As the title says, I need help space mapping. My setting is inspired by the Alien universe, with earth being split between several nations who have their own interstellar empires. I’m trying to figure out the best way to do this, considering space is 3D and as such means I would need to keep track of all territorial claims perpendicular to the galactic plane

1 points SouthernAd2853

I would advise just color-coding individual stars in this case. It's likely territories won't be contiguous, and claims to the empty void between star systems are meaningless; there's nothing worthwhile to claim there and no way to practically enforce a territorial claim four light years across.

If you've got two stars that are on a perpendicular line relative to the galactic plane, just draw them next to each other. You can't accurately represent 3d space on a 2d plane, and it's not like anything is to scale.

parent
1 points nyrath
You have my permission to use my HabHYG maps. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/starmaps/mapindex.php#id--Winchell's_HabHYG_Starmaps

What i did was:

take the merged HYG star database

filter out stars further away from Earth than a preset limit

calculate each star's XYZ cartesian coordinates

plot them on the map in XY coordinates

(this is the important part) for each star, draw a line between the star and its two closest neighbors, and label the line with it's length in light years.

If you do more than 2 neighbors, the map becomes a tangled mess.

The neighbor lines give you the 3D information, even though the map is flat.

Territorial claims can be indicated by color coding the stars and neighbor lines.
parent