As a kid, I loved to pour over map books and atlases. As an adult, I still get that frisson of excitement when I open up an Ordnance Survey map (the gold standard for me) of somewhere in the UK and start to understand it. I love the utility of satellite navigation but there's something about the artefact of a paper map that connects to me.
In gaming terms, I often struggle when a roleplaying game setting doesn't have a decent map. I even ended up sourcing an out-of-copyright London map from the period that Handiwork Games (then Contested Ground Studios) Hot War was set so they could have a decent map for the game. The vagueness in their Berlin map for Cold City made it hard for me to engage with the game. I find myself looking at the maps and building connections in my head.
Traveller has always done the same for me. I loved the dot maps that were produced of the Imperium back the early days, and the hex mapped sectors were wonders of discover for me. The original Atlas of the Imperium was a great artefact showing the scope of the empire; probably not very useable in play, but delightful in scope. It lacked UWP data, so it wasn't hugely useful.
Marc Miller's Traveller (T4) brought the First Survey and Milieu Zero books, created from data collapsed back from the MegaTraveller era to represent the state of play at the start of the Third Imperium. Sadly, that was a flawed product as there were base errors in the data when then UWPs were collapsed, and it didn't align fully with the Milieu Zero book. These books were reissued as a single hardcover volume with corrected data and some additional material, Milieu Zero Campaign. That remains one of my favourite Traveller books.
These days, we have travellermap.com, one of the most fantastic resources that I've used online for a roleplaying game. Traveller sector data that shows you the Imperium and beyond, to star system level and even linking to generate planetary maps and to address different eras. A fantastic tool that I've used to generate maps to use both online and at the table. I have absolutely no need for a printed Traveller atlas of the stars. And yet...
Some time ago, a band of brave Travellers set out on a mission to update and create the Second Survey, a corrected and updated version of the Atlas of the Imperium. Working with the travellermap.com data, a new, significantly expanded volume was created, with a talented group including Don McKinney (RIP - the book is dedicated to him) and Joshua Bell (travellermap.com) who edited the book. There's a splendid cover by Ian Stead showing a Donosev-Class Survey Scout.
Available as a PDF or hardcover book on DriveThruRPG, the book is a lovely hardcover volume with 216 pages with colour print in the maps. I purchased the standard colour version and this is one of the few times I've wondered if I should have got the premium. It looks great, but the premium colours tend to pop a bit more and be a little sharper on the eye.
The core of the format is that shown in the image above - a full sector hex-map with the location referenced to the Core Sector. After that, there are several pages of extensive data which includes full UWP, PBG (Population, Belts, Gas Giants) and Base and Trade codes. The star types are given (if I recall correctly, Don told me that these were reworked to reflect a more modern distribution, but I may be wrong on that). There are also extensions that cover Importance, Economics and Culture. I think that these may have been born from T4's Pocket Empires, but my copy isn't to hand for that to check.
The only issue I can see with the data is that in a few places, there's just two much in a system and it overruns into the next column. You can see an example about a third down the first column on the right above. The text is also rather small; however, with a decent light it's fine and there's the PDF and travellermap.com to fall back on.
You can see details of all these here on the travellermap.com site. It's a really useful reference.
There's a short section describing mapping the Imperium, another giving a break out of the code references (a summarised version of the link above) and a section which lists where the sectors came from in Traveller's extensive history.
The in-game conceit is that the book is the 1105 Imperial dated update of the Second Survey which was started in 990 and finally released to the public in 1065.
In conclusion, I'm really happy I bought this. It has no real need in the modern day, but there's just something about having a definitive map set like this. Lovely.
18 November 2025
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