That's an easy trap to fall into. One of the blessings and curses of the Traveller background is that gravitics and m-drives change *everything*. You have to disregard many of their likely effects to keep the background familiar and gritty enough to be playable and interesting.

As for mapping all the planets in the galaxy, yes, big mirrors and long baselines would allow this for a large fraction of the galaxy. But dust clouds do block lines of sight here and there, mostly to coreward. Working at infrared and radio wavelengths allows you to see through these clouds to a degree, but you'll still have less detailed information about areas behind them. Of course, add in jump drive, and you can move "sideways" far enough to peek around the edges of the smaller clouds.

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 6:29 AM, Christopher Sean Hilton <xxxxxx@vindaloo.com> wrote:

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 12:19:32PM +1000, Tim wrote:

[ ...snip... ]

>
> I guess it depends to what extent the Vilani felt a need to chart
> stars. There are two very big advances in the ability to observe
> stars, both just ahead of our own technology level in Traveller
> terms..
>
> The first huge step comes with cheap access to space, i.e. with
> effective maneuver drives. That reduces the cost of placing and
> maintaining space observatories to less than a hundredth of current
> real-world costs. It allows placing huge mirrors at relatively low
> cost into space, free of atmospheric distortions and many other
> undesirable influences. That would improve both resolution and light
> gathering ability by orders of magnitude for similar cost. At similar
> cost to our own observatories, astronomers could directly image
> planets about stars within a few hundred parsecs. A century of
> indirect observations using it would be enough to gather basic
> information about planets orbiting just about any star in the galaxy.
>
> The second huge step comes with jump drive, which brings the ability
> to build observation sites in deep space as well as to compare
> observations from locations a million times further apart than
> single-system observations would allow. It would allow astronomers to
> directly image planets in distant parts of the galaxy at relatively
> low cost, and to directly map the surfaces of planets about nearer
> stars without visiting them.
>
>
> Both of these capabilities were achieved by the Vilani a few thousand
> years before the First Imperium. So it's just a question of whether
> they had any interest in pursuing them at all.
>

My bad, I hadn't thought through the implication of cheap space travel
and Jump drive to observe stars over long distances. I'm also caught
up in the real world contemporary changes to long distance
observation. Thus, I fell into the assumption that most of the data
would be gathered by visiting the systems.

--
Chris

__o "All I was trying to do was get home from work."
_`\<,_ -Rosa Parks
___(*)/_(*)____.___o____..___..o...________ooO..._____________________
Christopher Sean Hilton [chris/at/vindaloo/dot/com]

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