Why arent Sprial galaxies spiral shaped?

[Claymore Righ]

This is one of those questions I've have for over a year now and just never posted.

It would be nice is the spiral galaxy setting created a galaxy that had a galactic core (i.e. cluster) in the center and then had arms that curved outward where there *might* be the occasional linkage between arms (that would be another nice option linked or un-linked arms).

I often can't, by looking at them, tell the difference between a spiral, a rim and a random galaxy.

I also suppose that you could say that a map only shows part of a galaxy, which means that what would be neat would be to have 4 kinds of spiral, one for each quadrant showing part of the core and then the arms spinning out from that part of the core.

Am I just babbling here? probably.

[Suicide Junkie]

There is a bit of fiddling needed to get the spiral to work out right.
You need to have enough stars that the arms get filled in, but few enough that the crossover is kept to a minimum.
I reccommend turning "all connected" off, and hitting "generate now" a couple times until you get one to turn out ok.

[Claymore Righ]

Thanks S.J.

I have been fiddling with it and hand editing the results.

It still seeems to me that the cluster with arms would look and play better.

[PvK]

I thought it was because it was just a cross-section of a single very thin spiral arm, rather than an entire spiral galaxy. Remember these are quadrants, not entire galaxies, although you can pretend if you want to. However, real galaxies have astronomically more systems than a quadrant, and are correspondingly larger, as well. A quadrant is just a speck compared to a whole galaxy.

PvK

[LGM]

Originally posted by PvK:
I thought it was because it was just a cross-section of a single very thin spiral arm, rather than an entire spiral galaxy. Remember these are quadrants, not entire galaxies, although you can pretend if you want to. However, real galaxies have astronomically more systems than a quadrant, and are correspondingly larger, as well. A quadrant is just a speck compared to a whole galaxy.

PvK

A quadrant is a fourth of a galaxy, not a speck.

[LGM]

I have hosted several games using Spiral Army galaxies. You have to generate a few times to get some nice shape to them. The main characteristic is you get a ring in the middle that you have go around the ring to cross. There is also a tendency to get spoke lines going outward and rings going around the middle. Dead-ends tend to be out on the edges.

[Andrés]

255 are not enough systems for a good looking a spiral galaxy.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

sounds like a good idea for a custom map.

[PvK]

Originally posted by LGM:
A quadrant is a fourth of a galaxy, not a speck.

Well the word "quadrant" means a fourth of something, usually a plane. I thought in SE4 it was more like the Star Trek use, which just seems to mean a general region of space. (e.g. "We're the only ship in the quadrant..." (The Wrath of Khan)) At any rate, when I said a quadrant was a speck, I was saying in comparison to a real-universe galaxy. But even so, that was perhaps a gross over statement of its size, since even if you hack the system number up to 256, an actual galaxy is thought to contain about 100,000,000,000 stars, so the largest SE4 quadrant would be one four-billionth of a galaxy.

PvK

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
But even so, that was perhaps a gross over statement of its size, since even if you hack the system number up to 256, an actual galaxy is thought to contain about 100,000,000,000 stars, so the largest SE4 quadrant would be one four-billionth of a galaxy.

PvK

one four-billionth... sounds like a speck to me.