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Comment by tyfon | Hacker News Reader

Playing Elite Dangerous, a lot of these names are quite familiar. I have at one point held base at Wolf 359 at least :)

Maps like these are so fascinating, anyone know of something similar with updated planet information?

As soon as I opened that page I had a flashback to playing Elite on my ZX Spectrum as a 10-year-old. I had to look twice at the map to check it didn't show Lave and Reidquat.

And that's really weird, because now I look into it, I think there's no way I saw a map like this in that game. Nor Frontier on the Amiga, as far as I can see. But when I look at the map, Elite is all I can think about, somehow I feel certain that's where I've seen it before, even though the evidence suggests I'm wrong. There's some strong association going on there. Weeeeeeird.

Edit: I think it might actually just be that I first saw this page so long ago that it feels the same... As soon as I zoomed out I knew I'd seen it before, but not for a long long time.

The Map Is Not the Territory. Your memory of the mental model of our local neighbors that you'd worked out is overriding the actual memories.

Something similar happens when we remember childhood houses. Spaces where there was a lot of activity seem bigger, because we've mapped those areas extensively.

Interesting. I’m aware of the common feeling that one’s childhood room seems “much smaller than I remembered” when it’s visited in adulthood (especially after a long time away), but I had never heard that feeling tied to level of time/activity done in that space.

It makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

No, it wasn't the mental model, it was literally this picture, i.e. the image, down to the colours and everything.

is it because you were small when you were child and thats why these spaces are bigger in your memmory than you experience them now. for example for my kids ceiling is 5 times theyr own heigt. that would be huge for adult me to have ceiling 10meter high.

The association you have is not for the local / galactic chart from Elite, but rather the navigational scanner when in flight - used the same 3-D positional rendering for nearby objects. See bottom centre here: https://www.retrogamer.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Elite-...

I think it's that the layout of the map, with flags going above and below a circular plane, looks exactly like (and is perhaps inspired by) the scanner that shows where ships around you in local space are in Elite/Oolite (FOSS Elite 1984 clone, highly recommended).

You're not the only one - C64 Elite player here.

There are similarities between the scanner and this map, but the in-game map wasn't even close. There's probably an interesting visual memory research to be done into how we make that association.

The colours and font are quite evocative of the early versions of Elite, even if the names of the stars aren't :-)

About 15 years ago, I used the open source program, Celestia. You could move around the solar system and beyond in 3D. It was cool at the time, but I haven't looked at it in a long time.

It also allowed add-on data to be imported. Hobbyists would create accurate 3D models of weird shaped asteroids using the latest data from NASA, and you could download the data, and view it using the main Celestia program.

Maybe someone has posted updated data in Celestia format somewhere?

You can script it in Lua. I once used that to make a presentation in it for my wife to use in class. Showed the Solar system from above, then visited Sol and each planet in turn, doing a split-screen with Earth and zooming whichever pane had the smaller body to compare sizes, that sort of thing. It was like having a scriptable Magic Schoolbus. Pretty cool.

That sounds really awesome and it seems the project is still alive [1]. I'm going to play with this after work tomorrow!

[1] https://celestia.space/

I'd like to explore Celestia with my son but can't find an installer for Ubuntu 19.10. Anyone know of a Flatpak or Snap installer for Celestia?

O7 Commander. I love Elite exactly because it lets me fly to those stars. Since we're still not at the point where we can go there in person, we can at least launch the game and dream about a future whete it's possible.

Wolf 359 has a rather storied history in fiction. I would guess more people are probably familiar with the reference in Star Trek: The Next Generation than in the Elite games. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_and_planetary_systems_in...

I was surprised when I found out that it's a real place. I wonder what is the portion of made up and real places in Star Trek and other space opera

I'm playing right now. Just docked at Morgan's Rock (on the edge of the Sagitarius arm heading back towards Sol) after a ~20kly loopy exploration/POI tourism trip.

Nothing comes close to this game for gaining an understanding of the shape, distances and density (or lack thereof in some areas!) in the Milky Way (you've got an FSD/FTL drive but not a good enough one to leave the galaxy).

It makes you appreciate the distances between binary stars when it takes 30+ minutes to travel from one to the other at 1000C :)

Anyone slightly interested in astronomy should take the game for a spin or just to open the galaxy map and zoom out.

I remember arriving on such a system and being a little surprised that I could barely even see the companion star. It was just a much brighter star among all the others.

Exploring the galaxy in Elite is incredible, but just like everything else in the game, it's so damn boring and repetitive. FSD charging, jump, cooldown/fuel scoop. Repeat 1000x.

Same comment for me, but star control 2.

If we can't travel there in real life, at least there is video game tourism.

I was thinking the same, but more so with Frontier: Elite II :-)

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