Ya, a potentially HUGE pain in the arse... This is one of the things that makes running a sci-fi opera setting ( like ICAR) very difficult.
To date, it seems to me this has been tip toed around by talking about systems, clusters and worlds and detailing some basic star mappings (shells)... This dosn't however, cover the distances, travel times and locations of said celestial bodies.
Sure we have clusters, do they have stations...what services are available? What hazards exist and what celestial events can occur?
I struggled with this a great deal on my own project. The idea of an astronomicon was exciting and through XML and software I felt I could generate a universe using special RPG software that saves as XML. Feed it into an XSLT/XSL-FO engine and produce a PDF, repleat with SVG graphics.
Thats all well and good, but it still remains a very difficult subject.
So, my question is in reading the ICAR v4 manual, you cover several clusters but there is no sense of distance and though location is covered once, you still don't get a sense of the vast spaces between stars and what they offer the players.
Are there thoughts on:
- Identifying clusters in more technical terms. For example, what facilities are available, what flag they fall under (symbolically since I can't read), perhaps planet information (rotation around host star, planetary conditions that may require special equipment for the players.) etc.,
- A map of some kind (perhaps a system map when talking about a cluster)
- Moons, stardocks, asteroid belts, nebulae, etc.,
- Death stars, star destroyers and sith
The mappings of ICAR could easily be its own book (and if you want to seperate the core rules from the game setting this would be a good idea), but its even more work...
Back to my errata