Elite Galaxy to Traveller Sector converter
Play with it at: https://inexorabletash.github.io/elite2trav
Elite system generation code is based on Text Elite by Ian Bell, partially reverse engineered by Christian Pinder, plus some corrections to ensure the system data matches BBC Elite and Oolite.
It will render a quick map of the specified Elite galaxy adjusted to the Traveller hex grid, and output UWP listings. Depending on the conversion style, hex coordinates may exceed 3240 and require post-processing to be used in utilities such as The Traveller Map.
The pseudorandom generation of Elite worlds produces X/Y coordinates in the range 0...255. When mapped, the Y coordinate is divided by two, and to convert to light years the coordinates are scaled by 0.4. So an Elite Galaxy is 102ly by 51ly, or 36 by 17 parsecs on a hex grid - slightly more than half a Traveller sector.
This leads to very dense maps, and to maintain trade routes requires restricting travel to Jump-2 or about 7ly, comparable with witchspace range in Elite.
Alternately, the 0.4 scaling factor can be dropped - or, looking at it another way, everything can be scaled up by 2.5. When this is done, an Elite Galaxy spans just about three Traveller sectors wide and one sector tall. Maximum range is Jump-6, and the sparser nature of the Elite galaxies is maintained.
Traveller was a pencil-and-paper role playing game created by Marc Miller, Loren Wiseman and others at Game Designers' Workshop in 1977. You can find out more about Traveller at Far Future Enterprises or explore an online map of the Traveller Universe at The Traveller Map
Elite is the seminal space combat and trading game, written by Ian Bell and David Braben in 1984 for the BBC Microcomputer. Numerous ports, adaptations and sequel games have been released. Ian Bell's Page details the history of the game. The open source game Oolite is based on the original Elite. Braben's Frontier Developments has published Elite: Dangerous, featuring a massive multiplayer universe encouraging trade, combat, and exploration.
Ian Bell has confirmed that Traveller was one of the direct inspirations of Elite.