On 12 Feb 2016 at 18:24, Craig Berry wrote:

> I once had fun trying to imagine what tactical and strategic planning
> maps might look like in Traveller. You'd have to label every asset
> with the time at which it was known to be at that location, and then
> have secondary versions of that asset spread across all the places it
> could be now, weighted by probability. I was picturing color coding
> -- yellow/orange/red for increasingly old intel about the enemy,
> violet/blue/green for increasingly old intel about friendlies. Add on
> notations for where friendlies are supposed to be headed in the
> future, where enemies are predicted to be going, and your own
> alternatives, and you get a map that's trying to display about nine
> dimensions of data in two or three dimensions of display. :) I'm sure
> that learning to read and use such displays takes up a fair amount of
> time in Naval officer training.

Heck, consider the nav/tactical displays in Cherryh's Chanur books.
You've got a display of where things were at one point, gotten from
the bouy when you jump insystem (unless it was shut down to frustate
you).

You've got a seriers of "ripples" spreading out from where your ship
is/was showing where you'll be getting data from *your* sensors (and
you'll actually have two sets of such, one for passive sensors, and
another spreading at half the speed, for active sensors)

Then add on to that various color coding or other ripples for when
other places/ships in-sysem can detect *you*.

And that's just with lightspeed lag and ships that can move somewhat
faster than Traveller manuever drives can.

So even *tactical* displays are going to be confusing.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com