Astrography of Flat Black

No need to wait: Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) just hit the streets, with not only more stars and improved parallaxes but proper motions.

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Argh!

I mean, great, but my universe just became obsolete. :slight_smile:

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Don’t know if I’ve mentioned this to you before, but this feature – that the Empire maintains a monopoly on interstellar vessels – is also explored in Morioka Hiroyuki’s Crest of the Stars series. The novels have been translated to English; they are out of print but available for a couple of dollars each on Amazon. There are also manga and anime versions.

You are deliberately focusing on “Scarecrow of Romney Marsh” smuggling, rather than other kinds? As you are no doubt aware (but others may not be), most smuggling in the real world takes the form of legitimate shipments through normal channels of goods that have had their paperwork hacked to avoid or reduce tariffs or other restrictions. So 100 widgets (Cr2 tax each) becomes 90 widgets, or 100 gizmos (Cr1.8 tax each).

There’s this to be said for abstract astrography: it lacks the visceral pleasure of real world star maps, but is much more robust against updates.

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Yeah, well, science fiction suffers from that a lot. Heinlein never stopped holding out for Martian canals and princesses.

Eichberger Spaceways would be vulnerable to such frauds to the extent that it attempted to set price-discriminating freight rates on different commodities. It doubtless employs supercargos and inspectors to reduce such losses, and must carry the costs of admiralty courts. But even with its ability to price-discriminate between commodities limited by the threat and presence of such frauds, it always gets to collect a baseline rate of profit on the bulk freight rate. And it still gets to price-discriminate on a link-by-link or OD-pair basis.

But the existence of “smugglers” who operate by submitting dodgy paperwork will not allow the Empire’s sources of revenue to just take off to the outworlds. I’m most concerned about the Romney Marshes model in which smugglers cross the Channel in their own boats because that is the existential threat to the Empire and the setting. If it the Empire couldn’t prevent that it wouldn’t survive.

The thing I really like about XHIP is that it collates positional data with everything else I might be interested in (and that is known). Not just position and space velocity, but visual and bolometric luminosities, colour indexes, spectral type and luminosity class, estimates of age and metallicity where available, identifiers in different catalogues, constellation…. It going out of date makes me sad.