Sector

★★★★★ Essential mobile “Traveller’s” Aid by Barbierossa – May 25, 2017

Does exactly what you expect it to do! Need an off the cuff sector of space? Boom! Done! Brilliant!

Sector is a mapping tool for classic tabletop Science Fiction Roleplaying games.

With a single click Sector will generate an entire sector (16 subsectors) of worlds for you and your players to explore.

Full UPP (Universal Planetary Profile) generation for every world

Random name generation for all worlds, sectors and subsectors.

Beautiful mapping that shows the mainworld size, atmosphere and surface type at a glance.

Minor and major trade routes calculated and drawn on the map

Clusters, chains and voids are automatically detected and named

That’s not all - the map is editable! Tap the ‘Edit’ button and then tap hexes to remove a world you don’t want, or add a world to a blank hex. Trade routes and cluster names are generated on the fly.

Note: requires the use of an RPG rules system. Contains materials from the Traveller SRD document

Note: Mapping an entire sector is resource intensive. Recommended for iPad Pro and iPhone 6s devices or better.

I wrote a bit more about the motivation behind Sector here

Sector for Mac

At the moment I don’t have plans to build a full GUI Mac app - although I would like to do this. Instead, you can download a completely free command line tool here - there’s no warranty or anything else provided - use at your own risk, but it should be pretty safe!

To call it, just open the terminal and cd to the same directory, and then run ` ./sector` - at the moment there are no options, it will just spit out and entire random sector listing! On the plus side, it’s very fast.

Tips and tricks

Tap the ‘edit’ button in the map to switch into edit mode. You can then tap a blank hex to add a new world, or tap an existing world to remove it. Cluster and rift names will change as you do this, as the existence of clusters and rifts has to be checked again and names are generated fresh each time.

Tap the map with two fingers to hide the toolbar and navigation bar for full-screen map goodness

The map can be panned and zoomed as you would expect.

Is a label or a route getting in the way? Tilt your device to move labels slightly, or tap the label or route button in the toolbar to turn them on and off.

Dashed lines are ‘minor’ trade routes, solid lines are ‘major’ ones. It’s up to you how to interpret (or ignore) this information however you like!

Don’t care about trade routes? Just turn them off with the button in the toolbar

You can regenerate trade routes and name labels - when the map is in edit mode, tap the labels or routes button to regenerate either of these.

You can edit any world’s UPP or name. In the world details screen, tap the edit button and then edit the text for the world name or UPP. Only valid UPPs can be saved - however you are able to enter a UPP in this method that couldn’t be generated with the random generation.

Want to add an existing world from you campaign to the map? Just enter edit mode, and tap a blank hex to add a random world. Then exit edit mode, and tap the hex again to view the world detail. Then edit the world details, and change the name and UPP as you desire.

Amber and Red zone worlds are outlined in the appropriate colour. Balkanised worlds are outlined in blue. Any trade routes to these worlds (which will be rarer than normal) are also coloured.

The circle representing the world tells you several things: The size of the inner circle is proportional to the size of the world. Asteroid belts are shown with an asteroid icon. The outline around the central circle represents the atmosphere thickness and composition. Tainted atmospheres are brown. The thicker the line, the thicker the atmosphere. The colour of the central circle tells you something about the surface composition. Blue means a water world, green is a garden world. Grey is waterless, whereas brown means some water is present. Icy blue means an ice world. (note this is based on the SRD trade classification. It’s possible that some water worlds would also be icy, due to temperature!)

The letter in the centre of the world icon tells you the main starwort classification. See the system details screen for a full description of what this code means.

the icons to either side of the world icon tell you what bases are present in the system (tap the world to see the details, and you see what each icon represents)

the icons below the world icon represent the trade code classification, eg. ‘Rich’, ‘High Tech’, etc.

Release notes

2.3

This is a major update that improves efficiency and reduces crashes.

The main map view has been completely re-written for improved speed and efficiency. Drawing speed, scrolling smoothness and memory use are all much improved.

Adds the ability to create a blank sector for you to populate manually

Adds 3D-touch actions to the map view. Try 3D touching a world hex - slide you finger up when peeking the world details to get quick access to editing actions.

Integrates with Spotlight - try searching for world and sectors directly from your home screen search.

Fixes a common cause of crashes when generating trade routes.

2.2

You can now save your generated sector maps as a PDF! Use the share icon when viewing the map and select ‘PDF’ as the file format. You can still also share as a plain text file world listing, and as a native Sector file format.

2.1

Adds a small navigator thumbnail view in the navigation bar, so you always know what part of the map you’re looking at. Also, reverts back to showing a zoomed in version of the map initially

2.0

Completely redesigned the way the map is drawn. Now you can zoom out to view the entire sector at once, and scrolling across the map is much smoother.

Import regenerated sector files, for example from https://travellermap.com eg. https://travellermap.com/data/Spinward%20Marches . Use the import button to load a sector file from the Files app. Note that only the name, location, mainworld UPP and some additional details are imported. The ‘importance factor’, if present, is used to generate trade routes.

Adds the ability to export the sector as a text file.

Adds the ability to edit a world’s name and UPP - or regenerate a new random one.

Adds the ability to re-generate trade routes and name labels - in ‘edit’ mode, tap the route or labels button to be prompted if you want to regenerate either of these.

Improves the trade route drawing logic to reduce clutter.

Bug fix for the world info popover to make sure it points to the selected world.

1.3

Adds a map legend to help explain the colours used in the map, and what they mean. Minimum OS version increased to 10.3