(just had an idea. born out of my dislike of soase's unrealistic solar-system representation. i know its meant to be a representation like gcii's representation of solar-systems but gcii's method doesn't seem to fit well in this game.)
we scale down the galaxy:
rather than creating a galaxy, we create one system.
a star becomes a planet and a planet an orbital body (e.g. moon).
in this scale, for example,
mercury, venus, earth, mars, etc... are added as suns.
and their moons are added as planets in their gravity fields.
sol can still be added of course.
and we're not really scaling it down, we can still add other stars and their planets.
we just link the phase lanes between the stars.
advantages:
1. a more realistic solar-system layout is possible
2. moons and other orbital bodies can be added
3. game-field is smaller but actually larger
questions:
1. is this possible? can't see why not at the moment.
2. visually, can we use the planetary 3d objects as stars? i've not looked at modding info yet but i can guess its just a matter of adding the new "suns" in the proper lists.
comments are welcome, of course.