After a hiatus while moving my family down to San Francisco and lots of unpacking, I have cycles to do a little more work on the map now.
Now that I have my copy of Supplement 10 unpacked I've tackled borders for the Solomani Confederation, passing through the Solomani Rim, Alpha Crucis, Old Expanses, Spica, Langere (hello, Hivers!), Neworld, Aldebaran, Canopus, Ustral Quadrant, Dark Nebula, Reaver's Deep, Daibei and Magyar. I still need to tweak Daibei a bit.
For Aslan/Solomani and Solomani/Hiver borders I followed the conventions of Supplement 10 - the polities claim empty hexes between border worlds. This makes for more attractive borders, but at the expense of hand-tweaking.
Speaking of hand-tweaking (or wanting to avoid it), I've been playing with a different algorithm for allygen. Instead of starting with worlds within an allegiance and expanding outwards (which creates blobby regions of empty hexes), it starts big and contracts each region, snipping off "bad" hexes - empty hexes with three empty neighbors, and breaking up straight spans of 4 empty hexes, repeating until a minimal border is achieved. This yeilds very natural looking results. I'll publish a page on the algorithm soon.
For those sec2pdf fans out there I've added an MSEC generator - browse to http://www.travellermap.com/MSEC.aspx?sector=Solomani%20Rim and it'll spit out a rough .msec file for the specified sector based on my data. I haven't tested the result, yet, and it could use more work - e.g. grouping based on allegiance, etc.
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