# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Sci-fi/Modern Mapping >  Calisota Sector Star-Map

## William_Oak

Hello folks,

I've been enjoying myself doing a map for a space sector I had conceived for a  40k rogue trader game. Never took the time to do a full sector map at the time.



For the moment I'm still working on some style decisions. For the moment its a mix of textured & symbolic.

I'm also looking for a decent way to represent depth. I've had the notion of a "depth number" associated with each system, but I dont think it would fit with the style.

When I did the original game, I only made one major map for a region called the arcadian expanse. Made it in hexographer so it's pretty crude. Hoping to redo that one as well. Rogue trader does have an excellent star system random generator, which made actually prepping each system fairly simple.

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## Azélor

What is the pink area around the map?

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## William_Oak

> What is the pink area around the map?


It's supposed to be a sort of fog of war, which I made using an image of a warp storm. There are some structures that I want to keep hidden, and this does the job.

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## William_Oak

Did some work, added some coloration for depth of systems. I think its as far as I will go with this map for now.

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## Azélor

They are hidden but at the same time, you make it clear that there is something there. 
You could as well leave it black. Most stellar objects are near invisible and or hard to detect unless you focus on a small area (when searching or observing space).

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## William_Oak

You make a good point. I'll try it without.

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## William_Oak

Ok, so I made an attempt without the fog of war. I did go a bit further though, leaning into the more artificial parts of the map, going for an old-school screen layout.

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## Azélor

I like it better that way.

This area is 33 500 000 ly3? That's huge!
An area that could easily contain over 100 000 stars.

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## William_Oak

> I like it better that way.
> 
> This area is 33 500 000 ly3? That's huge!
> An area that could easily contain over 100 000 stars.


Woops, bit of a mistake there, I used the diameter rather than the radius to calculate the volume. I'll correct it to 4 160 000 cub. light years. Only planned for it to be a volume contained about 1000 stars (AND EXACTLY 1000, though the players wont know that), at about 0.4 stars/parsec cubed. I'll need to get out the excell now to make sure I havent messed up my scaling.

For fun, I made a scale thing. The large map on the left represents the milky way (not my map, unclear on the original author), top right my map, and lower right a smaller region I mapped in hexographer a few years back. Hoping to update that next.

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## Azélor

The average density around the Sun is close to 0,004 star per ly3. 
That's about 16 600 stars.

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## William_Oak

Ok, so I've managed to get the transition work for my expanse map into my new visual style. I've still got some stuff to work out, as I rotated the original map which has left some space in the corners. I'll fill em up with more systems later. Here's a comparison image:

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## William_Oak

Ok, so I've put a few of the base legend indicators, and I've set myself the zone I will try to fill. I also created a new drawing file, the other one was heavy with experiments, a lot of them, and it was getting heavy.

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