That wasn’t so bad…
Spent most of today finishing off the actual map. I still haven’t quite gotten the layout algorithms to be playing nice, but fortunately a friend of mine was able to actually reorganize the rats nest of warp links down in Elysian space. Of course, I went and made it all messy again, but that was mainly to get a few more unexplored systems closer to the edge of the map.
The details themselves are pretty straightforward. All colours except for the dull yellow are systems claimed by various empires (the software actually lets me mix and match colours claimed by systems; looking forward to using that!) Systems with thick outlines are ones with shipyards, while system names that are underlined have populations in them. Thick jump lines with circles at the ends are part of the (CC) network. You’ll notice Grant is missing a circle and the link isn’t coloured blue. That’s because it’s still missing the link on the Grant side. As well, nebulae now have their own icon instead of circles, little clouds that stand out nicely.
As I had expected, it’s a LOT easier to update and modify and add information to the map. I can copy-paste formatting as well as design layouts, so adding extra systems or updating information is really, really easy. I’ve printed off a black and white copy. It’s not as easy to read as the coloured version, but it’s not too bad. And given how it’ll be taking abuse as it’s used and updated, not putting the extra expense into printing a coloured version makes some sense. Though I guess in the future I can just have it printed for cheap at Staples.
All that’s left to do really is to post it up on the corkboard, and then redo/update all the pins to make them a bit more durable (that’s another annoyance. The flags make sense and they work, but the glue for them isn’t as strong as I would like, so I have to give them a fair amount of maintenance time and again. Nothing a bottle of superglue can’t fix, though…
Dollarton Proxima Shipyards 