The easiest solution if you want to stick to the canon is to say: “This is the way this universe is” and go on from there.

If you want go by Dr. Pournelle’s route, it allows for occasional longer jumps but also makes for more effective system defense: If you can maintain fleets at the jump points into a system, you can ambush ships coming through because they have to come through more or less one at a time, and the jump confuses both people and computers. If you aren’t concerned with going through the point yourself, you can mine it, like the Federation did at the Deep Space Nine wormhole to cut off the Dominion.

Pournelle’s universe requires different drives for jumping and for travel in normal space, sort of like…Traveller, which came out a few years after Pournelle’s stories began to be published. But stutterwarp might allow jumps as a free bonus; it is functionally the same as the “Ion Engines” used in the “Starfire” series of games and novels.

While most of the HIPX parallax data is taken from the New Reduction, some of the multiple star system parallaxes were revealed to be inaccurate – in these cases, the star system’s parallax was replaced by data from the Original Hipparcos dataset.

And how did you combine the multiples?

Thanks

I’m actually working on figuring out some new Arms that only use links that are shorter than 7.7 ly, and so far there are a lot of stars that can be reached like that – I’ve got many Arms going out in pretty much every direction. Most of those Arms end around 60 ly from Sol because the dimmer stars that can be used to connect them haven’t been discovered yet, but it goes to show that there are still plenty of systems that are accessible to normal stutterwarp (and also, to answer your other question, that the routing is still interesting at 7.7 ly).

If SW didn’t stick at 7.7 and 11.5, can you make better sense of the routing? That is to say, if you selected a different ‘magic number’ for the SW distance, will that remedy some of the connectivity issues without rendering other routes senseless?

That may well explain the imaginary systems.

What would be interesting would be to create an updated map that tried to not take liberties with known star data (or likely to be discovered) and that salvaged as much of the Colonial Atlas material as possible. One would have to accept some changes, but creating something sensible that could work using actual refined distances would be pretty wonderful.

I’m guessing you used Astrosynthesis for some of the above graphics. Do you have a sector file that you used during the production that you’d care to share?

Nice work, BTW. Have bookmarked this site!