I'm working on a 1ly = 1cm scale. The resulting map will be ~70cm in diameter. I don't really want to zoom the scale in, as this will make it really hard to print the thing eventually. I could make the stars, labels etc smaller, but they are already tiny. Yes eventually I will want major / minor routes, that should help a little, but until I know what colonies are where, that's not possible either. Omitting star system is kind of moot since the point of this exercise is to include all stars; I had a large scale "galactic" map that had way less detail and in the end it did not satisfy me.

Thanks for the suggestions though.

I did experiment with creating basically a flowchart of stars; I actually prefer the absolute positioning since it DOES help me figure out what stars are close enough to each other to have jump routes. Yes I should really script that. Anyway, for actual practical use later on the absolute positioning is not really too useful. I'll attach a flowchart of these stars:

Click image for larger version.  Name: starchart-relative-sample.png  Views: 426  Size: 300.3 KB  ID: 35408

Since this was an experiment, I eventually stopped putting distances on the connections. Sol/Earth is a box shape, it is on the left end of the branch in the lower right corner. The stars in the upper right corner are not yet connected to the rest - there is actually another cluster of 20+ stars that is unconnected to the rest and which I didn't include yet.