Back when, there wasn’t info on starfields and distances except in numerical form. There wasn’t the ready access to beautiful simulations…
So…I made my own. This is from a question a reader asked me:
My answer: “So many things are now available. Back in the 80’s, I used a star catalog that gave observed position, and input them into an Atari computer to get the X,Y, and Z on a graph, then got sheets of glass and made proportional dots on them at various levels to get a 3-d star map of the solar neighborhood. I had already chosen some close to us, like Ep Eri, A and B Cent, Wolf 354, Tau Ceti, etc; so they were there—my radius was about 30 light years. And it helped me conceptualize the distances, because without the ‘elevation’, you can’t see that 2 stars rhar appear close on a flat map are vertically separated by huge distance. I also turned up a curious spongelike threadiness to the location of stars, highways of stars, as if soap bubbles had stars only where they touched each other—and I was fascinated by this. I began to read up on cosmology, to see if my observation was elsewhere noted. Now it appears on 3-d computer maps, and these ‘filaments’ are, yes, observed, and part of the structure of the universe: they appear in macrocosm in the organization of galaxies, and rhey exist also within our galaxy (remember my observation was at max 50 light years, on version II) as strings of stars. So I envision the progress of star colonies as following these ‘highways in the sky,’ as the shortest distance between planeted stars. I’m delighted with modern discoveries, my ‘brown dwarf’ jump points are out there, my notion of extra-solar planets, which I never did use, is out there, and just so many wonderful things. Turns out my mining station at Viking (Ep Eri) has not one, but TWO asteroid belts, by recent observations—just really, really neat stuff.
I had several catalogs at hand, and they disappeared in a move so long ago I can’t remember. One was a (then) unpublished catalog I had sworn not to mention, so I didn’t; I’m sure it now is published; and the necessary imprecision of sticking little dots on glass sheets was such that it wouldn’t give away anything at all. Names that stick with me, yes, Gliese, Lalande, Luyten…but what I recall principally is two xeroxes in copper pin binding; and where those went, I wish I knew. But 6 house moves are between me and those catalogs.
I used that chart to work out a schedule of sublight ships and primitive stations, with dates. We need to get a move on to keep my schedule, but it tracks the movement of the sublight ships of my universe up to the point FTL is discovered and all but one of the old sublighters converts to FTL. It’s the ‘historical’ foundation of the Alliance-Union universe, and contains the makings of a lot of stories I haven’t quite found the characters to tell.
I am really pretty good with concept and really horrid at arithmetic. But my results kept coming out weird, where I knew they couldn’t be; so I found out my edition of the Encyclopedia Americana had screwed up the circumpolar coordinate equation—my second grade teacher, who undoubtedly despaired of ever teaching me to add and divide, would have been amazed that lil’ ol’ me found and fixed a math error in the encyclopedia (just a minus sign) without having to ask anybody. I knew when my stars assumed the configuration my astronomical knowledge expected.
I started working on some of this with Diane Duane, who had some relations with the Hayden Planetarium in Boston, and the Planetarium asked me if they could use my data—I of course was flattered and said yes. Then a reader volunteered to do a computer simulation flythrough—well, my programming was definitely limited, and adding the ‘theta’ so that you could do a real flythrough was considerably beyond my skills in Basic, which was all I knew. So the chap did it, back in the day (abt 1983) or before, when joysticks outside of airplanes and video parlors were a bit of a novelty. You could indeed fly through, and it was beautiful. As I say, so many things we expect now, but back then, it was wholly unexpected, and when I got that program I was so enchanted. It froze, it hung, it had problems, but it was wonderful to me.
I find myself wondering—do today’s young folk even know what 48 k means? Nowadays nobody whiffles at 48 gig. But back then, programming was so elegant, in the computing sense: I had a word processor that ran well in about 14 k. No failsafe, no advisement to save before shutting down: you command, it obeys, instantly. But it ran as well as any word processor. It just stored stuff on a LOT of ‘floppy’ disks. I neglect to mention my lightspeed acceleration-at-1-g calculations, which I set to print out, just to get a notion of scale and time—when I got back from an errand, the thing was still running, the tractor feed paper was nearly gone, and the sea of printout about reached the level of my desk in that little work area. I had to do my own mental adjustments to the scale of distance and accelerations we routinely work with.
And again:
Mmm, weirdness in the way WP stored that. Must’ve exceeded the allowable length. Anyway, HERE is where the comments start.
Yes, indeed. I had a Kaypro with dual floppies…first portable PC with 2 handles on the thirty pound case. Had a 286, then a 386 and I thought I was smokin’. Faster and faster we go.
I’m a fan of the GDW game 2300AD, produced in the late 1980s and making use of stellar catalogue data to produce a similarly realistic astrography. (I came across Cyteen before 2300AD, mind.)
I’d never thought about the exceptional effort that you had to do to come up with your maps and universe. Now I can just go to Sol Station or the Internet Stellar Database or the various professional catalogues and look up the information. What you did … bravo.
lol—thanks!
What you did was a remarkable achievement. You gave a vast science fiction universe a very detailed real-world setting that had implications for the universe’s functioning.
The first computer I ever used had 8k 20-bit words. Them were the days. It didn’t have disks, just magnetic tape. Now this was before PC’s. My first PC was an IBM PC1 with a whopping 64K and 2 floppy drives.
oooh, I can play this game: first paid job (1971) was programming an ICL 1902A mainframe computer with 192K (actually 64K of 24-bit ‘words’) and a paper tape reader to boot the OS from. It supported 32 simultaneous data entry terminals for an insurance company … it was being run as an FEP for a 1963 mainframe computer (Marconi KDF9) that had individual transistors for each bit – a big advance on the previous generation that had real core memory that could get real bugs on it if you didn’t close the doors properly …
Oh boy … a bunch of acronyms there I haven’t heard in eons (all of them English, of course).
FIRST computer I ever used used something like an antique ‘Castle’ filmstrip for programming: they let us students use about 8 different terminals, but if we handed it anything complex its partitioning went kerflooie, and each other’s answers started turning up on our printout—yes, printout: that’s how it communicated. Every time it went nuts, we had to slip the end of the foot-and-a-half long filmstrip into the slot and let it reprogram itself. It spoke Basic, or something like it.
The really big one at OU had a whole brick building the size of a house for the CPU, and people were advised not to bring anything magnetic near that building on pain of being shot. I think it used vacuum tubes, and probably had less computing power than a Droid cellphone.
Oh my. I had an Apple IIe in college, with an Applied Engineering memory card to boost its RAM clear up to a whopping 768KB. I had AppleWorks, which was a really wonderful program, dinosaur cousin of other suites like MS Office and Corel’s suite. In my classes, I used and liked the Turbo Pascal code editor, which was derived from WordStar’s editor. My IIe had an ugly green screen, a whopping 80 columns by 25 lines with the card, but a fancy color monitor was beyond budget, alas. In classes, the old 286 and 386 PCs ran MS-DOS. The Mac was brand new the semester I started college or so. Microsoft Windows didn’t exist until slightly later, and was layered clunkily on top of DOS. When I began doing typesetting, page layout, and graphics on computer (ooh, “desktop publishing!”) it was on a Mac Plus with a LaserWriter Plus and ReadySetGo. I wonder how many others remember ReadySetGo. PageMaker was new and so were Freehand and CricketDraw, and some time shortly after, Illustrator. I had Fontographer somewhat later on, on a newer Mac.
It was during that time, with the trusty old Apple IIe on a cart by my college desk, that a college buddy loaned me Downbelow Station and The Pride of Chanur, because I was desperate for some good new SF to distract me from calculus and computer science, English lit and French lit, and things more impossibly esoteric. I read all of Downbelow Station in a weekend. Who needed sleep? That was *good*, Chanur was equally *good* and hinted at actual knowledge of languages and history, and I’ve been hooked on Cherryh novels ever since.
That same college buddy had a copy of an RPG, the old tabletop and paper and dice kind. The game had, quite surprisingly, an essay by one C.J. Cherryh on the Company Wars. That game or another he had, had a system for generating likely star systems which sounded quite plausible. I wish I had bought a copy of the game myself. I have wondered since if the rules for solar system generation could be made into a handy utility program for scifi fans and authors. If I knew the name of the game, I’d look for an old copy for sale online.
—–
That idea, drawing stars with magnitudes onto sheets of glass (or acetate) is still a good one. A pad of clear acetate sheets, some colored markers suited to acetate, some solvent to erase drawing mistakes, and something to hold them in a shadowbox lightbox…say, that’s workable for someone with some time. Might be a cool thing fro a scifi con, for an astronomy class (college), or a high school science project.
Hmm…someone who knows how to do 3D CGI art and someone to do simulations programming could do a really fine starship program, navigation, colonization, ordinary merchant runs to terrible wars to arr, space pirates…. Something maybe quite different than the sims and games already out there.
Something that had actual starmap data, including exoplanet findings, with some added fun of being on a starship bridge, science officer or helm/navigator, or a shuttle or fighter, hmm…. I could see that being very fun for authors, fans, and actual scientists.
Wish I knew how to do 3D CGI or any real programming. But some other fans might!
Absolutely fascinating and I’m sure that’s partly why AlianceUnion is so compelling – because the underlying universe IS about right. So few authors manage that level of detail – although I guess readers can’t actually know this, maybe every author is this concientious, and it just doesn’t always show in the writing?
My first was a BBC Basic (later apple) I ran various bits of self written code on it, I don’t think I ever managed to get one of those ‘type the code in’ games to run properly. Was one of the first kids in class to hand in WordProcessed essays. By the end of school everyone did it.
How mcuh glass do you need to model this corner of the galaxy?
I used 1/4″ glass, I think, in the small 1′ model (I did a larger, 2 and 1/2′ one in plexi) —and I actually stuck dots on both sides of the glass, as a way of doing slightly more variation in ‘elevation’. But you can’t be wholly accurate with those materials, let alone little stick-on dots and starforms from office supply. Plus the 1′ model is hard to pick up, due to sheer weight (think of a 1′ x 8″ near-cube of glass) and glass being a semi-liquid, it’s a pita to manipulate in a large frame. And optical quality diminishes as you get thicker, so that setting a light behind it helps.
I think my first was something like Tulrose’s first PC. I was very late on the scene – that was quite old when I got it – around 92 or so … 64 K rings a bell! remember having to do stuff in DOS and buying DOS for dummies!
yes, it’s wonderful to see how you got it right, CJ; that framework of research makes the books much more enjoyable and interesting. 😀
Thinking further…an art piece, etched glass or glass jewel affixed to glass, several levels, could be a neat, unique art piece. Hmm…a sort of three-dimensional checkerboard cubic arrangement maybe. Gosh, that sounds fun.
This is a link to the Chronology, with actual star names for the various places in Downbelow Station and Cyteen: this is from the mother-ship, cherryh.com; http://www.cherryh.com/www/chrona1.htm
Two of the star names given for stations in the Chronology are from older catalogues which have never been digitised, and therefore can’t easily be found using modern online references. These are:
Olympus: Groombridge 34
Better known as: GX And(romedae), BD+43 44, G 171-047, Gl(iese) 15, HD 1326, LHS 3 or HIP(parcos) 1475
Cyteen: Lalande 46650
Better known as: NSV 14719, BD-01 4774, G 029-068, Gl(iese) 908, LHS 550, or HIP(parcos) 117473
If you’re doing searches, omit the parts of names which I’ve included in parentheses. What’s left conforms with the system of nomenclature currently used by most astronomers, and by the SIMBAD online database, run by CDS, the international astronomical data centre in Strasbourg. This is a wonderful resource for anyone who grasps the basics of astronomy or is interested in learning.
CJ, it sounds as if the unpublished catalogue you were working from was most likely a draft of the third edition of Gliese’s Catalogue of Nearby Stars (CNS3 in CDS-speak). It never was officially published, but draft versions circulated quite widely and a digitised version is available from CDS. Alternatively, I suppose it might have been an early draft of the Fourth General Catalogue of Trigonometric Stellar Parallaxes (W.F. van Altena et al, published 1996, aka GCTP4). I don’t think there are any other likely candidates.
The latter of these was probably one of the last star catalogues ever actually printed on paper. They’re just so much easier to use and analyse in digital form. The unfortunate corollary is that older catalogues which have never been digitised might as well not exist, as far as modern astronomy is concerned. They survive only in fragmentary form, as individual star names cross-identifed in digitised catalogues.
I’m betting on Trigonometric Stellar Parallaxes, knowing kind of the bent of the researcher.
OK, I wrote the manual for the word processing program (TI-Writer)for the TI 99/4 computer. It came in pieces (keyboard, monitor, floppy drives) patched together with tape wire, and the RAM was in the program cartridge. It used 5-inch floppies that really flopped. This was 1983-4. My mom still runs Word Perfect out of DOS on a computer from the 1990’s that uses 3-1/4 inch “floppies.” One of those little memory chips that go in a camera has more memory than that whole computer.
I found the following in an Amazon search. Alas, I did not find any copies available for sale.
Title: “The Company War: The Boardgame of C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station”;
Publisher: Mayfair Games;
Date: 1983-08 = 1983 AUG;
[QUOTE]
Citation: [URL=http://www.amazon.com/]http://www.amazon.com/[/URL]
The Company War: The Boardgame of C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station [Paperback]
C.J. Cherryh (Contributor)
Out of Print–Limited Availability.
Paperback
Publisher: Mayfair Games (August 1983)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0425066231
ISBN-13: 978-0425066232
[IMG]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ZwbxzRsDL.jpg[/IMG]
[URL=http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ZwbxzRsDL.jpg]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ZwbxzRsDL.jpg[/URL]
[IMG]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61ETCNmKk7L.jpg[/IMG]
[URL=http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61ETCNmKk7L.jpg]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61ETCNmKk7L.jpg[/URL]
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Wow, memories: I got a Timex/Sinclair 1000 in 1982, when I was 10. It had a membrane keyboard, and came with 1k RAM installed. Plus we had the 16k RAM expansion (very unstable, if you bumped the table it would crash the machine). And yeah, system limitations were very important once you wanted to go past
10 PRINT "Hello, world!"
Along with TRS-80, TI99, Apple ][e, and of course the Commodore 64… it amazes me today how much sheer INNOVATION those machines inspired, even with <64k of memory.
I remember that some of the people from IBM came to my junior college as part of its bicentennial week – this was in San Jose, so it was a short trip – and brought at least one cartridge-tape based computer, running 40-turn Star Trek. It had a crowd standing around it.
The first computer I actually got my hands on, rather than using it remotely, was an LSI-11: 64K, 8-inch floppies, and you had to do compression on those all the time, because the operating system wanted the files to be contiguous. Ran Fortran just fine, too. (It ran the ballot counting for the Hugos in 1984, too. In Pascal.)
When I sit down and think about it, its amazing how computers have changed. I remember as a kid helping my father build boxes to hold the computer TUBES he had scavenged from dead boards at work (he worked for DEC at that time) because he planned to build his own computer as soon as he had enough. He got stuck bringing us to work every now and then and he would set us up with a computer the size of a refrigerator that had a screen about 12 inches wide by 4 or 5 inches tall so we could play Adventure or some such. I remember there was a clockwork canary, a dam, a key you got up a tree somewhere, and a maze that used to drive me nuts. Oh, and we were not supposed to tell the Boss about the game, even though Dad and the geeks had figured the excuse was that the game was testing hardware or some such nonsense.
Later we had Apples in high school to learn basic on (it was a club, as the school didn’t have a formal class worked into the curriculum) and a monstrosity that ran on huge rolls of tape that nobody used because it was outdated even then. My cell phone has more brain than all those together!
And yikes, I still have “DOS for Dummies” on a shelf here, it goes with the 3 computers stuffed under my bed. One of these days I need to dig them out and toss em! I wont discuss the other 3 relic computers and the dot matrix printers I have stashed in a closet…
I think its time for some housekeeping….
I logged on to say that I really enjoyed reading this back story.
It really pays to create a good universe especially in science fiction, and the effort shows.
Someone is currently trying to create a space simulator based on our neck of the woods in the Milkyway, and this is how their star map looks.
Ah, old friends, many of those names…
In high school, our history teacher tasked us with writing about the Civil War. I got the bright idea to write about it as if it were happening across interstellar space; the slaves were an alien race. I got my interstellar cartography from the back inside cover of an old Astronomy magazine, which showed our nearest dozen or so stellar neighbors in a kind of 3-D chart. When I got the paper back, the teacher asked me if I had ever read Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress; I dug about in my folders and brought out the tattered paperback copy I was reading at that point. That gave him a huge grin.