The Galaxy..... part 2

So, now that I have waxed lyrical about the galaxy, let's see how it looks in the game. There is a galactic map that all players have access to, and initially shows you local position, the star systems around you.

Here you can see I am currently at a populated star system called Aulin (more pictures of this system later). You can see some other star systems nearby, and the blue lines indicate direct routes from your current system to them. You can also see near the bottom of the picture regions of space (Vega, Altair, Achenar, Sol), which themselves have hundreds of star systems within them.

Let's zoom out a little to see some more.

Now we can see a lot more star systems in the general vicinity of our system Aulin, the lines indicating routes plotted to get to these systems. Systems are a factor of light-years (LY) away from each other, and the ships in the game are fitted with a hyperdrive which allows you to jump to other systems.

OK, this looks like a lot of places to visit, but now let's zoom out a whole lot more.

So, now you can see the whole galaxy (the position of Aulin is still there, but it is an insignificant dot in the grand scale of things). Frontier have created the whole galaxy to explore. Every dot in this picture is a star system, and you can visit every dot.

This galaxy map, also has the ability to show you the make-up of a given star system (if it has been explored, more on exploration later).

The star system we see here is LHS 6309, a system close to Aulin, which has a number of stars, planets, asteroid belts, and stations/platforms populated by the game.

As you can see, you get a lot of astronomical information about the objects in the system, you can spend hours reading about all of the different star types and planet types. The planetary rings are also detailed, so you can see their composition.

That's all for now. In my next post, I will show you what it looks like travelling to this system in a ship.