[ post #16 ]

Originally posted by Admiral Zaarin Actually, I'm pretty certain that there is sufficient water on Earth including ground water, ice, etc. to submerse the land; perhaps Kamino is just closer to its sun or has a more luminous sun. Even Mars is theorized to have enough water to cover the planet ankle deep.

If there was, we'd be under water or under ice right now. Since we're not, it's safe to say that the entire land area wouldn't be submersed. Even with all the ice melted, it still wouldn't do it because ice takes up more space than water does.

I, too, would be hard pressed to imagine Kamino is competely and totally covered with water. There's probably small islands around the planet, but they're probably either too rocky or some other problem with them that it was just easier to build cities on water.

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[ post #17 ]

Lol, Kaminoans ran into the same problem everyone in the US has when they want real estate. They got tired of the Environmental Protection Agency and Wildlife Preservation Society and said the hell with it and moved into oceanic cities.

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[ post #18 ]

There's a guy making fictional variants on Earth with big beach balls. One of them was a variant exploring what would happen if we inverted the land and the ocean and then poured all the water back in, and there was about 5% land left.

Oh here it is.

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[ post #19 ]

Originally posted by Grimace Truth be told, though, I'm also a fan of the "wedge" version of the galaxy rather than 3/4 of the pie version. With that all said, this book is SUPER pretty. It's got a lot of information! It's everything so many people wanted for so long. The problem I saw with it is that while it's the best thing since sliced bread, it also seems to take away the sense of being able to plug your own stuff into the Star Wars universe now. A person can't easily say "This planet is 5 days out from Tatooine, in a remote part of space far from any other planet of importance." Oops! According to the Essential Atlas, there's no such place anymore. Explored, impotant planets are EVERYWHERE now. Now when players and GMs look at the map they can say "well, we're only 4 hours from Llanic and the Spice Run hyperroute that takes us back to Ruess...or we can take the other route all the way to Darkkneli that's on the Hydian way and only a hop, skip and jump to Sullust". Yes, I know there's oodles of star systems in those ever shrinking gaps between known star systems on the map, but it seems this atlas just basically a stole a little bit of the "openness" of the Star Wars universe away from us. So while I like the prettiness of the book, and while I think it's great that they've taken the time to finally place things in Star Wars, I feel a bit saddened by how it seems (to me) to take away the sense of the galaxy seeming VAST and full of unknowns, and having stretches of areas where you can get lost or stranded in Star Wars.

By "wedge", I think you mean WEG's "Slice" as seen in Star Wars 2E.

The Atlas is an awesome resource, probably the best of the Essential series as others have opined. It is jammed packed with so much information, maps and pictures that compile so much detail and flavor to the Star Wars galaxy. One of my biggest pet peeves of the EU is how self-contadictory it is, and this book works to resolve many of them, and should work to go a long way in preventing them in the future. And for RPG use, I completely disagree that this limits any GMs in any way.

First of all, the galaxy as presented in the Atlas is not completely mapped out, in the Core Worlds or even remote systems 5 days away from Tatooine. The book does not even pretend to show all systems of possible interest in any area. The galaxy is a lot more densly populated that the book shows. It would be impossible to catalog every single star system in any galaxy.

And remember, hyperspace travel times depend on how well-known the route is, more than physical distance. A system 5 days out from Tatooine one way could be the same physical distance to another system 5 hours away in another direction. If a system is hardly ever visited, it could have an extremely long travel time, no matter how close it is to a system or a major trade route. That could be considered "remote" even though it is close to a well-travelled system.

Finally, GMs are free to decide what is canon for their games and what is not. If you want a system not to be where it says on a map, then POOF, it is not there, thus the mightly Lord and Master GM sayeth. GMs are allowed to contradict and change whatever they want, because it is their galaxy. GMs have the freedom to pick and choose whatever they want from the EU, including the various aspects of this book.

I think the Atlas is totally awesome!

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Last edited by Whill on 28 January 2010 at 10:48 PM

[ post #20 ]

I hadn't picked up the book yet, though on the subject of how many more systems, sectors, and planets now listed in the galaxy making for what appears as a much more densly populated galaxy....

Nomatter how close all these planets are together, and their distance apart or time to travel... Really, thats just based on what, lightspeed travel time???

Not everyone has the Millenium Falcon's .5 hyperdrive. Especially where 2x is galactic standard...

I think its time to employ a bit of good ol' fashioned GM ingenuity...

If anyone's look at a regular travel map. Even Google Maps. Sure, towns and citys may seem like only mere inches apart, but look at it this way -

a 45minute travel time is based on your average 100lm/h driving speed.

Scenario A: Theres road construction happening at some point, and traffic is slowed down, single lane and crawling at 20km, and the backup is a few miles long.

In Star Wars - well hey... Roll your random GM dice, and have the ship drop out of lightspeed due to high solar flare activity in the next sector ahead. Or some other reason that's call cause for concern and have to detour and take the long way around.

Scenario B: Your driving out of city, into town, or out of town headed for the city. Normally, - or better yet, a long drive out through the country outback to the cabin for the weekend. 20 - 40 mins (pending on distance) your there. But this particular day either you : run a flat tire, or run out of gas, or the fanbelt breaks, or one of the engine pumps dies, etc. Its a barren stretch of fields and highway. Little to no traffic this particular time of day save for the odd transport. Its gonna be a long hike on foot until you arrive at the nearest gas station, since its unlikely to expect someone to be feeling kind enough to pull over and offer you a ride. Well, 75 miles / 45minute driving time doesn't sound very far until your out walking on foot... 15 minutes of walking, if you look back can still see your car on the side of the road.

Well, same applies to Star Wars. Planet hoping around the galaxy is soley reliant on the convenience of the Hyperdrive. When the hyperdrive fails for some reason inbetween planets, well, that mere 5 day trip just got weeks longerif limping on sublights. Longer yet if your stuck drifting in space. Thankfully the wide open space is cold and without oxygen, so time is always a concern in those situations. Not like you can slap on an EVA suit and think you'll be able to float your way over the distance like a person would walk on foot. Any chance of rescue solely depends on being able to fix the ship, or by random chance another ship is passing through that exact same route in hyperspace. (on the assumption said passerby even wants to risk dropping out of hyperspace to investigate the sos beacon, or if said pilot's asleep and goes on by not even knowing)

And hey... If you've got a working system for travel times, why change it , simply because the book says so???

Another trivial point is - when traveling from planet to planet, however long the diatance or travel time... Does anyone ever really spent that time in real-time hour by hour? No, not likely... Perhaps a couple hours for onship roleplaying. But almost always, the travel time is taken care of by the wave of the GM's hand and vocal anouncement - Its X time/days later, and you have arrived at: ____. The only real useful the long travel time between planets is good for is a reasonable excuse to roll your dice for repair and upgrade checks on personal items, healing wounds, or training in more skills. Again, a couple minutes of actual dice rolling around the group (and updating the stats sheets).

Perhaps the worst aspect of any galaxy map is the fact that its drawn out on a 2d plane when the galaxy is actually existing in a 3d space. My best guess is the galaxy sure looks incredibly dense right now since someone took a rolling pin and flattened the galaxy that'd occupy an entire 3d cube, into a paper thin flat 2d sheet that's better for map layouts of landmass.

And lastly - why can't there be loads of unnamed planets? all those empty spaces inbetween, theres likely bound to be lots of open areas waiting to be found. Especially if you subscribe to the galaxy is actually a 3d space that would fit in a massive 3d cube.

Just some ideas there... Just because its a book full of planets looking so close together, doesn't mean its an end to classic GM creativity.

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[ post #21 ]

In addition to the points made by Terras, keep in mind that the diameters of the markers for each planet are huge in the scale of the map itself. To move from one side of the planet marker to the other would mean a significant hyperspace jump, and its just to denote one planet. If you shrink the size of those circles down to even 1/10 their size, it'd look far less densely populated, 1/100, even more...and the markers would still be huge compared to the scale of the map.

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[ post #22 ]

I think that my only thing about the Atlas is how it (1.) placed Coruscant [no! you pronounce it Coruskant! HARD C!] that near the Unknown Regions, and (2.) made the Unknown Regions very small. The Unknown Regions should have fringed the galaxy.

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[ post #23 ]

Yea, I don't like how there is a huge half-galactic blank space right next door to the capital of the galaxy. A "sahara-desert" type patch of uninhabitated area I could understand ... but not the entire half ...

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[ post #24 ]

Originally posted by Jame I think that my only thing about the Atlas is how it (1.) placed Coruscant [no! you pronounce it Coruskant! HARD C!] that near the Unknown Regions, and (2.) made the Unknown Regions very small. The Unknown Regions should have fringed the galaxy.

In Modi galaxy maps and since he worked in the Atlas are basically tod down view and it show a very big unknown regions, almost half a galaxy. So it is big, but I do agree the unknown regions being so close to Coruscant.

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[ post #25 ]

Yea, I don't like how there is a huge half-galactic blank space right next door to the capital of the galaxy. A "sahara-desert" type patch of uninhabitated area I could understand ... but not the entire half ...

meh...

That doesn't bother me. It just means we got lots of room to work with when we get the Unknown Regions book in April : )

I feel it re-enforces the notion that the galaxy is not as tamed as we're made to believe. I view it as there's this chuck that has been in-accessible for many tens of thousands of years and combined with the peroidic big nasty that comes out of it, people just gave up trying to push into it. People would say "Oh you don't want to go there. You can't jump anywhere....assuming something doesn't get you." It just became this big area on everyone's map where Captain Barbossa scribbled "You're in over your head Jack, here there be monsters!"

I love the book. I'm running a game based in the Outer Rim and Wild Space and having a book this detailed is fantastic. My players can look really get a grasp on the distances their having to travel. Also they get the chance to plot out their routes. They roll their jump calcs, roll for random events and roll Galactic Lore to find out what they know about the systems they're going to/pasing by. We already had a situation where the Jedi wanted to use a spice smuggling hyperroute in the atlas, but since they only rolled a 12 on Galactic Lore for that area, their characters weren't aware of it.

The map of the Shadowports is also very niffty for when they were chasing down a bounty hunter. : )

I'm a little disapointed we didn't get a map of Ss-ruuvi Space. But over all a great buy for any game or just own as a fan. And it has purdy purdy pictures!

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[ post #26 ]

However there is a huge downsize with this book.

Since it is too big and paperback, the pages have start to come off.

I want my book to last at least much more then a year and the only solution is hardcover.

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Want to play Star Wars RPG PBEM? Then just go to www.starwars-chronicles.com

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