Welcome to the Worldbuilding Hub! The goal of this site is to serve as a repository of resources and articles (written by myself) to help people add a physical realism to their fictional worlds and star systems - as such it is useful for any sci-fi project (be it a book, a setting, or an RPG) and is often quite educational in places.
(If you're looking for what was formerly known as "The Traveller Hub" then don't panic - you're in the right place, the hub was renamed since none of the material here was actually specific to the Traveller RPG).
Last update: 25th Nov 2006 - Updated the Revised Stellar Generation Tables. Found a statistical flaw in the table (probably caused by companion systems) that generated too many evolved stars (IV,III,II).
Articles/Resources on this site...
- Revised Stellar Generation Tables (v3.0) UPDATED!. Here I present revised tables that generate realistic stars (both for existing systems and for new ones). Note that the default link is to a PDF file with just the revised tables and modifiers and no analysis. Finally, no more headaches trying to figure out how the hell a habitable planet can exist around a red giant or white dwarf! :)
- How to calculate Stellar Magnitudes. How to calculate how bright a star would look from a given viewpoint. Warning: contains logarithms, but also has examples! Useful for adding a bit of background flavour to your worlds (particularly when you realise that distant companion star is actually bright enough to turn night into day...). Doesn't work for planets though, that's a hell of a lot more complicated unfortunately...
- How to calculate Angular Diameters. How to calculate how big a star (or planet) would look from a given viewpoint. Warning: contains maths (but it's not too hard). Also useful for adding some background flavour to your worlds.
- Stellar Characteristics and Evolution. A qualitative summary of star types and sizes, and a detailed explanation of stellar evolution. No hard numbers here, but it should still prove useful for getting your head around how stars evolve and how that should affect planetary systems.
- Realistic Astrography of the space around Sol. This somewhat mammoth project is my attempt to make a realistic map of the locations of stars around Sol, since the canonical GDW maps of the Sol subsector and its surroundings are not at all accurate in this regard. I'll warn you that it's pretty dense, but it's invaluable if you want maps that shows the real positions of all the known stars within a 6 pc radius of Sol (and some of the major ones beyond). Obviously, it doesn't match the Third Imperium canon. These maps are useful for any sci-fi endeavour - not just Traveller - and the full raw data is also provided.
My JTAS Articles
JTAS is the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society, housed on the servers of Steve Jackson Games. For a mere 20 US Dollars, you get two years of subscription, covering 52 fortnightly issues of JTAS magazine plus all the archives, and full access to discussion boards ranging from general talk about Traveller to worldbuilding and gearheading.
I've now left JTAS, but I submitted a couple of articles to JTAS in 2003 which were both published - I've endeavoured to make these as realistic as possible by basing them on current scientific knowledge. Note you'll need to have a JTAS subscription to be able to read them.
- Brown Dwarfs, by Constantine Thomas. The first of my world-building articles, and unofficially the first part of my "Empty Hex Fillers". This presents detailed rules to add realistic Brown Dwarfs and their satellites to Traveller campaigns (brown dwarfs are substellar objects between large gas giants and small stars - they are massive enough to emit a significant amount of heat through gravitational contraction, but aren't massive enough to fuse hydrogen like stars). There are rules for adding Brown Dwarfs to empty hexes and planetary systems, as well as expanded rules for Superjovian worlds (intermediate in mass between small Brown Dwarfs and large gas giants like Jupiter).
- Interstellar Wanderers, by Constantine Thomas. Part II of my "Empty Hex Fillers", this covers other bodies that can be found drifting between systems - including three new types of 'rogue world' and rogue jovians. It also decribes 'Barren Systems' - stars with no planets in orbit around them.
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