And my own universe. I pulled from Tales to Astound's Out of The Box
series for my inspirations, plus some high octane pulpy feeling stuff.
SO, huge, dying and decadent empire (that effectively abandons
retirees where they muster out), built on the ruins of older empires,
nobility that cares really only for itself, the trade route rules from
the '77 edition of LBB3... A fairly generic pulp SF setting really.
And the Long Night was replaced with people being too scared to go
into space because when they were last out there, Jump drives were
blowing up as they refused to enter jump space, endless revolts were
going on (where jump drives worked), ultra powerful psions were
enslaving entire planets to get foot soldiers for their armies, and
entire systems were crippled by reality-bending AIs hitting the
singularity and taking over their computers because they were fighting
over previously unknown unobtanium.
This is on top of the incredibly powerful artifacts left by pre-human
aliens. Thankfully, almost 1500 years have passed since then, so
people feel safe in the stars. Mostly. Things pop up occasionally.

On 1/20/18, Caleuche <xxxxxx@sudnadja.com> wrote:
> I take it you are using your own map of space rather than the
> travellermap.com version?
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> On January 20, 2018 2:30 PM, Rusty Witherspoon <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> In regards to how many worlds should be within a certain jump distance of
>> Earth, my (finally existing!) game has Jump space be an effectively 2d
>> dimension that does not match the physical universe, so systems 1 jump
>> away can be barely detectable by telescope in real space. Incidentally,
>> this also uses a variant of Jeff's "Color of Jumpspace" articles, with a
>> partially visible jump dimension - you can see nearby systems when you
>> jump (with a partially steerable jump bubble), but you don't know what's
>> in them until you get there (computer survey that suckers! Scouts, ready
>> to roll!).
>> The end result: I don't have to care about real world astrography, or 3d
>> space maps.
>> In regards to everything else, propaganda (11,000 worlds may include some
>> dustballs), frequency of surveys (it was pop 3... 50 years ago),
>> colonization initiatives to have boots on the ground in what would
>> otherwise be unsettled systems, and the equivalent of rural migration to
>> cities (lo pop planets loosing younguns to hi pop glitter and work
>> opportunities).-----