Huh?

Background

• Sectors

  The galaxy is divided into 25 sectors, each of equal area, as seen from above the galactic plane. There is sector 0, the hub, sectors 1-8 which form a middle ring around the galaxy, and sectors 9-24 which form the outter ring of sectors around the galaxy. They are arranged by the right-hand rule (counter-clockwise), with the 0 degrees mark pointing horizontally to the right.

• Subsectors and Levels

  Each of the galactic sectors is divided into sixteen subsectors (from 1 to 16), and four heights (top, upper middle, lower middle, bottom). This divides up each sector into 64 volumes. The subsectors are not all of equal areas, however. That makes things way too complicated.

• Quadrants

  Each subsector has four quadrants to it. For a sense of scale, there's probably going to be less than ten planet-bearing star systems per quadrant.

• Subquads

  Each quadrant has eight subquads, just because.

• Coordinate system

  I've decided that a realistic coordinate system to apply to the galaxy is a cylindrical one, with the coordinates
  • theta being the angular distance around the center of the galaxy,(think degrees)

  • radius being the distance from the center of the galaxy, and

  • height being the distance from the plane of the middle of the galaxy.

  I've been thinking that the best way to refer to these has been in (resectively) fractional-pi radians (read "13-64th pi radians"), parsecs and parsecs. Parsecs are more commonly used by astronomers, and are easily converted to lightyears (3.11 ly is about a Parsec).

  Updated Coord Sys Here

  Foreground

  • Galaxy viewing program

    Some capabilities for the galaxy viewing program:
    • zooming, either smooth or by fixed steps
    • rotation, about the center of the zoom spot
    • sorting, of inhabited systems vs uninhabited
    • alternate output, possibly like output to a gif file or something? Least important.

    I was thinking that as every star was pointed to, or selected, a minimal amount of data could be displayed for that system. That data would be kept in the Galaxy Database (noted below).

  • Database for Galaxy viewer

    The galaxy database file doesn't have to be fancy, just functional. It would contain
    1. the number of entries,
    2. the entries themselves.

    There would be two types of entries.

    • Dummy entry. This would be for noteworthy stars that don't have planets. It's data:
      • Name
      • "dummy"
      • theta
      • radius
      • height
      • temp
      • diameter
      • number of suns

    • Fatty Entry It would contain this info:
      • Name
      • nation
      • theta
      • radius
      • height
      • number of planets
      • system population
      • planets_list:
        • name_1
        • ...
        • name_x
      • capital planet (index into planets_list)

    I thinks that's plenty of info for that. More intense info will be kept in the solar-system database and the planets-database. I'm not about to write that stuff up right now, but soon.

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  Jed