Well, since traffic is low, and my last innocent question sparked a small flurry of
interesting and informative discussion, here's another one:

How big is Charted Space? In particular, what proportion of the Galaxy does it cover?

My blunt-pencil-on-the-back-of-an-envelope calculations gave me this:

Charted space is roughly 20 x 20 = 400 Sectors, excluding the Core Route Expeditions (this
from travellermap.com).

Each Sector is 4 x 4 = 16 sub-sectors.

Each sub-sector is 10 x 8 = 80 square parsecs.

Charted Space is therefore 400 * 16 * 80 ~= 500K square parsecs.

Wikipedia says that the diameter of the real Milky Way Galaxy is between 100K and 180K light-years,
or 25-50K parsecs, which I average to 30K parsecs. So its area is very roughly 3 billion square
parsecs (making the inaccurate but convenient assumption that the Galaxy is circular).

Making the highly simplistic but also highly simplifying assumption that the maps of Charted Space
encompass the entire thickness of the Galactic disk (alternatively, that the Galaxy is a flat disk,
not actually 500 parsecs thick), that means that Charted Space encompasses 500K/3B = 1/6,000th of
the entire Galaxy, or 0.016%.

Anyone care to point out where I've dropped a decimal place or three? :-) Or some other fundamental
error?

Jonathan