Here's another reference map for my original fiction project, The Human Destiny.This is a setting in which Earth is conquered by an alien interstellar empire (the Khedai Hegemony) sometime in the middle of the 21st century, and in which humans live in a client-state protectorate for several centuries afterward. Eventually the Hegemony begins to permit humans to enter its interstellar service, and to explore and colonize a number of worlds near Sol. The stories I'm writing largely fit into this period, when a few exceptional humans begin to prove themselves on the galactic stage. The first story has been published and is available here on Amazon . More stories are on the way, including at least a few novels if I can get those put together.This map is related to my previous project:. In this case, the area covered by the previous map is a tiny sliver of the new one. If you zoom in to the little blue circle toward the left edge of this map, labeled Human Protectorate, that's the volume that the earlier map covers.

In this case, the map covers a fair-sized chunk of the Orion Spur, centered not on Sol but on the region around the supergiant star Antares. The radius of the volume covered by this map is 800 light-years. The placement of stars, open clusters, and dark-nebula complexes is as accurate as I can make it - although in many cases, that's not all that accurate. Things are more or less in the right direction from Sol, but they're probably not always at the right distance, and in the case of the nebulae I'm making a wild guess as to their shapes.



The main purpose for this map is to help me see the spatial relationships among objects, and make a plausible model for the Khedai Hegemony that I can refer to when I'm writing stories in this setting. World-building with a purpose - although I've generated so much information that I may end up turning my notes into a reference book that other people might use. I used to write and edit for the GURPS role-playing game, and this setting might end up making a decent space-opera universe for GURPS.



The scale is 25 light-years to the inch, or 4 pixels to the light-year (there's a scale on the map image itself).



Each star system and open cluster is marked by name, with its Z-coordinate given to the nearest tenth of a light-year. I've sprinkled a bunch of unlabeled star icons in the center region of the map, to mark the rough extent of the Scorpius-Centaurus Association, a scattering of young, bright stars relatively close to Sol. Star systems with a big icon are super-bright "beacon stars." Stars with a little icon and a label are "notable" in some way, usually by being the homeworld of one of the star-faring cultures that make up the Hegemony.



Very large image (8000 pixels on a side). For best results, download or zoom in by clicking on the image above twice.



Star brushes by Ohn Barttels, available under Creative Commons license.



Technical notes: Image was produced entirely in Photoshop. Research and development took up about 40-48 hours over the last few weeks. Actual map design and production took about 20-24 hours.



© 2018 by Sharrukin-of-Akkad (Jon F. Zeigler). All rights reserved. You may not copy, alter, or repost this work without my express written permission, nor may you in any other way treat this work as your own.