This has come up repeatedly while participating in the current Community Goal, as PMD2009 48 is closely bordered by Col 70 Sector and large regions of permit-locked systems. Only a relatively narrow corridor between the Bubble, Witchhead Nebula and Orion Nebula can seemingly be traversed. From anywhere "south" or "east" of that corridor, ships need to make significant detours around the locked region.
This would not normally be a problem, but the galaxy map's route plotter is completely unable to deal with it. Instead of finding the detour, it gives up on the route entirely and forces you to manually look for waypoints. This is made worse by the inability to plot a route with waypoints, and the inability to hide (or even visually mark) inaccessible permit-locked systems in the galaxy map, so you can't see the size or relative position of the obstacle that must be circumnavigated.
Attaching a part of my travel map, top-down view. The corners in the south (Synuefe WH-F c0) and east (Col 173 Sector YF-N C7-5) were both unable to plot routes to PMD2009 48 (the endpoint on the southeast). Getting from the Col 173 system to the CG required manually routing hundreds of lightyears west until reaching the corridor between the bubble and Witchhead... at which point, fortunately, it was possible to route to Shenve and from there to the Orion Nebula.
I'm not sure what improvements I'd suggest - admittedly, finding a detour in the galaxy map would likely have some significant computational cost compared to what's done now. But setting a waypoint and continuing to plot a route from there seems quite feasible, and adding "unrestricted / permit-locked" filters to the map (analogous to the "visited/unvisited" etc filters) seems even more so. Both would help a lot with this issue.
This would not normally be a problem, but the galaxy map's route plotter is completely unable to deal with it. Instead of finding the detour, it gives up on the route entirely and forces you to manually look for waypoints. This is made worse by the inability to plot a route with waypoints, and the inability to hide (or even visually mark) inaccessible permit-locked systems in the galaxy map, so you can't see the size or relative position of the obstacle that must be circumnavigated.
Attaching a part of my travel map, top-down view. The corners in the south (Synuefe WH-F c0) and east (Col 173 Sector YF-N C7-5) were both unable to plot routes to PMD2009 48 (the endpoint on the southeast). Getting from the Col 173 system to the CG required manually routing hundreds of lightyears west until reaching the corridor between the bubble and Witchhead... at which point, fortunately, it was possible to route to Shenve and from there to the Orion Nebula.
I'm not sure what improvements I'd suggest - admittedly, finding a detour in the galaxy map would likely have some significant computational cost compared to what's done now. But setting a waypoint and continuing to plot a route from there seems quite feasible, and adding "unrestricted / permit-locked" filters to the map (analogous to the "visited/unvisited" etc filters) seems even more so. Both would help a lot with this issue.
