Using the World Map

Starwalker looked at the World Map for the first time in many months. He knew the map was there and available in flight and he also used DOTLAN periodically but he had not really looked at either very closely. He occasionally opened the map to change the autopilot settings for route selection but apart from that it was rarely ever used.

Today was different. Starwalker was still waiting for the ship refit to complete and was simply idling the time away. He opened the World Map and started to look through some of the options on the Stars page.

It was like seeing the map for the very first time again as Starwalker realised that here was a fantastic resource that he had simply never exploited. Key information about other pilots was at his finger tips:

• Average Pilots in Space in the Last 30 Minutes or Ships Destroyed - good starting point to go where the pilots had actually been flying in space recently and fighting
• Escape Pods Destroyed - looking for more trouble? Good chance to find action where pods were destroyed but it was also a possible gate camp location, especially at entry points or along key routes
• Pirate and Police Ships Destroyed - good places to go looking for ratters 

The information was shown as coloured balls, with the higher number being shown as a bigger ball. Context menus provided specific metrics and could be expanded to include system information such as planets, asteroid belts and moons. At a glance it was easy to see the busy systems and set off towards those systems.

Starwalker knew the types of places to find fights but spent a lot of time flying and not finding any fights. Using this map (or DOTLAN) would not necessarily change that but it would be more of a help than a hinderance. It was certainly better than what Starwalker normally did - head off in some random direction.