Any Guidance on Stellar Density?

[mcbobbo]

I'm looking at designing a sector, and while the process for defining a system seems pretty solid, what about the likelihood that a given hex of space contains a system at all? Anything in the Star Wars realm about that?

I know that typically it's story driven, and that's perfectly fine, but I'm looking to pay a bit forward on this first. A skeleton of a system with the most popular hyperspace lanes lined out would make me a lot more comfortable, I think. Plus I could be consistent about travel times and the like.

I have some Traveler rules I could co-opt, but wanted to use Star Wars flavor rules if possible.

From what I understand about 'sectors' in general, there's not a lot of really hard rules. "Roughly 50 inhabited worlds, but often more" seems to be the only metric.

[mcbobbo]

Experimenting with Google Sheets shows me roughly 50 systems in a 25x25 hex grid is 11-13 on d66.

Still working on it...

[CRMcNeill]

The only process I can think of off the top of my head is randomization. Take a handful of pennies and throw them up in the air over a hexmap. The hexes that end up with pennies in them have star systems. Then draw squiggly lines between them to map out hyperspace routes. Distances within a sector seemed to be measured in hours or days.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[CRMcNeill]

[Whill]

[mcbobbo]

[atgxtg]

Stellar density actually varies throughout a galaxy depending on where you are. Density would be much higher in the Core than out of the fringes.

I think Traveller used a 3/6(50-50) chance of a hex (1 parcsec) containing a star system. You could use that, or even shift it up or down (1/6, 2/6, 4/6, 5/6 etc.) a bit depending on what you want.

In real life, Earth is on a spiral arm, and density seems to be a bit more than the 3/6 from Traveller.

Assuming Traveller density, you'd need about 100 hexes to get 50 stars. So either a 10 parsec square (10x10), or a cube about 4.6 parsecs (15ly) on each side (3375 cubic light years)


For easy math I'd suggest upping the density to 3/6 per cubic light year. about and then use a cube 10 light years (about 3 parsecs) per side. That would be good for the core.

[HandsomeHutt]

Www.recons.org is an astronomy research group focused on stars nearest the sun and they have a list of the 100 nearest systems to the sun. That list has 100 systems within 7 parsecs (1440 cubic parsecs or so), which is about 0.07 systems per cubic parsec. Most of those systems are the very small dim red dwarf stars which might impose restrictions on the type of inhabitable planet which might orbit it. It is possible to take that list and estimate the number of sun-like stars per cubic parsec, which would be much lower.

[mcbobbo]

If you check out the other thread, it seems the '50 interesting systems in a 25x25 hex grid' metric works pretty well.

I started off wondering if this was covered anywhere already. Seems it isn't.

[Luwingo_Spince]