Freelance Traveller

The Traveller Map Turns 20

by Josh Bell

This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue.

In April 2005, back when dinosaurs roamed the Internet, I made a post to the venerable Traveller Mailing List announcing an online interactive map of the Official Traveller Universe:

I popped by http://jtas.net/travelleratlas/ and thought "cool!" at first, then realized that most of the maps had been generated by hand. Aaaaaaah! That just makes my teeth hurt with sympathy pain. Also, Google Maps had just gone beta, and I found a copy of GURPS Traveller at Half Price Books (which features the Imperium Map in a "console" frame) so I created a conceptual blend of all of the above [...]
I've tested in IE6 and Firefox (so it should work with the latest Netscape/Mozilla browsers). Click and drag in the map, zoom in, go wild. You'll need a decent 'net connection. Note that it's generating all of the tile images on the fly, so I hope it can relieve some of the tedium of maintaining projects like the one at jtas.net.
(If you're curious, it's a tiny C# ASP.NET app with less than 1400 lines of code. There's a "readme" on the site with other details. And yes, I've fired off the requisite mail to Marc.)



At that point I didn't even have the TravellerMap.com domain registered yet, but the site was functional enough to invite others to take a look at a temporary address. The initial feedback was encouraging, so I continued to refine the site.

I’ve told the story many times before: I was directly inspired by the mockup in GURPS Traveller (see figure 1).

It was also inspired by Google Maps, which went live in February 2005, a mere two months earlier! The earliest image I have of the site is from mid 2006, thanks to the Internet Archive (see figure 2). Although it already sported a search box, a lot of the interface was still directly lifted from the GURPS Traveller mockup, with radio buttons for selecting options and buttons to scroll and a drop-down for scale since not everyone was familiar with dragging and zoom gestures.

At one point I even made sure the site worked with Netscape 7.2 running on Windows 98 (see figure 3):

I have continued to refine the user interface over time to make the experience more streamlined and immersive. Clicking on worlds brings up information boxes, the site can find jump routes between systems, and you can easily generate printouts of world data, sector booklets, or posters of official data or custom data for your campaign. Sectors link to published resources for players and referees to learn more.

Since 2013 the site has hosted the “Official” data for the Traveller universe, with many contributors iterating on sector data to improve the quality and fix glitches to keep it in line with published resources. The crew at Mongoose Publishing reaches out when new supplements are produced so we can keep the data up to date.

In The Great Rift supplement by Martin J. Dougherty (Mongoose Publishing, 2017), the Traveller Map is even called out as an in-universe resource for characters! I like to claim that the map is a benefit of membership in the Travellers' Aid Society. And when the site has glitches, players are encouraged to visit the TAS office at their local class A or B starport for assistance.

More history of the site can be found at: https://travellermap.com/doc/about.

Thanks to all who have contributed in any way, with code, data, suggestions, bug reports, or positive feedback. I’m thrilled that the site has served the community for so long.