I think Voyager could have been better with a map showing where they were and the places they were going. The map would have been primarily for the writers. It's good for the writers to know more about the situation than they show or tell, to give a realistic feeling. The show could sparingly show parts of it in Astrometrics or in the Magic Meeting Room.
They would learn about each civilization from their neighbors as they approached. Each civilization would take between one episode and one season to traverse because it's hard to imagine a cohesive civilization that takes a year to traverse. The civilizations could be modeled after civilizations of human history and the stories would be similar to a group of pre-Columbus Scandenavian explorers riding horses from Newfoundland across the Amercicas to Tierra del Fuego.
The map would be the backdrop. We would see them weighing decisions like travelling closer to the galactic center, perhaps with navigational hazards, to travel through an empire rumored to have subjugated neighboring civilizations before the won independence at great cost, or to travel a longer path through an empire rumored to have collapsed into mostly feudal planets loosely allied under a common religion. They always have the option of leaving the spiral arm or travelling along its edge where they'll encounter fewer allies and adversaries. They wouldn't always have reliable information on the civilizations, who is likely to help them or harm them, and the internal power struggles going on in the place they pass through.
But the map would anchor it all. They know where the stars are. They know where they are. They know something about the civilizations behind them. They know at what point they'll start reaching the boundaries of explored space and encounter known allies and adversaries. We didn't get that anchor. Instead it felt like each episode we learned "we're not travelling through a region with characteristics XYZ," but it didn't feel real. TOS is random and episodic, but I still got a feeling of place: The UFP was a great power, and Kirk was exploring the Wild West and protecting frontier settlements. Roddenberry said he fibbed when he sold it as a Western, but to me that's exactly what it was, and it worked. With Voyager, I obviously knew the story of where they were, but it felt like something they just mentioned when convenient, not the backdrop for everything that happened.
tl;dr
Voyager would have felt more realistic underpinned by a map of where were and possible paths ahead.
They would learn about each civilization from their neighbors as they approached. Each civilization would take between one episode and one season to traverse because it's hard to imagine a cohesive civilization that takes a year to traverse. The civilizations could be modeled after civilizations of human history and the stories would be similar to a group of pre-Columbus Scandenavian explorers riding horses from Newfoundland across the Amercicas to Tierra del Fuego.
The map would be the backdrop. We would see them weighing decisions like travelling closer to the galactic center, perhaps with navigational hazards, to travel through an empire rumored to have subjugated neighboring civilizations before the won independence at great cost, or to travel a longer path through an empire rumored to have collapsed into mostly feudal planets loosely allied under a common religion. They always have the option of leaving the spiral arm or travelling along its edge where they'll encounter fewer allies and adversaries. They wouldn't always have reliable information on the civilizations, who is likely to help them or harm them, and the internal power struggles going on in the place they pass through.
But the map would anchor it all. They know where the stars are. They know where they are. They know something about the civilizations behind them. They know at what point they'll start reaching the boundaries of explored space and encounter known allies and adversaries. We didn't get that anchor. Instead it felt like each episode we learned "we're not travelling through a region with characteristics XYZ," but it didn't feel real. TOS is random and episodic, but I still got a feeling of place: The UFP was a great power, and Kirk was exploring the Wild West and protecting frontier settlements. Roddenberry said he fibbed when he sold it as a Western, but to me that's exactly what it was, and it worked. With Voyager, I obviously knew the story of where they were, but it felt like something they just mentioned when convenient, not the backdrop for everything that happened.
tl;dr
Voyager would have felt more realistic underpinned by a map of where were and possible paths ahead.
