Pact Days: Star Charts #ValespiaPact

Welcome back to Pact Days. I wanted to talk a little bit about maps. 

I like to draw maps for some of my story so that I can keep track of what is where. For my blog story, Assassins' Retirement, I drew his house floor plans so that I wouldn't get locations wrong or contradict myself. With The Valespain Pact, I found that I needed to make a star chart. Some of this story takes place in space and I had tacked on travel times in Alpha Trine and Striker, not realizing that it could become a problem.

The hardest question to this star chart situation was how do I draw one because space and that in it are not one dimensional. And I don't have the skill to draw something that would be similar to a holographic image in the movies. 

I googled and googled and my google-foo brought up a lot of beautiful pictures and diagrams of space but it really didn't help me. But as i was looking around the house for ideas, I stumbled upon an ancient notebook of graph paper and an idea sparked. 

I needed to draw not only the galaxy that The Valespian Pact covers, I also needed the Milky Way and the galaxy that the Arthro War took place. The graph paper was great because the light years could be equally counted. The Milky Way is 100k light years across and Andromeda is 220k light years across. In between the two sits a small galaxy that is only 3 million light years (Triangulum) that is the Arthro Galaxy.

There are sheets of graph paper joined and it's too big for my scanner. Pictures will have to suffice. :) This is the Milky Way. I bit anti-climatic, right? I've only pinpointed a few things in the Milky Way: Earth, Earth 2.0, the prison planet, and the location of another planet for one of the future books. You can also see the GryFalconi planet, Aries 7. Sidonia is the planet that Dargon and Alpha fought V'Saar on when Dargon was in the military. Cypress, which will be important later on but not a spoiler. And Triangulum according to the Terren star charts but a.k.a Arthro Galaxy by the survivors of the Arthro Way. 

I didn't put a neat circle around Andromeda because it is more filled out than the Milky Way and I wanted to respect the spiral tails of the galaxy shape. These are the primary planets that make up the Cypress Council of Neighn and the Valespian Pact. I even put the space station where Zeus worked on the chart. I'm going to add more space station and transportation buoys that are used for space travel. I might even insert the smaller coalitions outside of Andromeda that Atlainticia has to deal with.

Together, this is what the three galaxies together look like. It's not a "WOW" map but it's a map that will be able to serve a purpose for me and the story. I wouldn't want to get lost in space... LOL!

Thank you for stopping by and reading!!