As others have already brought out, the OP question about the number of stars in the sky is in relation to using a limited number of playfields really falls back to the choices made by someone who runs a server. In the current implementation, you can't make a server to server jump through the warp or teleport mechanism so the total population of people who play that style is already locked in and the server admin facilitates getting people in the same place with those choices. As a player finding a server that favors PvP will put you where you want to be regardless of the count of stars- if you want to hide just jump far away from the alpha/beta/delta center and the further out you go the less likely it is anybody will find you unless you tell them where you are. At another level the map is too big which spanj pointed out in one of his recent vids where he described the process of going someplace you've never been or getting back ... the currently implemented tools are a sign that "Eleon hates us" or words to that effect. The galaxy map lets you see the relative location of all of the stars, their class, and their names. Given a name you can search for a particular star and find it in the map. This info is available by floating over every star so like our reality it is possible to create a comprehensive map of the universe but the similarity ends there- that data isn't available in any form other than the map and no tools are provided to chart a course or find the best path from where you are to where you want to go. It's pretty trivial to convert the data available in the galaxy view into a directed graph where each star is a node and the formula d = ((x2 - x1)^2 + (y2 - y1)^2 + (z2 - z1)^2)^1/2 to determine the cost from one star to another ... you can float over a couple and enter the coordinates and the resulting value is equal to the distance in LY that's displayed. Determining the best path can be determined using either Dykstra's or the Floyd-Warshall algorithm. These mechanisms would support finding the best path even if the costs weren't symmetric (ie "going from X to Y is a 20LY hop but going from Y to X is a 200LY journey") but because the data is (apparently) not available through the mod API the only way you could scrape it would be by using some sort of AI image detailer that simulated a navigator playing with the existing map. For the places you've been the problem is simpler because the database persists the information in a place you can interact with it but it only has entries once the playfield is initialized for the first time. The galaxy map view appears to use the seed mechanism to create the data structure fresh each time the server process gets initialized. This is a deterministic series of values derived from the universe seed. Guessing that they generate the playfield seed at the same time as they assign the name, x/y/z, and class of star. Until Eleon either exposes the data or develops tools in the map view to do warp jump astronavigation planning the galaxy does feel a bit too big but I don't think it's because they hate us. IMO exposing the data doesn't cost as much and lets them leverage modders to create stopgap tools without locking them in.
