I was looking through a map of he galaxy that came with the Star Wars Fact Files in the U.K., which displayed information about the alignment of many planets during (what I assume) was the height of the Clone Wars. Interesting in and of itself, but it seemed to contradict other such maps. Many of the contradictions were minor - a planet in the Colonies Region versus the Inner Rim - although some were obviously different. For instance, the Fact Files map seems to limit the Expansion Region to one corner of the galaxy, while a similar map from Star Wars Insider shows it as another concentric ring. It got me thinking about the need to document as much of the galaxy as possible in the Planets table of the encyclopedia database, so that it can be searched with more options (this feature is in beta testing for entries now... check it out). I'm in the process of searching out the best of the online galactic maps, and thinking about how to go about putting one together. I know that Dan Wallace is the guru of the galactic map, so I may try to get hold of him to talk about it. I keep coming back to some form of 3-D representation, like the cheapo galaxy tour on the encyclopedia website's download page, only better. Way better. In the meantime, I'm going to hack away at it myself. Back to the Fact Files Map... it was interesting to see the number of seemingly neutral worlds during the Clone Wars, at least as defined by the map. All sources indicate that "thousands" of star systems had sided with the Separatists, but only about a third of the galaxy was listed as loyal to the Separatists. Same for the Republic, with the majority of planets being neutral. This got me thinking about adding fields in the Planets table of the database to indicate a planet's alliance during the major eras of the galaxy. The obvious way to handle this would be to simply have fields for each era, but that wouldn't capture the information on planets that switched alliances during the war, or were subjugated rather than voting on their alliances. So then I got thinking about fields for each major alliance, with values that indicated their stance on each alliance. In other words, a field entitled "Empire" could have values of "subjugated" or "voted" (or something like that), so that I could indicate the willingness of a planet to adopt an alliance. This thinking, however, still doesn't show changes in alliance over time, unless I had weird values for the field ("voted before", "voted during", "voted after"). So, if you're reading this and have any ideas, feel free to shoot them my way.