HowSerendipitous:
Awesome! Really looking forward to seeing it!
On a slightly different note: CSE won the prize for LTFC, so he gets a $30 voucher. I believe I'm a month late in announcing that.
I honestly thought it was clear from how the votes tallied up, but there's been no mention of it here that I can see, so I figure I ought to say it aloud, just in case.
CSE:
Thanks!
The scale is approximately log(real scale)
2. Makes it easy to fit things on a screen and still be visible.
The whole thing has heavy Photoshop bloom/editing with a massive custom macro (almost 100 different things it does, iirc) so that I can put out a lot of star systems in a short period of time, whenever I need it. All I have to do is position planets, adjust star brightness, run it through the Photoshop macro to add stuff, and voila!
Here's how it looks before the photoshop stuff:
The planets are far trickier - or, at least, the ones with atmospheres are. Atmospheres are tough.
Nanyej, where the current mission is taking place:
The planet surface itself is pulled from Space Engine - they have a great planet builder/export feature. I still have to do some photoshop editing afterwards though.