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Inner Sphere Cartography Society Archive

Maps for the various BattleTech eras:

Here are the latest ISCS map files for the various eras that the ISCS has collected data for.

Maps in JPEG format:

 Maps in Adobe PDF format:
Maps with borders:

 Maps with previous era's borders:

 Maps with JumpShip paths:
 

Recent News:

  • New maps!!! As mentioned before all maps are now derived from the work of the IS Atlas. In addition to some minor corrections, the 2750 era was revised to match up with the overview map of 2750 in the Inner Sphere sourcebook. The borders for 2750 are based off of the worlds that were jointly administered by the Terran Hegemony. The research into a more accurate 2750 map has yielded enough information to give us a rough guess at what 2575 looked like. This gives a good idea what the Periphery States looked like before the Reunification Wars.

  • Well if you want you BattleTech filtered through Microsoft, they have set up a site called MechWarrior Universe. Øystein Tvedten helped them out alot with the maps located on this page. Since Øystein and I have done a lot of work on Inner Sphere maps together I also got a link to the ISCS on the bottom of the page.

  • Øystein Tvedten has setup the Star League Defense Forces Mapping Agency to display the Inner Sphere maps that he has created. Øystein used one of my PDF maps as a basis for his, but has been using scans of the sourcebook maps to help him create his maps. The ISCS looks forward to working with Øystein as his contributions are the reason the ISCS maps now include Periphery planets.

  • Finally got some time to sit down and work on the scripts I had to create Inner Sphere maps in a postscript format. I dumped the plan to use gnuplot to generate a map that I could output to a postscript file as I couldn't find a way to make it plot the planets, label them and draw the 250 and 500 Lightyear rings. One of the reasons, I decided to work on PDF files for the IS maps were the various requests have come in for maps with the planet names displayed. The original code I found for making Inner Sphere maps made a postscript file I returned to that and used ghostscript to do the conversion to PDF. While I would like to include planet labels in my POV-Ray renders, there is no way I could make the map look good and readable.

Datafiles for the ISCS:

The datafiles have been compressed with gzip and archived with tar. Various programs on all the major platforms should have utilities that can uncompress and extract them. You will need the ISCS Include Files and the Era Files with POV-Ray 3.x to render a map for a particular order.

The ISCS Data File (36k)
This is a formated text file that has information for all the eras that the ISCS has compiled information for. The current version is dated for 20000328.

The ISCS Data File (Tab Delimited) (30k)
This is a tab delimited text file that has information for all the eras that the ISCS has compiled information for. The current version is dated for 20000328.

The ISCS Faction Key (2k)
This is a simple text file that has the codes for all of the faction abreviations used by the ISCS.

ISCS Include Files (5k)
The files in this archive are needed by the era files to render the image.

3025 Era Files (56k)
This archive contain the files needed to generate the map for 3025.

3058 Era Files (56k)
This archive contain the files needed to generate the map for 3058.

History:

The "Inner Sphere Map Project" compiled the first Inner Sphere map file for the 3025 era from the data given in the back of the BattleTech House Books. At one point, my gaming group helped to update the file from 3025 to 3052. I also happened to come across a PC program that drew a map of the Inner Sphere with data files for 3025, 3030, and 3039. Once I had all of these data files and the suggestion to make one combined data file, I decided to do it. Shortly there after, I made a post to rec.games.mecha for help to correct some of the errors that cropped up from trying to combine all the files. Thus the Inner Sphere Cartography Society (ISCS) was born out of Team SPAM!'s need for acurate and complete map files for both the Planet Hop and JumpShip Path CGIs.

In adition to getting the data from the "Inner Sphere Map Project", I obtained a postscript file of the Inner Sphere and an awk script. I converted an awk script to perl and rewrote most of it to handle generating output files for the different eras at the same time. Instead of generating postscript, my revised script generated commands for a program called fly and more recently POV-Ray 3.0.1. fly is a program that takes your input and generates a gif file and POV-Ray is a powerful ray tracing program to make photo quality images. In addition to drawing all the planets, I took the JumpShip Path cgi data file and used it to draw the jumps to all the planets in the same faction. The jumps help to give an idea to the borders for the different factions.

Update: I had another break through in the development of the maps. While toying around with developing a map for revised version of Succession Wars, I came up with the idea of using a hex map for the regions of the Inner Sphere. This idea has been ported over the maps for ISCS and has provided me with a much better way define the holdings of the factions. Another improvement in the POV-Ray code is the fact that I am breaking down the information into seperate file that reduced the overall size of the code. It is now possible for the colors to be changed without having to generate the whole POV-Ray file again. This reduction in size lets me hand out the POV-Ray code for others to play with. Note that the available code does not include the jump links that are present in the images here. Any advice from users of POV-Ray or users of other unix/linux ray tracing packages is welcomed. I'm looking for suggestions from people for better faction colors and lighting tips.

Contributors to the ISCS:

  • Michael J. Flynn
  • Nic Jansma
  • Bruce Jensen
  • Dartanyon Lockett
  • Mirko Streckenback
  • Vince W. Tam
  • Chris Mikael Trossen
  • Øystein Tvedten

Archived Files

At various points in time, these were the test cases that I used to render Available now are older images used by the ISCS. These images show the development and progress made with POV-Ray to make better maps for the ISCS. 3025 was used as the base for developing the maps as there were only 5 main factions to worry about.

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TS! These pages brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe:
"Information is in the noise!"
Michael J. Flynn Mon, Jan 19, 2004
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