Stellar Cartography

Traveller's maps are two dimensional.

The universe is, by and large, three dimensional.

It only started bugging me when I bought GDW's 2300 AD.  That game had an excellent map describing a sphere some 50 light years in diameter around Sol.

So I embarked on a quest to fix the maps.

The problem is much of the existing material depends on the topography from the 2D maps.

I was on the S-Bahn in Stuttgart when a solution hit me.  The Traveller maps were just like the maps of the train line.  They didn't necessarily correspond to the real position of things, just how the train reached them.

That settled it with me for a while, but there's a canon device where the Imperium is using a dispersed array of telescopes to look very long distances.

Dammit, I still need a 3D explanation.

Then it hit me.

Take the existing "subway map" and print it all on one gigantic sheet of paper.

Crumple that sheet into a big wad.

Jumpspace has to follow the paper, three space doesn't.

Most places on the 2D map are still very close in this 3D representation, and if one were to actually map it out, you could figure out the real distances of things.

Even with the miraculous maneuver drives from Traveller, a slower than light trip around a fold in the map will still take far longer than the multiple jumps will by following the paper.

The only real wrinkle is that in some places beaming a message will take less time than sending it by X-Boat.

No solution is perfect, but at least this is playable.