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Revision as of 12:50, 5 August 2016 by Maksim-Smelchak (talk | contribs)
Notes (2007)
Traveller star-maps all use hexes which are one parsec wide. The parsec also determines the range of the Jump Drive.
- The original authors used Parsecs as a measurement for their maps over the more used (hence less sexy) light-years.
- Many measures, such as this one are highly dependent on Earth's configuration. Eg. a circle is divided into 360 degrees because that was the number of days in a year in the Persian calender and/or has many factors. Division into arcminutes and arcseconds, each 1/60 of the degree is also highly dependent on the Earth time system, dividing an hour by 60s (note that 24 is also a factor of 360). Other races could use other circle divisions, 2520 has better factoring, pi, or radians. Even the light year only makes sense in a Terran context, as it is dependent on the time it takes earth to circle Sol.
- For example Vland has an orbit of 1.276 AU and a day of 22.93 hours. Given the same division of a circle into degrees/minutes/seconds a Vilani Parsec would be 1.276 times larger, eg. 4.162 instead of 3.262 light-years. (Of course with a year of 478.72 days, this would be 3.175 Vilani Light-years). Then again, Vilani may have 480 degrees in their circle giving a Vilani Parsec a completely different value.
- Dcorrin 17:52, 12 October 2007 (UTC)