Making my own coordinate system
This is less of a real code question and more of a conceptual one.
Imagine an area that we will call our galaxy. The galaxy has a diameter of 100,000 lightyears, and is, say 2,000 light-years tall. I want to divide this area into reasonable "chunks" as a means of not only easy orientation, but as a means of circumventing the current floating-point limitations.
My idea for the heirarchy is this:
Top or bottom half, then quadrants of 50k ly (we could also do an octant system, but I don't like that for some reason)
Each quadrant has 4x4x4 "cubics" of 12500 ly
each cubic has 5x5x5 sectors of 2500 ly
each sector has 10x10x10 subsectors of 250 ly
one more division of 10, now each is 25 lightyears
I kinda want one more division
We can essentially see that I have divided this area into 25x25x25 lightyear cubes, and we can represent all possible coordinates as xyz = -+, 1-4, 1-64, 1-125, 1-1000, 1-250, 1-25, meters. The idea is to scale the largest possible coordinate from whatever 100,000 lightyears is to something more manageable (in our case 25 lightyears worth of meters) , but to be honest I really don't know how practical this idea is. The largest distance is still way too large, and the resultant coordinate system really doesnt work all the well either, but I feel like i'm on the right track.
Does anyone have any better ideas? Am I overthinking this? If anyone has any form of insight at all, I would appreciate it. Also, I do not need any code examples, just concepts.