Maps of the Three Galaxies

[slade the sniper]

Query: Are there any maps of the Three Galaxies...or any of the galaxies period? I know there is that sad little map of the Thunderhead galaxy, so I guess I should say, are there any other maps? I kinda want to see what I can do with the Three Galaxies and Macross...

-STS

[Warshield73]

That "sad little map" is the best one in all of the books. If you google it you can probably find something fan created but really there isn't much.

DB 12 page 8 has an even sadder little map (sorry Carl) that just shows the three galaxies and the distances between them but no reference for CCW, TGE or any of that. Page 70 has a smaller version of that map with the relative position of Phase World but that is all I know of.

[slade the sniper]

that is...weird. Does Palladium have a hatred of maps, or do I just love them too much? I guess I just grew too dependent upon them in other games...

Fan made map search beginning...

-STS

[Warshield73]

:( that is...weird. Does Palladium have a hatred of maps, or do I just love them too much? I guess I just grew too dependent upon them in other games...

Fan made map search beginning...

-STS

No. Well I mean PB never had great maps but you always get good ones in Rifts books. The Problem is that we have 7 books from 4 authors and there hasn't really been any direction. It is also hard to map a galaxy and even harder to map three. Plus I think writers are hesitant to do a full map because once you map something its set which can limit new things in future books.

[Anthanatos]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-mUxT ... sp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qtn-z9 ... sp=sharing

Posted this last year, my homebrew map of the Anvil Galaxy.

[Warshield73]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-mUxT ... sp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qtn-z9 ... sp=sharing

Posted this last year, my homebrew map of the Anvil Galaxy.

All I get is that it doesn't exist.

[Anthanatos]

Here are current links to my Anvil Galaxy map.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-mUxT ... sp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OD5xaN ... sp=sharing

Let me know if those files don't work.

[Warshield73]

Here are current links to my Anvil Galaxy map.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-mUxT ... sp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OD5xaN ... sp=sharing

Let me know if those files don't work.

Interesting stuff. I will give it a look later but I like your sector by sector

[DhAkael]

B.T.W.; I mapped all 3 Galaxies ages ago into a hex-grid. The scale / distances are... umm... large but hey, at least the systems are laid out in a relatively logical dispersion.
Slade teh Sinper snagged them off me a week or so ago.

[eliakon]

The problem with a galactic map is that it is basically pointless.
Space is big. No, bigger than that.
Which means that you can't have silly stuff like 'patrolled borders' that run through half a galaxy. And the population totals in the book aren't even jokes. The stated size of the militaries of forces that supposedly control and patrol large chunks of a galaxy like the CCS and the UWW and TGE are so small that they their entire fleet strength is woefully insufficient to patrol single sector...

Visual time.
Take a full sized dump truck.
Fill it with sand.
Dump that sand in a pile.
Repeat this ~400 or so times.
Put that pile into a circular disk shape
Now... make a map of every grain of sand.

EDIT: I have been informed that a billion grains of sand is only a 1.5 metric ton cube 1 meter on each side... so you simply need ~400 of those (so 600 metric tons of sand to make a 400 cubic meter model) not full dump trucks.

THAT is what a galactic map looks like.
And that is why I say "scope and scale" to people that try to talk about galactic scale stuff

[Warshield73]

The problem with a galactic map is that it is basically pointless.
Space is big. No, bigger than that.
Which means that you can't have silly stuff like 'patrolled borders' that run through half a galaxy. And the population totals in the book aren't even jokes. The stated size of the militaries of forces that supposedly control and patrol large chunks of a galaxy like the CCS and the UWW and TGE are so small that they their entire fleet strength is woefully insufficient to patrol single sector...

Visual time.
Take a full sized dump truck.
Fill it with sand.
Dump that sand in a pile.
Repeat this ~400 or so times.
Put that pile into a circular disk shape
Now... make a map of every grain of sand.

EDIT: I have been informed that a billion grains of sand is only a 1.5 metric ton cube 1 meter on each side... so you simply need ~400 of those (so 600 metric tons of sand to make a 400 cubic meter model) not full dump trucks.

THAT is what a galactic map looks like.
And that is why I say "scope and scale" to people that try to talk about galactic scale stuff

If you were trying to map the entire three galaxies this would be true but if you just create a large scale map to show the scale, relative position and borders can be extremely helpful.

Trying to map every single star is certainly impossible but it is also unnecessary. The closest I ever came was I created a map that was probably 300 by 800 LY around the planet of Good Hope for a FWC game. By having its location on a larger map I always knew how far away they were from CCW territory, Kreeghor homeworld, Phase World, etc. It would be cool to simply have a large map of the 3G with a grid so that known worlds could be placed on it.

[eliakon]

The problem with a galactic map is that it is basically pointless.
Space is big. No, bigger than that.
Which means that you can't have silly stuff like 'patrolled borders' that run through half a galaxy. And the population totals in the book aren't even jokes. The stated size of the militaries of forces that supposedly control and patrol large chunks of a galaxy like the CCS and the UWW and TGE are so small that they their entire fleet strength is woefully insufficient to patrol single sector...

Visual time.
Take a full sized dump truck.
Fill it with sand.
Dump that sand in a pile.
Repeat this ~400 or so times.
Put that pile into a circular disk shape
Now... make a map of every grain of sand.

EDIT: I have been informed that a billion grains of sand is only a 1.5 metric ton cube 1 meter on each side... so you simply need ~400 of those (so 600 metric tons of sand to make a 400 cubic meter model) not full dump trucks.

THAT is what a galactic map looks like.
And that is why I say "scope and scale" to people that try to talk about galactic scale stuff

If you were trying to map the entire three galaxies this would be true but if you just create a large scale map to show the scale, relative position and borders can be extremely helpful.

Trying to map every single star is certainly impossible but it is also unnecessary. The closest I ever came was I created a map that was probably 300 by 800 LY around the planet of Good Hope for a FWC game. By having its location on a larger map I always knew how far away they were from CCW territory, Kreeghor homeworld, Phase World, etc. It would be cool to simply have a large map of the 3G with a grid so that known worlds could be placed on it.

My point is that things like 'borders' are pretty pointless unless your making a 3D map. Ignoring the fact that on the scale of a galaxy it is pretty impossible to have a border, it isn't going to be a straight line down the entire galactic plane. They are THICK, there will be pockets here and there, and things will intrude into other territory. It simply isn't absurd to think otherwise.

Now a map with lines pointing to "here is key point X" are somewhat more useful. But only slightly unless someone is willing to sit down and first make a co-ordinate system for the galaxy, with useful distances, and then assign locations.
As it is honestly I find it more useful to NOT have a map... since it lets me avoid the problem of authors who have no concept of scope or scale who put things so far apart that trips between locations takes weeks or months each way.

[glitterboy2098]

to give an idea of the sheer scope of the issue..
[This] is a map of the Star Trek setting, from their official Star Charts product. aside from Voyager, every single Star Trek Show and film has for the bulk of their runtime, taken place within the bounds of that map. every dot is a system that has been mentioned somewhere within an episode or film, whether in dialog or on a screen somewhere. with only a handful of outliers in more remote spots, most of which can be seen within the inset map that shows the bordering space.

if you look at the scale, each grid square on that map (representing a single sector in the setting) is 20 light years across. the whole map? only 340 light years across and 220 high. that inset map showing the bordering areas? the political borders shown run roughly 1360 ly x 1320 ly. but it is not detailed.

the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across.
to map out Trek's milky way in detail you would have to repeat that map's process 105,080 times.
any map of three galaxies, each at least as large as the milky way, in such detail would require three times the work.

but you say, we could use much less detail!

the problem there is that unless the map is highly detailed, it is useless. and if it is highly detailed, it is expensive and hurts gmaeplay. putting points on a map fixes the positions of the worlds in question. which means you have to make the maps detailed at least for the worlds we have details about in the books. but that opens up the problem that you now can measure the distance, and that means the travel time is similarly fixed.

to put it into context. the fastest trek ships can do about half a light year per hour. and then only for short bursts. most barely break a light year a day. for trek ships, crossing those 340 light years represents nearly a years travel time. the fastest three galaxies ship which can do 6 lightyears per hour, would still take 56.6 hours.. 2.36 days.

in the three galaxies, some worlds, if mapped out in details, would end up tens of thousands of light years away from each other. ten thousand light years would take 69.4 days for the fastest three galaxies ships. suddenly it gets a little hard to keep the drama going when it takes two and a half months to rush somewhere.
and since we don't have the thousands of worlds the trek map does, we'd end up with a lot of the three galaxies having one named system.. and nothing else for thousands of light years. which makes half the advantage of having lists of named systems in the books moot. if a GM has to basically invent everything anyway, why bother with listing systems for them to use?


so the TL:DR version.. trying map out the three galaxies would be a huge amount of work, and even if you cut every corner possible, all it does is make it harder to write good stories.

which is the same reason trek avoided putting out any official map product for so long, and why trek's writers always ignored all the ones that had been made before the star charts book (usually seen in background images in the show), and why even after the star charts book the writers basically ignored the distances given in favor of speed of plot.

[DhAkael]

Long version =physics, geometry, math, boring [censored].
TL:DR = You stupid why you want map?
Seriously, no one CARES about scale, scope or the "reality".
They don't.
At all.
They want pretty pictures with dots saying YOU ARE HERE.
That is it.
STOP ALWAYS MAKING IT ABOUT YOU!

[Warshield73]

My point is that things like 'borders' are pretty pointless unless your making a 3D map. Ignoring the fact that on the scale of a galaxy it is pretty impossible to have a border, it isn't going to be a straight line down the entire galactic plane. They are THICK, there will be pockets here and there, and things will intrude into other territory. It simply isn't absurd to think otherwise.

Since almost every sci-fi setting from Honor Harrington at the hard end to Star Trek in the middle to Star Wars at the fantasy end all do this and have borders between polities and regions I don't see why Phase World can't.

DB 2: Phase World, pg. 50 even says that the "The "political" geography of the galaxy bears a funny resemblance to the political map of a planet, due to the fact that most inhabited planets occur on the "surface" of the galaxies"

As for pockets or overlap in areas those can be noted but given how space travel works, simple FTL in normal space, and the Cold War-ish environment there will be clearly delineated borders in interstellar space for military reasons.

Now a map with lines pointing to "here is key point X" are somewhat more useful. But only slightly unless someone is willing to sit down and first make a co-ordinate system for the galaxy, with useful distances, and then assign locations.

No it doesn't. Plenty of other settings have maps with relative locations and that is all Phase World really needs.

As it is honestly I find it more useful to NOT have a map... since it lets me avoid the problem of authors who have no concept of scope or scale who put things so far apart that trips between locations takes weeks or months each way.

As I said earlier I think this is the reason we don't have a map for the 3Gs. No one writer wants to hem in everyone else. Also, IMHO, this is why Phase World is such a mess. There is no guiding voice for this setting, each author just does what he/she wants. Now I disagree with this but I do understand it.

I don't see why an author including relative location information would be a problem for you. If they have something you don't like just ignore it. There is entire Phase World book that I basically ignore so not sure why that is a problem. Also, if an author has two locations weeks apart it might be for a story reason.

to give an idea of the sheer scope of the issue..
[This] is a map of the Star Trek setting, from their official Star Charts product. aside from Voyager, every single Star Trek Show and film has for the bulk of their runtime, taken place within the bounds of that map. every dot is a system that has been mentioned somewhere within an episode or film, whether in dialog or on a screen somewhere. with only a handful of outliers in more remote spots, most of which can be seen within the inset map that shows the bordering space.

if you look at the scale, each grid square on that map (representing a single sector in the setting) is 20 light years across. the whole map? only 340 light years across and 220 high. that inset map showing the bordering areas? the political borders shown run roughly 1360 ly x 1320 ly. but it is not detailed.

First I'm not trying to be pain here but you have forgotten what is the best of all the Star Trek shows, with TOS being its only competition, Deep Space Nine where a solid 1/5 to 1/3 of its episodes taking place in the Gamma quadrant. But, aside from that your statement holds. Also just to point out that there are several contradictions in the various series that contradict what is on the map.

the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across.
to map out Trek's milky way in detail you would have to repeat that map's process 105,080 times.
any map of three galaxies, each at least as large as the milky way, in such detail would require three times the work.

Not only is each of the three galaxies individually far smaller than the Milky Way the entire volume of the 3G is barely as much as the Milky Way on it's own.

In the Consortium of Civilized Worlds (CCW), the Three Galaxies are divided into sectors. Each sector is a square, two dimensional area 500 by 500 light years. Two-dimensional representations are practical because 85% of all habitable worlds in the Three Galaxies can be found in the Galactic Biosphere, a region about 10 light years thick, located at the edges and comers of the galaxies

This means that a map could simply break down a map into sectors and allows a simple system to represent Z axis. I used a simple system of a letter with + or - symbol to show in the biosphere above or below it.

but you say, we could use much less detail!

YES! I can! In fact, I have!

the problem there is that unless the map is highly detailed, it is useless. and if it is highly detailed, it is expensive and hurts gmaeplay. putting points on a map fixes the positions of the worlds in question. which means you have to make the maps detailed at least for the worlds we have details about in the books. but that opens up the problem that you now can measure the distance, and that means the travel time is similarly fixed.

No, it is not useless and I don't have to make it detailed. Saying so doesn't make it so. Basic relative location brings consistency to a game and only hurts a GM that is disorganized or doesn't like to plan. Even then it doesn't hurt as you can simply ignore it.

Rifts Earth has maps. Most are simple showing basic location. This is a fixed distance and travel times. I haven't noticed it being a problem there.

to put it into context. the fastest trek ships can do about half a light year per hour. and then only for short bursts. most barely break a light year a day. for trek ships, crossing those 340 light years represents nearly a years travel time. the fastest three galaxies ship which can do 6 lightyears per hour, would still take 56.6 hours.. 2.36 days.

in the three galaxies, some worlds, if mapped out in details, would end up tens of thousands of light years away from each other. ten thousand light years would take 69.4 days for the fastest three galaxies ships. suddenly it gets a little hard to keep the drama going when it takes two and a half months to rush somewhere.

Ummm, that is like part of the setting.

In some ways, this situation is comparable to sea travel during Earth's pre-industrial days, when a trip could take months or years, and was not something people did unless they had a good reason.

Now the great thing about Rifts is that you can use short cuts. Maybe making the trip quickly requires a secret route to a stable rift that gets you close to the place or to use the phase gates on Phase World. You could also think in terms of your plot, if the bad guys are doing something on worlds that are months apart maybe they have a secret short cut. Also, this "problem" already exists. Every planet described in the book has two parts of it's location - political (CCW, TGE, UWW, etc.) and galaxy. If you want to use a planet in the Anvil and a planet in the Corkscrew for your adventure you already have to work out how to keep the drama going.

You already have this problem on Rifts Earth. For your average PCs it can take weeks or months to travel from continent to continent. Should maps be banned from every world book?

There are also simple cheat. To use your Trek example there's the Borg Transwarp conduits, that spore drive (?) from discovery, etc. The writers wanted to unite UPF space to the Dominion in the gamma quadrant so they put a wormhole.

and since we don't have the thousands of worlds the trek map does, we'd end up with a lot of the three galaxies having one named system.. and nothing else for thousands of light years. which makes half the advantage of having lists of named systems in the books moot. if a GM has to basically invent everything anyway, why bother with listing systems for them to use?

Being brutally honest here, I have no idea what your point is. In all of the books put together there are only a few dozen named systems. The information for each system, with the exception of DB 6, is minimal with largely just a short blurb for one planet. You already have to create massive numbers of systems and planets unless you dump all of the created systems into the same sector.

Every space game I have ever played, including games like Star Wars or Stars Without Numbers, has large empty spaces with a small number of created systems. Maps don't really have an impact on this.

so the TL:DR version.. trying map out the three galaxies would be a huge amount of work, and even if you cut every corner possible, all it does is make it harder to write good stories.

No it wouldn't. I created my map on a large graph paper in a morning, listing relative location of each system in the first 2 books. I added systems from Anvil and Three Galaxies in about 2 hours. Now my group had stopped playing before Dimensional Outbreak, Fleets and Thundercloud but those wouldn't take more than a few hours to add.

Now my sector maps took longer but I only created 4 of those over the decade I ran this game so not a big deal.

As for getting in the way of good stories why? Does having a description of the CCW and TGE get in the way of the story. What if I want them to be friends fighting the great Flooper invasion (We all know it's coming)? Haven't you limited the story by describing them as enemies? If not why is that different then relative locations of systems.

For that matter why can't my combat borg be a spell caster? All that does it make it difficult to write good stories.

which is the same reason trek avoided putting out any official map product for so long, and why trek's writers always ignored all the ones that had been made before the star charts book (usually seen in background images in the show), and why even after the star charts book the writers basically ignored the distances given in favor of speed of plot.

Trek also ignores most of its own canon which is why the 15 or so years of Trek has been, IMHO, total garbage. Once Deep Space Nine ended Trek just became a bit of a joke with 3 of the last 4 films being unwatchable.

The Expanse is some of the best science fiction I have ever read or seen on TV and not only do they write in things like generating gravity but they use actually maps of how the solar system will look at the time. David Weber has very specific physics and space travel rules for his universe (as well as a map) and those stories are some of the best out there.

Ignoring franchise canon, including established locations and distances, aren't great storytelling its lazy. It says "I have a story to tell and that story will be more successful if I jam it into this IP but I have no interest in learning anything about this IP before I do it".

Two final things: 1-Ignoring distances and such in a TV show is very different then ignoring it in a game. If I am your player and a trip takes 6 hours one game and then a few months later that same trip take me a month I'll be pissed because I like consistency. 2-You also prove my point. If the map existed and it doesn't fit your story and you don't want to take the time to work around it, you can ignore it.

[eliakon]

Long version =physics, geometry, math, boring [censored].
TL:DR = You stupid why you want map?
Seriously, no one CARES about scale, scope or the "reality".
They don't.
At all.
They want pretty pictures with dots saying YOU ARE HERE.
That is it.
STOP ALWAYS MAKING IT ABOUT YOU!

I am so glad to see you are willing to admit that you shouldn't make this about you

And if all people want is a pretty picture that will be totally ignored anyway... then that is a lot of wasted effort for a useless object.

[eliakon]

So many problems with this I almost don't know where to start.

My point is that things like 'borders' are pretty pointless unless your making a 3D map. Ignoring the fact that on the scale of a galaxy it is pretty impossible to have a border, it isn't going to be a straight line down the entire galactic plane. They are THICK, there will be pockets here and there, and things will intrude into other territory. It simply isn't absurd to think otherwise.

Since almost every sci-fi setting from Honor Harrington at the hard end to Star Trek in the middle to Star Wars at the fantasy end all do this and have borders between polities and regions I don't see why Phase World can't.

Those settings are also vastly smaller, and don't try to pretend that those borders are rigid or patrolled.
Again scope and scale. A setting that is a thousands if not millions of times smaller is going to have much smaller area to map.

DB 2: Phase World, pg. 50 even says that the "The "political" geography of the galaxy bears a funny resemblance to the political map of a planet, due to the fact that most inhabited planets occur on the "surface" of the galaxies"

Which it then disregards in latter books...

As for pockets or overlap in areas those can be noted but given how space travel works, simple FTL in normal space, and the Cold War-ish environment there will be clearly delineated borders in interstellar space for military reasons.

And as I said again those borders are rather absurd.

Now a map with lines pointing to "here is key point X" are somewhat more useful. But only slightly unless someone is willing to sit down and first make a co-ordinate system for the galaxy, with useful distances, and then assign locations.

No it doesn't. Plenty of other settings have maps with relative locations and that is all Phase World really needs.

Again, comparing other smaller settings to the 3Gs is at best disingenuous.
How many other settings have full multi-galaxy maps?

As it is honestly I find it more useful to NOT have a map... since it lets me avoid the problem of authors who have no concept of scope or scale who put things so far apart that trips between locations takes weeks or months each way.

As I said earlier I think this is the reason we don't have a map for the 3Gs. No one writer wants to hem in everyone else. Also, IMHO, this is why Phase World is such a mess. There is no guiding voice for this setting, each author just does what he/she wants. Now I disagree with this but I do understand it.

And this is just another example of this. A new "but I want THIS to be the way it is" idea that ignores everything before and tries to lock in everyone after... just like the stuff you claim to not like.

I don't see why an author including relative location information would be a problem for you. If they have something you don't like just ignore it. There is entire Phase World book that I basically ignore so not sure why that is a problem. Also, if an author has two locations weeks apart it might be for a story reason.

A book that is written with the INTENT to be ingnored is a vanity project that has less than no use. Not only is it pointless it drains resources from useful material.

An author can put specific items weeks apart for a specific story... but unless you are trying to claim that you are stepping in to become the 'voice of the phase world line' then you are not the one writing all the stories and thus deciding travel times seems like it is something best left to the individual GMs.

to give an idea of the sheer scope of the issue..
[This] is a map of the Star Trek setting, from their official Star Charts product. aside from Voyager, every single Star Trek Show and film has for the bulk of their runtime, taken place within the bounds of that map. every dot is a system that has been mentioned somewhere within an episode or film, whether in dialog or on a screen somewhere. with only a handful of outliers in more remote spots, most of which can be seen within the inset map that shows the bordering space.

if you look at the scale, each grid square on that map (representing a single sector in the setting) is 20 light years across. the whole map? only 340 light years across and 220 high. that inset map showing the bordering areas? the political borders shown run roughly 1360 ly x 1320 ly. but it is not detailed.

First I'm not trying to be pain here but you have forgotten what is the best of all the Star Trek shows, with TOS being its only competition, Deep Space Nine where a solid 1/5 to 1/3 of its episodes taking place in the Gamma quadrant. But, aside from that your statement holds. Also just to point out that there are several contradictions in the various series that contradict what is on the map.

the Gamma quadrant potion is in again a couple more sectors. It literally adds nothing to your argument.

the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across.
to map out Trek's milky way in detail you would have to repeat that map's process 105,080 times.
any map of three galaxies, each at least as large as the milky way, in such detail would require three times the work.

Not only is each of the three galaxies individually far smaller than the Milky Way the entire volume of the 3G is barely as much as the Milky Way on it's own.

source?

In the Consortium of Civilized Worlds (CCW), the Three Galaxies are divided into sectors. Each sector is a square, two dimensional area 500 by 500 light years. Two-dimensional representations are practical because 85% of all habitable worlds in the Three Galaxies can be found in the Galactic Biosphere, a region about 10 light years thick, located at the edges and comers of the galaxies

This means that a map could simply break down a map into sectors and allows a simple system to represent Z axis. I used a simple system of a letter with + or - symbol to show in the biosphere above or below it.

cool! so if we ignore 15% of the worlds then we can *almost* make this project work...

but you say, we could use much less detail!

YES! I can! In fact, I have!

Yeah, you want so little detail that the map is pointless for anything other than locking in players to your particular view of the setting and having the travel times that you feel are best.
It offers literally no benefit to the game at the detail level you propose... just removes flexibility.

the problem there is that unless the map is highly detailed, it is useless. and if it is highly detailed, it is expensive and hurts gmaeplay. putting points on a map fixes the positions of the worlds in question. which means you have to make the maps detailed at least for the worlds we have details about in the books. but that opens up the problem that you now can measure the distance, and that means the travel time is similarly fixed.

No, it is not useless and I don't have to make it detailed. Saying so doesn't make it so. Basic relative location brings consistency to a game and only hurts a GM that is disorganized or doesn't like to plan. Even then it doesn't hurt as you can simply ignore it.

I love how you insult everyone who doesn't adore your map by claiming they are disorganized and don't like to plan. Any other ad hominem attacks you want to get out of the way?
Basic relative location will simply lock in the game to one person's view on how the story should be told and make anyone else 'wrong'
As for GMs organization or planning? When I run games I plan out my star maps, in advance, for that game… though I guess that actually doing work might be do much 'planning and organization' for you.

Rifts Earth has maps. Most are simple showing basic location. This is a fixed distance and travel times. I haven't noticed it being a problem there.

Rifts Earth is vastly smaller to start with. And as part of the setting it claims that things exist in a fixed location that is canonical. Arzno is by the Grand Canyon not just "random city #13, put where you need it"... though there ARE a number of those too.

to put it into context. the fastest trek ships can do about half a light year per hour. and then only for short bursts. most barely break a light year a day. for trek ships, crossing those 340 light years represents nearly a years travel time. the fastest three galaxies ship which can do 6 lightyears per hour, would still take 56.6 hours.. 2.36 days.

in the three galaxies, some worlds, if mapped out in details, would end up tens of thousands of light years away from each other. ten thousand light years would take 69.4 days for the fastest three galaxies ships. suddenly it gets a little hard to keep the drama going when it takes two and a half months to rush somewhere.

Ummm, that is like part of the setting.

Yes, but instead of some random person saying "I have now decided that drama is not good and we will now make mandatory wait times because my story telling is better than yours" we can use the current "I can put the star systems where they work best for each game"

In some ways, this situation is comparable to sea travel during Earth's pre-industrial days, when a trip could take months or years, and was not something people did unless they had a good reason.

If you like running games that take decades of time that's good for you. Not everyone wants to spend years of down time every time they move between worlds in a game and don't feel that being locked into doing so because some one else thinks that is cool is a good plan.

Now the great thing about Rifts is that you can use short cuts. Maybe making the trip quickly requires a secret route to a stable rift that gets you close to the place or to use the phase gates on Phase World. You could also think in terms of your plot, if the bad guys are doing something on worlds that are months apart maybe they have a secret short cut. Also, this "problem" already exists. Every planet described in the book has two parts of it's location - political (CCW, TGE, UWW, etc.) and galaxy. If you want to use a planet in the Anvil and a planet in the Corkscrew for your adventure you already have to work out how to keep the drama going.

If your solution involves "ignore the setting and make plot holes that the group can drive through" then your not solving anything.
Seriously, did you read your post? You are saying that you want to make a massive game ending problem... but that your 'solution' is to IGNORE THE VERY PROBLEM YOU ARE MAKING AND INSTEAD USE THE CURRENT STATUS QUO.

You already have this problem on Rifts Earth. For your average PCs it can take weeks or months to travel from continent to continent.
Should maps be banned from every world book?

1) unless you walking then your flat out wrong. PCs can, and routinely do, travel the world in days. Funny that...it is almost as if 500mph aircraft are like normal starting vehicles for most classes
So no, maps of a planet itself shouldn't be banned. You undermine your own argument if your best defense is strawmen like "a specific world that is designed to be detailed should be treated the same as a generic space game"

There are also simple cheat. To use your Trek example there's the Borg Transwarp conduits, that spore drive (?) from discovery, etc. The writers wanted to unite UPF space to the Dominion in the gamma quadrant so they put a wormhole.

Again... bringing stuff from other settings or telling the GM "We broke the game so badly that we expect you to just make up handwaves to fix it back into playable shape" demonstrates just how bad the idea is.

and since we don't have the thousands of worlds the trek map does, we'd end up with a lot of the three galaxies having one named system.. and nothing else for thousands of light years. which makes half the advantage of having lists of named systems in the books moot. if a GM has to basically invent everything anyway, why bother with listing systems for them to use?

Being brutally honest here, I have no idea what your point is. In all of the books put together there are only a few dozen named systems. The information for each system, with the exception of DB 6, is minimal with largely just a short blurb for one planet. You already have to create massive numbers of systems and planets unless you dump all of the created systems into the same sector.

The point is just that.
There aren't enough canonical systems to make a map important. Any competent GM can easily handle placing every listed world for any particular game with out the slightest problem.
Now if you had something like Star Trek, or Traveller with thousands of published worlds, all of which have canonical material such as "border world" or "trade route x" or the like... then yeah, a map is important. A couple dozen generic star systems which are pinned down to 'this third of that galaxy' or 'this quarter of this other galaxy here'? not so much.

Every space game I have ever played, including games like Star Wars or Stars Without Numbers, has large empty spaces with a small number of created systems. Maps don't really have an impact on this.

Maps have a HUGE impact on this.
You are playing in settings with thousands of published worlds, where they DO have specific settings and the locations of those worlds matter to the setting. In such a setting then a map is useful... and the empty spaces are just 'the places we haven't written yet'
Palladium on the other hand, at its current publishing rate, take a couple centuries to get as many worlds as Star Wars or Traveller…

so the TL:DR version.. trying map out the three galaxies would be a huge amount of work, and even if you cut every corner possible, all it does is make it harder to write good stories.

No it wouldn't. I created my map on a large graph paper in a morning, listing relative location of each system in the first 2 books. I added systems from Anvil and Three Galaxies in about 2 hours. Now my group had stopped playing before Dimensional Outbreak, Fleets and Thundercloud but those wouldn't take more than a few hours to add.

1) you still make it harder to tell stories since we now have to deal with the travel times YOU feel are best for the game you want at the time you write it
2) that isn't a galactic map, that is a game note. A map project is either more detailed, or it is just an ego project where one GM tries to canonize their table top house setting as the One True Way that all others must play.

Now my sector maps took longer but I only created 4 of those over the decade I ran this game so not a big deal.

Actually, big deal
Remember you need to have a sector map for every sector (or maybe just the bio-zone). Or your not making a map, your just "nailing down the worlds so no one else can be creative and must play the way I tell them"

As for getting in the way of good stories why? Does having a description of the CCW and TGE get in the way of the story. What if I want them to be friends fighting the great Flooper invasion (We all know it's coming)? Haven't you limited the story by describing them as enemies? If not why is that different then relative locations of systems.

It is different because it locks in travel times and decides who is neighbors to who.
If I want to run a game centering on a 'Casablanca sector' with worlds from all the great powers I will need to use one star map
If I want to run a game following a CCW border cruiser and the worlds it patrols then I will want to us a totally different star map
If I want to run a game of exploration and colonization then I will need a third, totally different map.
All three maps though will be using the same worlds!
But the travel times and geography change based on what story I want to run.
Locking down the map is saying "NO! GM creativity is bad! Here is your map, here is your setting and because it works for me you will like it"

For that matter why can't my combat borg be a spell caster? All that does it make it difficult to write good stories.

Fabulous straw man. I love how your only argument to things is to claim that your book should simply be
Ignored
Worked around
Or that anyone complaining thinks rules are bad.

which is the same reason trek avoided putting out any official map product for so long, and why trek's writers always ignored all the ones that had been made before the star charts book (usually seen in background images in the show), and why even after the star charts book the writers basically ignored the distances given in favor of speed of plot.

Trek also ignores most of its own canon which is why the 15 or so years of Trek has been, IMHO, total garbage. Once Deep Space Nine ended Trek just became a bit of a joke with 3 of the last 4 films being unwatchable.

And yet you wish to make the exact same error so that you can have the exact same problems?

The Expanse is some of the best science fiction I have ever read or seen on TV and not only do they write in things like generating gravity but they use actually maps of how the solar system will look at the time. David Weber has very specific physics and space travel rules for his universe (as well as a map) and those stories are some of the best out there.

And they are
1) very small locations
2) one person telling one story.
It is like arguing that because the characters in the Honorverse are good, that we shouldn't roll up characters but just play them.
If I want to play someone elses game I would.

Ignoring franchise canon, including established locations and distances, aren't great storytelling its lazy. It says "I have a story to tell and that story will be more successful if I jam it into this IP but I have no interest in learning anything about this IP before I do it".

The problem is that you are confused
You think that there IS franchise cannon to ignore. There isn't, unless you make it up.
So claiming that people are lazy because they are ignoring your canon that you haven't set yet doesn't say anything about the other GMs... just about how you wish to lock down the setting into a canonical map that eliminates other peoples creativity.

Two final things: 1-Ignoring distances and such in a TV show is very different then ignoring it in a game. If I am your player and a trip takes 6 hours one game and then a few months later that same trip take me a month I'll be pissed because I like consistency. 2-You also prove my point. If the map existed and it doesn't fit your story and you don't want to take the time to work around it, you can ignore it.

1) That is why I expect each GM to make a map as they go for their own game. But that map would be tailored for THAT GAME. So if the plot is best served by Smurftopia and Whoosville being 600ly apart in one game and 6ly apart in another... then that is where they will be. No need to consult some almighty map asking 'mother may I' for permission to run the game.

2) once again arguing that "we know this book ruins your game, so just ignore it" sounds like "but I still want it published to lock down a setting because the vagueness and creativity bother me and I worry that other people might be playing the game wrong"
This isn't an IP where someone already set up the setting in detail. It is a generic space game with generic worlds provided as locations to be used as the individual GM sees fit.

[slade the sniper]

B.T.W.; I mapped all 3 Galaxies ages ago into a hex-grid. The scale / distances are... umm... large but hey, at least the systems are laid out in a relatively logical dispersion.
Slade teh Sinper snagged them off me a week or so ago.

I only borrow from the best

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-mUxT ... sp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qtn-z9 ... sp=sharing

Posted this last year, my homebrew map of the Anvil Galaxy.

That rocks. I like it, thanks.

Long version =physics, geometry, math, boring [censored].
TL:DR = You stupid why you want map?
Seriously, no one CARES about scale, scope or the "reality".
They don't.
At all.
They want pretty pictures with dots saying YOU ARE HERE.
That is it.
STOP ALWAYS MAKING IT ABOUT YOU!

I love it how my asking for a map with dots and lines got turned into "you are stupid" blah, blah.

Sheesh, just scale out until the dots all fit.

Thanks DhAkael and Warshield73

-STS