On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 01:31:32PM -0400, Christopher Sean Hilton wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 10:32:21AM +1000, Tim wrote:
> > I expect every star in the galaxy to have been catalogued thousands of
> > years before even the First Imperium.  Even most of the planets and
> > their orbits would have been identified.  Certainly that would hold
> > for every system within a thousand parsecs of Traveller's charted
> > space.
> >
>
> The way I see it, maybe during the First Imperium, but otherwise I
> agree.

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.

- Tim