Generated a star map for the new campaign last night – an area 20 parsecs by 20 parsecs with 150 odd systems and 11 terran planets – so its fairly sparse. But thats realistic – there will be a lot of empty systems out there.
I originally was going to be hyper-realistic and do it all in 3D, but mapping it and showing it to people became impossible. Its just too difficult to work out routes and borders and things like that. Maybe I will make it 3D when they invent holographic displays, but even VRML wasn’t really doing it properly and even with VRML you can’t just print it out and scribble on it.
Still a map is always a good first step in anything.