Yeah, I'd prefer we restrain ourselves a bit in terms of scale.  Even a hundredth of the galaxy has somewhere in the order of a few hundred million stars.  Since we're going for starlanes I'd prefer we be 'small'.  I'd be willing to put somewhere in the order of 40-50 systems on the map, admittedly because more would look like a mess and take forever.  If anyone has doubts, remember that realistically a single system could support quadrillions of people.  No setting attempts to get scale even remotely realistic because it's bad for storytelling.  

Maybe only a minority of systems are connected to the starlane network, but from time to time Vacare could find new lanes to previously uncharted systems so the network is always expanding inside and out?

How about it ya'll?