Because I have no way of knowing distances between star systems, I have used a sense of time rather than distance to determine how far away things are. This is useful for a number of reasons and helps to keep travel computations down to a minimum. However, the scale of my previous maps did not make sense. Well, it did but it was far too small. According to that map it would only take a few days to travel across to Gomoray and thats plainly bollocks. So, I have rewatched the series up to "The Living Legend" trying to get a sense of scale and timing, and the following is my findings.
This is very useful to get a sense of scale. Getting clues as to how long an episode is in time, how much time has elasped since the last episode and using a scale of 1 jump per day (I know, way too much time) means that I can plot a timetable of events. Using this timetable I can then plot a starmap... Probably an odd way of going around it, but I have no other means of information. The starmaps that you see are the results of my findings, and the following is what I get from the series.
Note that all times follow the 1 day = 24 centars, 1 secton = 5 days format.
Time elasped: 5 days
The first three episodes take place over roughly five days. The day of the ambush, the return trip the Colonies, the finding of survivors and getting their ships working, the trip to Carillon and the ambush there. It has to be at least 5 days, and the majority of that is actually spent in the Colonies themselves, after all, you do not just load up with ships and people just like that. Then the ships had to be converted for hyperspeed, and all this takes some time. It does lead me to think that there must be something wrong with Cylon sensers and tactics not to have detected their fleet...
Time elasped: 5 days
An unfortunate episode to be sure. Finding Kobol so quickly and so near to the Colonies too. Why has not anyone else discovered the planet? Actually, this episode was good for clearing the confusion for Kobol. It is NOT in the void itself. But this also leads to some questions, like if Kobol is not in the void, then why would the Twelve Tribes of Man go into the Void to get to the Colonies? Maybe the Thirteenth Tribe were the sensible ones after all. However, it is still a confusing episode in some respects. Time. Five days - two to get herded to Kobol, one to get through the void and one to land and make a camp.
Time elasped: 2 days
Apollo crashes, and is on the planet for two days.
Time elasped: 2 days
Another iffy episode. We are led to believe that the asteroid dust is the dust for the end of the solar system, but please, do not get me started on their misuse of so many astronomical terms. But Adama states that no one in the Fleet has got this far before. Now I am meaning that to believe the ragtag fleet, not the main Colonial Fleet because otherwise, why would people in "The Magnificent Warriors" know about the Colonies?
Anyway, Starbuck has one day to court both Athena and Cassie, and then has a one day mission.
Time elasped: 2 days
At least. We know the Galactica has been herded here, and then the strike team land. And have 900 centons to do their job. 900 centons or 9 centars. you are telling me they have 9 hours to get to the moon, climb the mountain and then destroy the gun? Hmmm...
Time elasped: 2 days
The crew are definitely on the planet for two days. This episode brings an interesting fact though. Adama states that he has been couped up on the Galactica for 16 quadrants. Now, a quadrant I think, is a measure of distance, not time, and that leads me to this: If we assume that Adama has not been off the Galactica since "Lost Planet of the Gods" (not an unreasonable assumption I think), then it is 16 quadrants from Kobol to here. So, if we know the size of a quadrant, we know the distance from there to here. I do not think quadrants are all that big to be honest with you. Judging from a lot of hand signals and movements on their wonderful map on the bridge, I think a quadrant is only a couple of star systems in length. But I have nothing to back that up.
Time elasped: 3 days
There's one day of previous events and then Starbuck is marooned for 2 days.
Time elasped: 8 days
The reason this is such a large episode is that it takes place over three days (you get that by the fact that Adama keeps saying about meetings in the morning - he says that twice), and when Silverspar and Blue squadron are meeting up for their chat in the Officers Club, Apollo mentions that were not shot down one Cylon scout in the past Secton.
So, all that together comes to 29 days. Of course this does not take in account time between episodes (save for the "Living Legend"). We know that they have encountered other planets during their time in space, but because this is near the beginning of the series and the Cylons are still in the minds of people, I am willing to think that only a secton or so passes between each episode at this point, enough for one or two star systems, but no more. So adding 7 sectons between the episodes gives us a total of 54 or so days for the series at that point. Although I am inclined to add some time between "Saga of a Star World" and "Lost Planet of the Gods" as food shortages and the like do not seem to be an issue anymore, although they have had their crops regrown on Carillon. Still, not the two yahrens the Timeline originally had.
And this is the basis of the new maps.
The scale is better and Gomoray is now some 45 days travel from the Colonies, which should equate to a journey time of some ninety days at the minimum. Much nicer I think.
Finally, the maps only go up to Gomoray and thus do not include planets like Terra. This is intentional as the Galactica only gets out that far during the Exodus, and certainly no one has ventured that far since then. So as I was mainly dealing with the war with the Cylons, I thought that I did not need to go further. I might at some point do additional maps which cover the Exodus, but not just yet.
The first and most important reference, is obviously the television series. The second reference was the various original novilisations that I own. These acknowledge the faster than light problem, that all systems are infact seperate star systems and that everything is generally bigger. Unfortunately it does have some contradictions, so it was used only as a secondary reference. Some names and planetary details were gained from here.
After these references, the other planets and names were gained from other sources, such as the various scripts that did not make it to production, comics, the Enclyopedia Galactica, and various others Galactica related products.
The star maps in the background of the bridge and the briefing/council room are the prime sources of information for these prepared maps. They show stars, planets and orbital data, and are both a blessing and a curse.
A blessing because when someone points to a planet and says it is Borellus, then we know that it is Borellus.
The curse is that they put a completely wierd perspective to the whole thing.
[See here for a map example, taken from the Canadian Squadron page.]
From studying a map, I believe that it shows the following information - planets, stars and orbital data. From this, we see that each map usually shows anywhere from one to three star systems, or at least what we as modern day people call star systems or solar systems. Unfortunately this reduces the whole scale of the series and I am not sure is entirely accurate.Let me explain.
Battlestar Galactica the television series - and therefore the main source of information - never refers to faster than light travel. Infact, light speed is only mentioned a few times, and then is deemed to be a bit of a hassle to get there (Commander Cain "Living Legend" of the Pegasus mentions that he will burn half his fuel to get to that speed). Also, the various terms used (system, galaxy and universe) are constantly intermixed with each other. So, we are left with the fact that the Battlestars can not get past light speed on a regular basis, and the star maps show solar systems. Obviously this fact alone contradicts each other as we know from our knowledge of the galaxy that our nearest star is some 4 light years away, which would be at least four years travel to the Galacticta. So, either the star systems in the Galactia Universe are much closer than a single light year, or the ships can travel much quicker.
I believe the later is more to the truth, and the series itself also seems to agree with this, both in the fact that the ships get to one system after another, and also the Cylon Baseships can overtake the Galactica (at the ragtag fleet speed admittedly) in under a Centon "Lost Planet of the Gods, part I".
Another point is that we seem to take the fact that Borellus and Carrilon are seperate star systems. Well, according to the star maps from "Saga of a Star World", they are not, they are all part of one system.
There is evidence to go with this and prove that the whole thing is one huge star system, but in the interest of 'real' science, I have to discount this.
So, maybe the orbital lines are instead travel routes. There is evidence to support this too. "Saga of a Star World" agrees with this to a point when Apollo is showing the normal route to Carrillon he effectively traces the orbit with his arm. However, all the orbits do still go round a star, and do not really link with each other except when these orbits meet.
One final problem is that there is no basic reference point on the star maps. I have assumed that there are all based on the Galactica's current location, with it being centred in the middle of the map. There is no real evidence for this, but it seems logical and the numbering does seem to suggest this.
So, I have used the following conclusions:
These terms are used a lot in the series, and planets and systems are usually listed to be on such a sector or quadrant. Unfortunately from my experience with the series, these terms are interchangeable, and sometime point to an area of space, or even a solar system.
Star maps can be broken into four sections, or four corners. I think each of these is a quadrant. A sector I am not sure of, but I think it refers to any section of space that is larger than a star system and smaller than a quadrant. Judging from "Lost Planet of the Gods", I think the sectors are actually the individual segments on the star maps, and can be labelled using a greek letter and a number (such as delta 5), the letter probably referring to one of the eight sections of a quadrant, and the number to the specific segment. However the reference given in the series does not actually conform to the star map in this way, so this may not be correct at all.
Currently I have not decided what to do with quadrants and sectors. I have not listed them on any maps, and am not sure yet if I will, after all, the map is going to get fairly cluttered and a lot of names are going to have to be made up, which I am sort of loathe to do.
The maps are in the right (as in left/right) direction because the star maps in the series are shown that way, regardless of the fact that the ships are shown to generally travel from left to right in the series. Gomoray was listed as the Southern Capital of the Cylon Empire, so the Colonials have to be shown underneath them.