How to move around

The controls

On a computer they are written at the bottom right inside the atlas too, so you never have to come back here. On a phone that legend stays, but it moves: it takes the full width just above the time dial, and it changes words — it names finger gestures, not the mouse and the keys. So the names you read below are the ones you see on a computer.

with the mouse

drag

turns your head

shift + drag

moves your viewpoint sideways

wheel

changes the scale

click

opens the card, and nothing else

double click

centres on what you picked

Click and double click do two different things on purpose: reading a card should not cost you the place you were standing in.

from the keyboard

arrows

turn your head

shift + arrows

move sideways

+ and −

closer and further away, as do page up and page down

space

picks whatever the crosshair is on

[ and ]

previous and next object

enter

lands, where landing is possible

esc

goes up one context

H

back to the overall view

In the search box the arrow keys run through the results, enter picks one and esc closes it.

And at the top left there is an ↑ up button, always visible. It does what esc does, and it exists because esc is not on a phone and is not guessable on a computer: the one control that holds the whole navigation together cannot be invisible.

The pointer highlights what it is about to select: if nothing lights up, there is nothing selectable there — and in this atlas that means it has not been measured.

The four framings

Four buttons in a column on the left edge, half way up — not in the bottom left corner: that corner holds the numbers. They solve a real problem: a galaxy is a disc, and from the wrong angle it turns into a line.

On a narrow screen they do not disappear, because they are the only remedy where there is no keyboard: they move into a row at the top, and only the word of each one survives — the second line you read below is not shown on a phone.

The atlas itself is in Italian only for now, so these are the words you will actually read on the four buttons — the English is the meaning, not a second label to look for.

dall’alto

from above — the cutting plane seen face on

di taglio

edge on — along the plane, to see its thickness

inquadra

frame — centres on what you have chosen

insieme

all of it — the whole scene inside the screen

Contexts, one inside another

There are no separate screens: you descend and climb back inside the same scene. Milky Way, solar system, Earth, Moon — and back out again with esc, in the same order.

Top left, a bar always shows the chain of where you are. It answers the only question anyone actually asks while navigating, which is why it exists: where am I.

The card

A click on an object opens its card: radius, mass, semi-major axis, orbital period, eccentricity, length of day, axial tilt, temperature, known moons. These are measured values, not rounded for effect.

At the bottom, depending on what you picked: details, land, enter the system. If what you are looking at is a generated system rather than an observed one, the card says so — it reads hypothetical, and that is not a nuance.

The numbers at the bottom left

from the Sun

how far you are from home

from the centre

how far you are from the centre of the Galaxy. Earth sits 8.18 kiloparsecs out

stars drawn

how many it is drawing at this instant

Time

There is a date at the bottom, and it runs. The atlas opens on the instant you open it, time can be sped up and run backwards, and the today button brings you back to now.

The positions of the nine planets on that date are the real ones: they come from the J2000 orbital elements with their secular motions. The moons are not: their starting phase is arbitrary, because for satellites we are missing the reference epoch — and that is written on each moon’s card rather than passed over. A clock that lies is worse than a clock that has stopped.

Searching

Type the name of a star or a system into the search box: top right on a computer, bottom right on a phone, where it sits above your thumb instead of under your other hand. It works with proper names and with catalogue designations.

Landing

On the Moon, Mars and Earth you go all the way down to the surface, with spacecraft imagery in tiles. Measured relief — mountains as tall as they really are — exists today only for Earth: where no elevation source exists the body stays a sphere, and the card says so instead of pretending. On the other bodies the maps exist at lower resolution. On Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune you cannot land for a simple reason: there is no surface.

Two ways to be here

This is an atlas, and there are two ways to cross it. You choose, and you can change your mind whenever you like.

Atlas. Go wherever you want, immediately. No cost, no waiting: it is an instrument for looking, and looking is already the whole thing. From here you can see Enceladus right now. Everything above is this mode, and you do not have to learn to fly in order to see Saturn.

Course. Start a ship and actually go. The journey costs something, and that is why arriving means something.

Press N to start the engines, and only inside a system: anywhere else they refuse, because between one star and the next there is nothing to manoeuvre around. You start at rest relative to the body you had framed, five radii out.

Flying

Kilometres per second, real inertia, real gravity. This is not a camera with an engine noise laid over it: the test bench checks that an orbit closes to within seven metres of its starting point after a 1.970-hour lap, and that a free fall reaches 0.564 km/s where the arithmetic predicts 0.5636.

The journey is paid for in time

This is the rule that holds everything together, and the only invention: the ship travels at honest speeds, and what gets accelerated is time. G starts a cruise towards the target you picked with T, and the clock slows as you close in.

Earth → Mars

0.524 AU — 3.03 days aboard, about 3 seconds for you

Earth → Jupiter

4.203 AU — 24.27 days aboard, about 24 seconds for you

You leave Earth on 14 November and come down on Jupiter on 9 December: the calendar moved on while you were travelling, and you can see it on the dial.

Those distances hold for that day, because two planets are not always the same distance apart: Mars can be half an astronomical unit away or two and a half. And something follows that you will work out for yourself: the planets are not where you left them. That is why the ship aims not at where the target is, but at where it will be when you arrive.

Time aboard is not time at home

At half the speed of light the clocks disagree. For Proxima Centauri, at 1.30 parsecs: 4.23 years is how long the light takes, 8.5 is what passes on the calendar, and 7.3 is what passes for you aboard. This is not decoration: it is relativity, and it is why these numbers cannot be rounded to taste.

The jump chart, and the best idea we have had

M opens the chart: the same galactic map as the atlas, with the range circles drawn on it. Inside them you can go, outside you cannot, and every target says what it costs in years.

Range is not fuel: it is the quality of the measurement. You jump where the distance is known well enough not to miss.

It is the rule of the atlas applied to movement: selectable = measured becomes reachable = measured well. And look at what happens between two numbers that are almost the same:

2.00 parsecs

you reach 5 stars

2.26 parsecs

you reach 667

A third of a parsec more takes the reachable world from five stars to six hundred and sixty-seven: a hundred and thirty-three times over. Nobody decided that: it is how the real stars are arranged, and all we did was count them. The gate is a single jump, from Ross 154 to Lacaille 8760, and anyone who does not pass through it stays in the solar neighbourhood however long they wander.

When a region of the chart is empty, it is not the game barring your way: it is a piece of sky nobody has measured yet. And widening your range does not mean a bigger tank: it means better instruments.

A jump can be planned, and it costs what it says, but it cannot be performed yet: an attachment in the engine is missing. The button is there, waiting.

What is not here, and not by oversight

No combat, no enemies, nothing to take from anyone. The ship is not a weapon: it is the means, and it exists so that a journey has a cost and therefore a meaning.

The logbook is not saved. J opens it, and it records where you have been and what it cost you for as long as the page stays open, then it is gone — and it tells you so at the top, rather than letting you find out afterwards.

That is a choice, not an omission. A logbook that survives needs to know who you are, and this is an atlas that opens with no account, no consent banner and no network. An anonymous logbook in a corner of your browser is not a memory: it is a thing that one day disappears without anyone knowing why.

The reason to come back is a different one, and an honester one: the frontier moves in jumps, and every time it moves, the map you thought was finished opens again.

the ship’s keys

N

engines on and off

T

change target (shift+T to go back)

G

start the cruise, X cancels it

M

open and close the jump chart

J

open the logbook

V

switch between onboard and outside view

C

recentre the view