Star mapping software

[Vertigo]

Not sure if this is quite the right place for this but it is in the context of SF writing resources that I'm asking about this.

I have been taking a surf around looking for software that can tell you objective and subjective interstallar journey times. So given x light years and y acceleration/decceleration what would be the external universe travel time and what would be the internal ship travel time. I have stuggled to find anything much, just a few rather poor looking programs. However I did find one that looks promising and wondered if anyone had come across it and could comment on it or anything similar.

The software I found is called AstroSyhtesis and actually appears to do a lot more than I was looking for and so may be of interest to any SF authors here. As far as I can tell it allows you to design your own star systems (indeed galaxies I think) based on (apparently) sound principles of astrophysics. And along the way it has a calculator for working our interstellar travel times . I think you can also create complete planet landscapes that can be ported to another map generating program or something of theirs.

The software pages are here: http://www.nbos.com/products/astro/astro.htm

 

[TheTomG]

That looks pretty interesting, I may try it out sometime! Thanks for the share.

 

[Vertigo]

Yeah it has a trial download so I think I'll take a play with it.

Oh and I noticed that it helps if I spelt it right first time! AstroSynthesis! Though I imagine most would have figured that was what I meant

 

[Vertigo]

Apologies for the double post.

I have now had a play with the AstroSynthesis software and it is pretty impressive You can create your own universe with planets, asteroid belts, space stations etc and then plot routes for travelling between stars or orbital trajectories for travel between planets given factors like acceleration and so forth to get travel times. It is not a trivial program and will take a lot of learning I suspect. However the current version does not have an interstellar travel time calculator but I believe the next version (3.0) will have and is due out shortly.

I have also come across another page with a log of links to similar bits of software. http://www.projectrho.com/smap07.html (although it seems to have a few broken links)

A bit of research to be done there I think!