Alliance-Union Guidebook

contributors CJ, Ragi-at-Heart,

MAPS
CYTEEN
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62 Comments

  1. smartcat

    Very *nice* indeed, Ragi-at-Heart-ji. Is there any way you can add a legend in either miles or kilometers? 😀

    • Ragi-at-heart

      Thanks – I see some errors that I’m going to be fixing down the road, and I suppose I could that in. The trouble I have and the reason I didn’t add it in the first place is that the original from Cyteen didn’t have it. I essentially took the maps found in the front of my copy of Cyteen and colored them to look planety. There wasn’t really a scale that I could see. CJ – did you have any size in mind, or would you say that Cyteen is roughly Earth-sized?

  2. CJ

    Roughly Earth-sized, or we’ve got a density/gravity discrepancy that probably wouldn’t play nice with human bones over generations.

  3. smartcat

    I assume we could use Earth latitudes and longitudes as a rough guide. How far is Cyteen from its star? Were we given that info or am I having a brain f**t?

  4. ryanrick

    Ragi-at-Heart, very nice indeed! Lovely work. I always like having maps handy and have been known to mutter at historic works and dredge out an atlas. I need that visual reference

  5. Spiderdavon

    The perrochon site puts Cyteen either at Beta Cassiopeiae or Eta Cassiopeiae. I’d guess the latter since it’s similar to our own sun. If that’s the case, and given that liquid water exists on Cyteen, then around 1 AU would be right.

    • CJ

      Actually not. It’s in the Lalande catalog and only has a number.

      • Ragi-at-heart

        The star names it’s known as are: Gliese 908, BD+01 4774, HIP 117473, SAO 128397, and Lalande 46650. It’s about 19.356 light years from Earth, according to the Hipparcos study that the ESA did.

        Wasn’t that star name listed in your Future History on your website? I thought for some reason that it was. From what I understand it’s an M3V1 which means it’s a cool red-dwarf, so Cyteen’s probably much closer to the star to be in the “Goldilocks Zone”.

  6. Ruadhan

    http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/

    That’s a terribly interesting site to look at, if you’re wanting info on where Location A is in relation to Location B and have a preference for visualisation. There’s a ‘Stars within 50 light years” page, with the visible stars on it. The non-visible stars (Hinder Stars, anyone?) are more likely to be found on the page for those stars within 12.5 LY of Earth.

    • Ragi-at-heart

      I’ve used that site a great deal. It is invaluable. Another resource is Celestia – a freeware program that lets you “visit” the stars. Very user friendly interface, too.

  7. CJ

    Yep, somewhere I have a notation about what is which. Pell is Tau Ceti. Ross 154 is one of the Hinder Stars. That one sticks in my head for some reason. Here is a link that you may find helpful. http://www.cherryh.com/www/chrona1.htm. Read through it and you will find the star names.

    Thank you for the link, too! Beautiful site! I wish I’d had it back when!

  8. Ruadhan

    I did some digging through the chronology at the link (BTW, looks like there was a search-and-replace gaff… the word ‘cArgo’ shows up in several places!) In amongst all the ship movements, here’s what it says for the stations (the dates are either ‘Working’, ‘Established’, or the first date I could find for a ship arriving):

    2037 SS1 Alpha Station @Barnard’s Star
    2039 SS2 Beta Station @Alpha Centauri (Evac 2157?)
    2042 SS3 Bryant’s Star Station @61 Cygni
    2043 SS4 Glory Station @Ross 154 (Particles; evac 2183)
    2047 SS5 Venture Station @Krueger 60
    2075 SS6 Galileo Station @EV Lacertae
    2072 SS7 Thule Station @Ross 248
    2091 SS8 Olympus Station @Groobridge 34 (estimated establishment)
    2089 SS9 Eldorado Station @UV Ceti
    2093 SS10 Pell Station @Tau Ceti
    2138 SS11 Viking Station @Epsilon Eridani
    2175 SS12 Mariner Station @Van Maanan’s Star
    2201 SS13 Cyteen Station @Lalande 46650
    2267 SS14 Esperance Station @???
    2277 ???? Pan-Paris Station @???
    2283 ???? Fargone Station @???

    I take it the stations launched by Cyteen (Esperance and later) don’t have station numbers because by then, Earth designations are going out of fashion. But which stars do those last three stations belong to?

    Cheers, R.

  9. Ruadhan

    2091 SS8 Olympus Station @Groombridge 34
    Helps if I can type…
    This station did not have an ‘established’ or ‘working’ date that I could find, so I used the date of the first ship visit I could find.

  10. smartcat

    Beautiful, Nand’ Ragi.

  11. Parsifal

    One further source of apparently canonical star data is the chart in ‘Forty Thousand in Gehenna’. This identifies Russell’s as Ross 780 (BD-15 6290, G 156-057, Gliese 876, LHS 530, YPC(PLX) 5546, HIP 113020). Gehenna’s star is identified as one of the Zeta Reticuli pair. Various other stars of interest, including Voyager, Fargone, Esperance and Pan-Paris are labelled, but not cross-identified. Over the years I’ve built my own 3D charts and made guesses as to the identities of a few of these, but the state of the art in stellar distance measurement has come a very long way since CJ made this chart. May I venture to suggest that she may wish to check the chart in the light of new information before pinning down these identities?

    I’ve also compiled ship routes described in the books, and I’d be happy to make this data available, if CJ permits and there’s some reasonably convenient way to do it (sadly, I don’t have a website).

  12. Parsifal

    One is honoured and obliged.

    It’s not that the material is bulky; it consists of a page or two (total) of text notes summarising most of the routing information provided by each book, and a few diagrams constructed on the basis of these. The diagrams are more informative and easier to grasp, but they’re in a rather obscure format (.graffle). I suppose I can simply screenshot these and supply cropped images, plus a (short) legend to explain the symbols used. Everything should fit in an e-mail of quite reasonable size. How may I contact you?

    • Ragi-at-heart

      Parsifal – my excuses. I had missed your response to me. My e-mail is a combination of my first name (Daniel) and my last name (Hicken) with a dot between them and through gmail.

  13. Soren

    Once upon a very long time ago, I got drunk and attempted to put together a complete map of the A-U galaxy (Compact space + Earth, Hinder stars, Alliance, Union, etc). Is there a good map of the human portions of that universe which could be made to mesh with the Compact map I sent you a while ago, and if not, may I pick your brain to create one?

  14. Jugabyte

    Decided to finally stop reading a book here and there of the Alliance/Union series and start ordering them to read… in order. w00t!

    *big CJ fan*

  15. tlbma

    Thank you for all the pleasurable stories to read over the years and may you provide many more. I am not an astronomy or enginering major but like the way those details all fill out and tie together the stations and the ships over gererations. Personaly I enjoy the personalities you have created, some like Rimrunners; Bet Yeager stick with me, Finity’s End, Bren and Jago, the Dowager in Foriegner. Characters and psycological intricacies of how each society works resonate throughout your work.You make me think on what it is to be human. I ‘like’ you more than a ‘salad’ ( Please forgive any errors in grammer and spelling I am new to the internet and cannot find spell check on this thing!) LOL I wanted to go into space and computer tecnology has me stymed!

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