Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Mapping the Sector

I've got the raw data for 635 major worlds in front of me, to build the Aurin Cluster:

These worlds have names like: Al-Hash, Rubicon, Sarnia, Telmuwun, Abadyo-IV, New Asia, Port Strela


      
I decided that is probably the limit, I will not create any more worlds.

Considering that Earth has a few billion people, that have billions of stories across dozens of genres, I think 635 worlds are more than enough to tell stories for the few decades of my life that I have remaining.  I need to have a focus, and a goal and at 635 systems, I said, okay. Enough.

Space Opera focusses on a few key worlds, and other worlds are less likely to be habitable.

There was a vast Empire in this region of space, that reached out at least to the World of "Basa Haula" in the Varala Drift Subsector.

That polity is now long gone, for millenia, leaving many worlds with ruins and data caches, from the days of the Vestiges of the Terran Empire in this setting.

I envision (at least on the frontier, in the Aurin Cluster) enormous towers, built with technology that the current inhabitants only dimly understand, and cannot maintain. Giant floating cities that speak of days millenia ago, when the Empire was at its height, and it had controlled thousands of worlds, spanning across at least parts of 12 sectors.

But now, at the crumbled fringes of a long-lost Empire, the Technology that connected most of those worlds is long lost, but slowly being rediscovered. It has cut places like Basa Haula off from their interstellar neighbors.

The process means I have to recalculate a lot of what I have done already for a more realistic flavor.

Smaller worlds will end up like Mars or the moon. These will be airless worlds, good only for mining, or poor candidates for agriculture, or large-scale colonization.

Likewise, if atmospheres are thin, water will be lost to space, small cold worlds will tend to have ice, and hotter worlds will be more like Venus.

The population on these worlds will be affected, so that low or high gravity worlds with contaminated or toxic atmospheres will have fewer people.

Moderate size worlds with breathable atmospheres will have more population, and because of the idea that the colonies established will generally fund their own Starports, small tiny populations of a few thousand per world will be a landing field, and not much more if a star port even exists.

A local population will (with some bell curve randomness) need to have about 100,000 people to have sufficient cause to build even a modest frontier port and local scout bases.

The average interstellar port on a trade route will serve 10 million inhabitants, and the largest Trading ports will be located on worlds with a billion inhabitants or more, connected by the Bulk Freighters, and the largest ports reserved for the largest populations, typically 10 billion and up, where Starships are constructed. Most of these are Alien, non-human worlds.

All of this fits with what I am trying to do. Lots of work ahead.   

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

The answer is not 42 (worlds)

Varala Drift, First Draft. Travellermap.com




















Republic Space, First Draft (Upside Down from Standard)
I wanted several worlds for the setting, for The Adventures of Nisa Jax. Some YEARS ago, I proceeded:

I knew that the setting of the entire series would be:

"The Varala Drift" (Pictured to the Left, Above)
Near the "Taranga Nebula Sector"
Near the "Obai Gulf Subsector".

A frontier area of Space called "The Aurin Cluster (Sector)"
At the edge of "The Orion Republic."
Many thousands of years in the future.

The entire setting would span 200 light years both Spinward, and Rimward (Rim-Spinward? Spin-Rimward?) from Earth. 


Earth was long ago forgotten, "somewhere in the Naka Corridor Sector."

Explorers from Earth must have traveled From Earth, along the Naka Corridor, through the Dorai Crossing, and through parts of both Sector Six, or the Behaj Core worlds, to get to the Aurin Cluster,  an active frontier, and the focus of all the stories of the Frontier.

I made the initial Republic Space map, detailing the sector placement.

But Sectors are not stories, and I needed worlds for adventures. I wanted many worlds that were not like Earth.

I have been a gamer for 43 years, so I started out with 28 worlds for the Varala Drift, using a Subsector size of 8 X 10 parsecs.

Scattered Density would be 33% X 80 = 26 worlds.
Standard Density would be 50% X 80 = 40 worlds.

I did not want a lot of worlds to start, because I was in a hurry to get to the writing.  I did not understand this would take me years of false starts, consideration, and despair.

But, initially, for these worlds, I generated those randomly, using Alex Shroeder's Traveller Subsector Generator:  https://campaignwiki.org/traveller/uwp/296437995 (Not that specific Subsector).

I changed them a lot, changed them again. I did a lot of adjustments.  Added worlds, subtracted some, changed worlds to change trade codes.

<Minor detour>
Then, along the way, I realized, Trade codes were Dynamic.

A Low population settlement, not even a real colony, most likely a private installation, or mining site would have limited trade. Over time, this world would move up to Moderate population.

Later, a decent world, going to an industrial workforce, would become polluted.

Without factories and pollution, you'd have a Rich world, Green Economy, that was not destroying its own environment.

I thought about Earth, in the Far Future.

 It seems like that would not be the case, that global warming wins out, and with High Technology, and Starships, eventually, the Terrans would leave the polluted Earth behind. 

Much as I had left the Rustbelt of Pittsburgh when formerly lucrative factory and steel mill jobs dried up because American steel was no longer produced as efficiently as Japanese, and German steel and cars. 

I left the Smoky City to join the military, travel, and get out of town.
</Minor detour>


For the subsector, I kept most of the names, but I confess I changed some names, making them shorter because they did not print well against the "Eye Candy" Background of https://travellermap.com/

My initial map was the one above, using Travellermap, with some Photoshop brushwork, to add in the trade routes and jump routes.

After I had painstakingly used Trade Codes to map trade routes, I started figuring out how it all worked,


I calculated, then plotted Trade and Agricultural Routes, Main Liner, and Freighter Routes. 

The idea was to set up the routes of TransStellar, LLC, to set the long-ago background of Nisa's father, Kars Vandor.

I still did not understand why their last names were different, nor the significance of that to the stories that came later.

As I had already decided, I centered on the world of New Asia, as the focus, but with the old Fluid World of Pre-Collapse UGAU (TIAAA) [Which was some nebulous Terran Interstellar and Astrographics Agency] sort of Old Terran Rule, Ancient base that used to support the old Tauspace Drives.  All of that was very fuzzy in my mind.

Time passed.  I thought more about a lot of things.

I thought about how the phrase:" Kars Vandor controls the trade of half a hundred worlds" kept re-appearing in my mind.  And here we have 28 worlds, and it was not at all certain TransStellar's Shipping Division controlled most of that.

I thought a lot about "How did the initial scouts get here, to the Aurin Cluster?"

What worlds were around this "Varala Drift" subsector?

How many Subsectors did TransStellar have a presence in?

I imagined the main Cargo Fleet of TransStellar was around 50 ships, huge bulk Freighters.

I meditated on this a lot, Gigantic holes in the backstory plot. Things that bothered me. How does he go from a Garbage Scow Captain to a Multi-Billionaire during one lifetime?

He did not inherit. He was a shrewd Trader, and wheeler-Dealer, who took huge calculated risks, hired the best people, and led from the front, from a Bulk Freighter Command ship.

In my mind, I knew:
Kars Vandor had gone to school at the Edge of the Orion Republic in a major system, at a small but decent University.

Gradually, (like the 'Traveller' he was) motivated by decent deals on the Rim, drifted toward the Aurin Cluster, as one of the first Merchants to do Exploratory Trade there...

Hold on- Ideas.

My mind opens. I imagine:

Where many alien worlds, as yet undiscovered, lay in wait for Human Contact.  Prior to this, there had been wars... long, drawn-out conflicts that slowed the Human Wave of Expansion and Colonization. That had, in places, cut off Terra. 

The Aurin Cluster was so remote from Earth, Earth was little more than Myth.  Just one of many worlds with humans living there.

So I decided it.

There were many worlds of the Aurin Cluster that were mainly Non-Human.  Billions of beings that were not human.  Artifacts, Technology that had gone in different ways. Worth a lot in Trade. But how to imagine that, without DETAILING IT?

I saw that I needed not just 28 worlds, but more. I settled on 42 for the Subsector, for the Stories of the Varala Drift, the center of the action for the Series... But I needed to KNOW, ICE COLD, what was going on, what had come before.

I was not content to fill the story later.  I knew I would have a problem down the road, making the backstory fit the narrative I wanted.

I knew I wanted to detail that backstory, in chronological order.

I needed a vastly larger number of worlds, more than just 42, more than "just the Varala Drift".

I needed a step-by-step super-detailed, gritty systematic process that flew in the face of my prior experience at creating a setting.

(Now some ancient thought processes revealed. Welcome to my mind.):

I was angry with Star Trek, and Star Wars creators for decades for not having maps of space.

Once Geoffrey Mandel made Star Trek Star Charts, I was excited.  I thought, "finally."

But upon purchase, perusing it, I thought, "Oh hell! I could do this, and better. And will, for my license."

The old School Enterprise of the 60s era Characters went from one planet to another in spaces of time that did not fit the narratives of time, speed, and distance that were supposedly canon.

I had told myself for years: "when I do this, I will have maps, they will make sense with the Setting."

I want it to be true that fans can track exactly what is going on, where, and when. Documentation is the key.

In the 80s, and 90s, FASA, Inc. (A rather important American game company in the 80's and 90s) did this with their maps for Battletech, for specific scenario books, for novels.

You could read about Planet Skye, and find that world on a map, what was near it, and orient yourself, and figure out the strategic situation.

For Star Trek, I know the idea for those settings was "to not confine the writers, not to corral them into some limited thing that hampered their creativity."

Star Trek: The Original Series was loose with Canon. They developed a lot as they went. They were breaking unfamiliar ground with every episode. Lots of good science fiction in the early days, written by "name-level" writers.

But Paramount was always "Hand-waving" problems away:

"Space is compressed."
"We did Transporters to save screen time for a shuttle shot."
"The rocks glitter, because it decorates the soundstage."
"We use 'Class M' planets as the focus for the Enterprise missions because we do not want to have to create a new alien world every week."

The thought was.. fans do not care that stories used genuine star names that were hundreds of light-years apart when Kirk went to the next world, at Warp 4, in a few days.

Stardates were complete bullshit at first.  Later on, they were complicated bullshit, but there was a system to it, by the time of the 'Next Generation.'

But licensed RPG books chronology did not fit the films, did not fit other licensed RPG tie in books, which did not fit the novels. Which did not fit the mirror Universe. 

Maddening to me. I like certainty.

Really, I  know, in my mind at least, no one wanted to track all these damn minutiae.

Pardon me, I love that shit. It is one of my strengths. It served me well on working on torpedoes. "Attention to Details."

As a World Builder who wants consistency, I care.

I want to see maps.
I want to know that a ship went from world A to world B in about a week, and what its captain's options were for destinations.
How and where it refueled.
What potential cargoes it could have carried.. or not.

I vowed I would map this series, and be able to show the fans my math, for consistency of setting, for the organization.

As a courtesy, for readers, and fans living in a real-world full of confusion and anxiety, I wanted to convey action, an adventure story, consistency, reliability.

Even the Star Trek and Star Wars TIMELINES are not consistent.

"That makes me crazy."  Yeah, I said it.

I am doing this mapping and documentation (The same way I write computer code).

 Painstakingly carefully, so that one day, decades from now, some literary researcher of the backstory, perhaps a fan, perhaps a writer, can pull up a map, and say, Yes, in X Year, this planet was thus and so, in the Nisa Jax Universe, at this location, in this subsector, spelled this way.

Canon, Defined.

I could go on, but it's break time, for now.

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Mission Statement: "Kars Vandor controls the Trade of Half-a-Hundred-Worlds"




[Sample Draft Map of a few star system locations in the Varala Drift.]

When I started out with the "TransStellar Saga" series concept, I had this core idea:

A female scout who has pre-cognitive flashes. She lives in the far future of the 55th century. Her Name is Nisa Jax.  That is all I knew when I started writing about her during the "North American Novel Writing Month" (NaNoWriMo), 2014.

Each year, thousands of would-be novelists compete against themselves and procrastination to finish at least a Novella of a minimum of 50,000 words over the month of November.  For those without experience, it is quite a challenge.

I wrote about this character of the Far Future.

She grows up on the world of New Asia, a world that is stormy, it has a large moon.  Huge tides. It rains a lot.

She is sent for some religious training to a remote convent, on a desert world, called Anchoret.
Once she arrives, she chafes against the regimented harsh discipline and craves her freedom.

That was clear.

She is smart, a genius intellect. She reads technical manuals for fun, but her father is wealthy. She has a problem with arrogance and stubbornness.

I looked for images of characters, to get inspiration.

I found an artist on DeviantArt.com, Marin Atanasoski, that could do the style I wanted. Nisa came to life.  The artist worked for many days, to my specifications.  The image he executed for me, was exactly 100% perfect.

He finally ended up with this graphic, which sustained me for years as "The Space Opera Novel I want to write. 'Sunrise, on a Distant Moon' ".


Nisa Jax, by Marin Atanasoski https://www.deviantart.com/spirit815


My initial concept was this:

Nisa's father is Kars Vandor, a hard-core tough-as-granite business shipping magnate, who started his career as a neophyte pilot hauling garbage to reclaim sites, and water to desert worlds.

Later, he worked for the Orion Republic as a troubleshooter, the go-to-guy when you need something to happen off the books, for a fee.

 Over his lifetime, he makes the right decisions and gets lucky exploring and exploiting the vast resources of Known Space.  This phrase kept going through my process: "He controls the trade of half-a-hundred worlds."

* * *

When I mapped the Varala Drift subsector, I wanted an area that could encompass 50 worlds.

I looked at multiple tools that could do a decent "how far apart are the stars for this setting?" map quickly, and I came upon the site of Alex Schroeder's Traveller Subsector Mapper.
https://campaignwiki.org/svg-map

I requested what he wanted for rights or attribution via email, and he graciously permitted me to use his site's mapping functions, at no charge, for whatever purpose I wished.  I credit his help here.

I worked many days with his mapper site, using multiple science-fiction game books, moving main worlds from hex to hex, adjusting systems military bases, geophysical statistics, populations, trade routes, starport classifications, and technological progress levels, until I came up with something that seemed like astrography, and plausible as a setting at the edge of the frontier of Known Space in the far future. 

But it all became something I could believe in.

A setting I could understand and imagine. Outstanding art helped.

Saturday, May 11, 2019

Taking the day off.

Went to Chom Thong, a sizeable Market town, near the highest mountain in Thailand.

Rested up, thinking a lot about the setting of the Aurin Cluster Sector.

But also concerned about the actual world, the conflicting politics of Authoritarian leadership, the uncertain future of America.

Terra is one world, a lengthy history, millions of years of life, barely thousands of years of civilization.

But being here now, at the present moment, that is my Zen training.

I watched a cat, all muscle, stalk a family of chickens for a good 30 minutes. He did not catch any of them.


Wednesday, May 8, 2019

News Item - The birth of TransStellar, LLC

Initial probes of the Aurin Cluster Sector by the Esper Scouts of the Orion Republic verified that there were numerous worlds suitable for possible colonization.  The corporation liquidated assets. It prepared colonization and mining ships.
The first Assessment Teams and Ore Scouts set out on their journey to develop the Varala Drift Subsector.

Saturday, May 4, 2019

The moving is done, tomorrow I set up my work room

I am back for an update.

I’m looking forward to printing out the Sector and Subsector maps of the Aurin Cluster, but yet struggling with the data.

The move took the energy out of me. I carried the furniture myself.  Many shelves, and the bed.

It is a much neater home.

Much more easy experience here, but the Thailand hot weather has been brutal at 40-43 degrees centigrade in the afternoons every day.

Sipping cold tea, water, and orange juice- I haven’t been hungry at all.

Daily I brush the cat with ice cubes in the afternoon’s hot weather to support her cooling.

Water will absorb 4 times the heat that air will.

So, I am utilizing the law of thermodynamics on a feline. 

She doesnt understand it, except that it refreshes her by evaporation.

 She loves it.


Wednesday, May 1, 2019

The Journal of a Space Opera Author

Hello, Space Opera fans!

Welcome to my mind.  Take a chair.

Do you love Coffee?  Coffee powers the engine of my imagination.


I’m James H. Jenkins, Space Opera Author.  This is The Aurin Cluster (my Online Journal).

This Journal will track the evolution of the novels I write.

A regular post will share art when ready for the fans.  I will likewise write teasers for forthcoming works, and secondary side stories that do not fit the framework of an 80,000-word novel.

Once a week, I will record my plans, apprehensions, and ideas for these Adventures set in the Far Future of the 55th Century.

Sometimes, I will create personal musings, disclosing my thoughts for the week.

My Journal will be my weekly review of progress.  A pool of solace, creativity, and reflection.

I encourage would-be novelists of Space Opera to collect up their pen, laptop, or workstation.
Ignite the thrusters of your own vast imagination. 
Reach for crafting a well-told space adventure, flying into the stratosphere, on a jet of smoke and flame, going skyward, without dread or doubt.

It takes the right stuff to dare, to achieve. To press on, without cease, until splashdown. 


I will engage in active interaction with my fans, as I release each tale.
 Your reactions are crucial to my improvement and evolution as an Author.  I want to be that, with the leading capital “A“. 
Let me know by post, what you found thrilling, or problematic.  
I will take it under consideration as I move forward.

With each Journal entry here, I will:

- Track what I learned, created, or accomplished this week.

- My intentions for the imminent future.

- Identify problems with the Series or development that I need to correct.

- My feelings about the Series to this point.

That’s it, for now.  Thanks for stopping to visit.

But before you go, meet my Editor-in-Fur, “Dirty Cat.”

A female Thai Khao Manee, that I rescued as a kitten, found mud-encrusted, starving, wandering the rain-flooded streets of Chiang Mai, Thailand three years ago during the rainy season.