Some background:
My interstellar civilization(s) have fled our home Solar System, spreading throughout the nearby systems in the Orion Arm. They possess FTL, but for plot reasons, they have only just begun to reach Sagittarius.
Since they have spread out through a large portion of the Orion arm (but not all of it), a standardized form of mapping was needed. In most of my drafts, locations are simply referred to via the "Sector XXX" trope, but, as we know here on this Stack, space is massiveandthree-dimensional. Thus, the three-digit sector schema won't work.
Relevant Information:
The sector naming schema is chosen because this system only needs to point towards a location, and provide minimal information about what is there (for example, sector 123a is the first star system in a sector.)
Assuming the following conditions:
- The Orion Arm is 10 kly long, 1 kly deep, and 3 kly wide (small estimates, I know.)
- Each sector is 5 ly apart
There should be 200x800x2000, or just around 300 million unique sectors.
This number seems absurdly large, however. Even is you used a base 16 coordinate system, you would still have a ~7-digit identifying number. Addendum: You could lower this number by having the system be two-dimensional, only dividing up along the galactic plane.
I did have the idea of using a truncated three-dimensional coordinate system, though. An example would be Sector 02101440.
Of course, a coordinate system might not even be the optimal choice, and conventional naming schema for star systems are essentially out the window, as I also want to be able to point at an empty region of space and say "This is Sector XYZ."
With all of that now in mind: How would an interstellar civilization map the arms of the galaxy?
Criteria:
- The ability to point to and label any region of space
- The ability to identify components in a system
- The system being expandable
- 3D is not required. It's secondary to all the above, as a sector can always be subdivided.
Systems that allow for shorter designations, or the ability to truncate one to be shorter, without overgeneralizing are preferred.
