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	Archive through May 15, 2022	25		09/25 11:55pm
	Archive through September 23, 2025	25		09/23 09:06am

IIRC if you go digging around in the F&E topics, there is a guy who is programming his own F&E software that people are looking forward to. Check there. He probably has a great map and likely far more knowledge than I about this issue.

By Russ Simkins (Madcowak) on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 09:43 am: Edit

Wow, 500 hex map.
Troublesome.
Too granular yet still not nearly granular enough.
So about a quarter inch hex is about as small as you can get and still have any hope of reading the hex number (which will be six digits).
That makes your overall hex size over 10 feet tall. Even if you stick to digital only image sharing the file size would be enormous.
And then we are covering a parsec with each lesser hex. That's a lot of real estate. Our solar system is only 0.00047 light years across. If we made our lesser hexes 10 feet tall, that's in the ballpark of 9/16 of an inch. So too vast for any terrain. You are still down to naming points of interest in each hex like the F&E map does to some extent.
So why not change the scale a bit, say 5 or 10 parsecs per hex still naming POIs. 100x100 or 50x50 is much more doable that ~200,000 hexes in a per parsec map. Lots of other challenges to consider like how to move from an edge hex into the appropriate edge hex of the next map. The numbers won't necessarily match up. Solvable but you would have to account for that.

By Russ Simkins (Madcowak) on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 10:10 am: Edit

Fun little puzzle/challenge. I'll doodle something up in Visio when I get some time. Definately something you would want built in a vector based software

By Robert Russell Lender (Rusman) on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 11:11 am: Edit

Your mention of how big it needs to be and the file size does sound like my 500 diameter map might be asking too much. It was just my hope was all.

Changing the scaling seems like the only reasonable solution. But I was sincerely hoping to stick to the 500 Parsecs wide thing as indicated in the SFU.

By Russ Simkins (Madcowak) on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 12:42 pm: Edit

Oh the greater hex would still be 500 parsecs just the lesser ones would be 10 parsecs rather than 1 parsecs. 50 hexes * 10 parsecs/hex = 500 parsecs.
1 parsec per hex doesn't seem to get you anything but complexity and headaches.
Visio makes a free viewer I've never used. If it allows shape data changes it might be all you need.
I am smack in the middle of a move so I don't have a computer or time to play with it (typing this on my phone). A couple weeks and I can be more directly helpful.