Map-based Course Calculation

[alexanderson1993]

From Nathan King:
What would it take to integrate the option for crews to calculate courses based on existing mapped locations? For instance:

We could provide our own image/SVG files and lay out maps of explored space according to our own sites' universes for the crew's reference. Depending on where in our universal lore timeline we're flying a particular mission in, we could hide certain areas of the map with "Uncharted Space" fog-of-war-style, then still choose as the Flight Director to have some event of our choosing occur should a crew decide to travel to that area. This station could technically be a single image with text overlaid which would provide closer looks at options with multiple planets, like so:

My line of thought with this concept is that it will help greatly with conceptualizing where in the universe one is when they're new to a space center's lore and history. In fact, even when they're well-versed, this would be a great enhancement.

During course calculation, a crew member's station might show, "Calculating..." as it does already, but the Flight Director would be able to decide how many obstructions they'd like to give the officer to navigate or course calculate around. I'm not entirely sure yet how I envision this looking as a final product. I mostly wanted to share the ideas I've had.

What are your thoughts? There are a lot of aspects of this concept which might range from more basic to rather complex, depending on how much of it you believe might be possible and how much development the idea would take. For instance, it would be really cool to have this correlate with a Sensors expansion that gave us the ability to stage a rectangle of space around the Sensors radar, within which the crew could fly around and gather information. This would certainly be a more complicated adjustment. I'm mostly interested in knowing how much is possible, then how much is feasible at the moment.

[alexanderson1993]

Closing, due to this being rolled up into an RFC: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11OkHwpWn_M--DMWxPvP77S3JVt2Ni6Jxw1h2YK546Pw/edit?usp=sharing