Posts Tagged ‘Heaven & Earth’

I began looking for and reviewing mapping programs a while back, even before I decided to actually create a map for Beyond Frontiers. I’ve always loved maps, and I love playing around with mapping software. There are tons of programs out there to do mapping, but I was looking for hex mapping software, which narrowed the field a bit. There were a good many programs focused specifically on Traveller that took existing .sec files and created or displayed a map, and there were other programs that focused on graphical mapping without Traveller style data in mind.

So when I decided the pencil and paper method wasn’t very efficient, I had a good idea of what was out there for me to use. Since I wanted to follow the Traveller style as I said before, I thought it best to use a Traveller focused program. Out of all the programs I had found, I narrowed it down to the big 3: Galactic, Heaven & Earth, or Traveller Universe. My main requirement was a GUI to plot systems, label them, and have their details generated randomly. I also wanted a way to keep everything in a database, and allow notes.

Galactic is an old DOS based program, so that was out right off the bat. Heaven & Earth was last touched in 2001, and wouldn’t even run in my XP VM, so I abandoned that idea. Universe remained, so that is what I used. Great way to pick software, eh? Just picking whatever is left over isn’t always the best solution, but through forum post discussions with other users and the author specifically, I determined it would work for me.

Universe couldn’t quite do exactly what I wanted, but it did have a maintenance mode to allow me to add systems manually to a subsector. So using the images of each subsector that I had created in Photoshop, I plotted each subsector until the entire sector was complete.

None of the systems had UWPs or names at this point, so the next step was to add them.