Milky Way Galaxy

[bartmoss]

Your mapping would also depend on how you handle FTL travel. Is it like Star Trek and Star Wars where you just warp from wherever you are, or are there nodes like in Wing Commander and Babylon 5? Another thought to go with the idea suggested by Ryan K, perhaps have distances from the standard plane of reference depicted by two separate colors to show how far up or down from the plane they are. You could go further by adjusting the shade. I don't know how well it would look once done though.

There are a few ways to show z-axis: Size of icon, "distance bars", shade/color... as a colorblind person, I find the later unfortunate; besides this I think I find it more intuitive to represent the spectral class by color. I have not yet decided how to handle smaller, regional maps - For the "overview" maps, any easy solution will do, and in fact I might forego it altogether, especially if I do not have states that overlap each other on the Z axis. (I should have those, though, just for the sake of originality. Hmmm! Thanks for giving me that idea, but damn you for making my life more complicated! - Just kidding

For FTL, I want a limited distance option. I have not QUITE decided on what pseudoscientific reason I use for it, nor on the exact distance - if I limit it too much, my technology will not be able to support a galactic society; but if I am too generous the limitations become meaningless. So this is still a proböem. Speed will be severely limited, though - crossing the Empire the long way will take 1.5 to 2 years.

I should probably add to this that I have so far mapped out a timeline from present day to ~6457 CE, so it does cover a range of technologies, and some eras will have vastly superior FTL drives to others, which will change the political landscape a great deal.

Yeah, I like to bite off more than I can chew.