Before I move on to the next election cycle, here's a new thingy to look at. Behold, the Galactic Map, in all its blocky, super-zoomed in glory:
The arrangement of systems was done quickly and fairly amateurishly by yours truly. They originally start basically on top of each other and can be moved into pretty much whatever position you want. The best way to make sense of it is to move them a roughly equal distance from each other in most cases. Ignore the directions, they roughly correspond to the direction each jump point is from the Sun, but there's now way to maintain that. For example, it's entirely possible that a jump point 'down' and 'right' in the Teegardens Star system might lead to Luyten 726-8. In that case, I'd simply move the systems around until the links(green lines like the spokes on a wheel) make sense. In some cases that can take some doing.
Which, btw(bonus moment here) I messed up on the exploration of. Why, you didn't ask? Too bad, gonna tell you anyway. Turns out Luyten 726-8 is a binary system as well. I thought the 'B' star was a planet -- that's how unimpressive its surrounding orbits are. Not a huge thing, but made me feel pretty darn stupid. So there it is. As an aside to this aside, something amusing that I read about on the aurora forums was a binary system -- with the secondary star 0.13
light years away. This was the home system for the game(starting with real Sol is optional). With far more advanced technology than we have, the exploratory survey ship required
20 years to get there, with the usual attendant jokes about 'i hope they get along well' and 'their grandkids will have to fly the return trip' and 'hope they brought enough snacks'. We haven't found anything as obscene/rare as that yet, at least.
The purpose of the map is to keep clear which systems lead to which(get a few dozen on there and things will get a little murky without it) in the (dubious) eventuality that SPACE ever makes a proper interstellar empire of itself. This currently obviously shows all the jumps from Sol, we have no idea what other jumps(if any) there are available from the surrounding seven systems.
So, the Galactic Map. If our collective journey is successful it'll expand in time to include dozens or possibly hundreds of systems. If not ... well, we'll have more important things to do. Like go play solitaire.