't know for sure myself. And besides, I use it when I play/run scifi stuff.

Also a big thanks to Stephan Aspridis who gave me the reasons why a fluorine atmosphere couldn't exist and the authorization to use his Galactic program formulas.

Also, here is a link for where you can download Chview and some files of real star data for it -- http://members.fcac.org/~sol/chview/chvc.htm