Weird graphic design of galaxy regions

Archvillain

Archvillain
Something about the design of the galaxy regions bothers me

Regions:
yqSADeS.png


It looks like it is graphic design that is aping the appearance of IAU constellation boundaries to fake sciencey authenticity much like "sympathetic-magic"

IAU boundaries:
3ZKW8Jh.jpg



There are no constellations to be divided on a galaxy map, so to put this largely-irrelevant little suspicion to bed, I'd like to find or figure out (or invent) an alternative reasoning why the regions look the way they do.
Clearly the new galaxy regions are following the spiral arms, which is cool and meaningful and useful.
Clearly using a circular grid like this is a defendable approach for mapping a circular galaxy.
But why are the divisions between regions drawn where they are? They don't seem to correspond to stellar mass, or volume, or equal divisions, or anything obvious.
Why are all the little subcuts the way they are? (Other than the suspected graphic-design reason I'm trying to get away from)

Can we come up with some good background or at least convincing handwavium for this? (I know that for most people there is zero need, but I've got a few weeks until I get my hands on this, so why not :D)

The region map does look cool - I'm not complaining - I just want to have my cake and eat it too!
 
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znôrt

znôrt
Archvillain said:
Why are all the little subcuts the way they are? (Other than the suspected graphic-design reason I'm trying to get away from)
Click to expand...

nice try. let's see if someone digs up an explanation, but i think it's really just to look cool, some sort of large scale antialiasing. i just mean the jaggies, unlike the general distribution.
 

Stigbob

Stigbob
Its where different alien civilisations lived before we wiped them all out, except those pesky thargoids.

I say "we" it was really the imperials.
 

Boff'in

Boff'in
I burst out laughing when they said 42, for just “of course” let’s face it “mostly harmless” is the first Hitchhikers gag/Reference, and I was beaming proudly for the devs for doing so, (great minds think alike), as I think the community would have done the same

But yeah,
Just seeing the Galaxy sliced up into funky shapes, like you see in sci-fi shows, it really made me happy.

The whole blinking and beeping, gameplay and interface - felt appealing.
And even if it’s slower than a honk, it far quicker than flying within XY light-seconds to get than surface scan.
Now you can find out if that planetary body 300,000 LS out is worth the trip to fly out to.

As I find exploring (as it stands today) unappealing.

Amazing job all round.
 

Muetdhiver

Muetdhiver
I like it. It looks exactly how we divided countries with natives during colonisation times :

Jagged mess of straight lines from diplomatic horse trading with little care about the "details" on the ground.

I really happy about them creating the different regions. I hope some will get better names than
sector 21 though. If each sector is seeded with a few unique discoveries, it'll open an interesting
exploration era.
 

M00ka

M00ka
Don't forget we are only seeing the 2D representation, the shapes may make a lot more sense when we see them in the 3D GalMap. Kind of reminds me of electoral distributions areas, maybe each region contains an equal number of systems or something. Anyway, I am not fussed about it, at least FD have done something that is unexpected and will hopefully make that game better.
 

FNLWA

FNLWA
The regions are small near the galactic core (where there is a high star density) and gradually get bigger on the outside (where the the star density is lower). So to me it seems like they tried to have about the same number of stars in each region and otherwise just tried to make it look like the IAU boundaries. Same number of stars means same probability of finding things when the only hint was "There is something in region xy". This is my best guess for their reasoning.
 

Flimley

Flimley
It’s a jigsaw puzzle of a mystery for sure. I instantly wondered the same thing. And would like to learn the logic determining the boundaries.

Flimley
 
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