I have done something with this game that many space strategy games won't often do. I have chosen to introduce a third dimension to the star map. Space strategy games usually won't include the third dimension for a good reason - 3D star maps are inherently much harder to understand and reason about. Stakes are pretty high for professional game development studios, so it makes sense for them to not risk with 3D star map. However, I am currently working on this alone and high risk unconventional decisions are the forte of lone developers. I haven't made any money off of this game and in high likelihood will not make any in the future, thus I cannot risk to lose something which I don't have.

Many things deliberately look and feel the way they are in this game. Most design decisions were made to make the 3D star map more understandable. Here are a few design decisions:

• Clamped vertical rotation - When you can rotate up or down only 90 degrees and no more, you will at least know where you cannot currently be.
• Up is always up - It is easy to get lost when one loses track of what is up and what is down. User cannot rotate the star map so that the cardinal directions change. This functions similar to Google Maps where north pole is always up no matter how you drag the map.
• Gridbox - Spacial sense does not translate through a computer screen, so it is quite difficult to understand how the stars are positioned in a black vacuum. Thus, I added a gridbox around the stars as a frame of reference. 
• Hiding stars - Sometimes seeing all the stars at once will confuse the user, if the user wants to reason about a handful local stars. Thus, the user can zoom and the stars, which end up outside the gridbox, will not be displayed. That helps alot.
• No numbers or letters on the star map - a characteristic property of a 3D star map is that a lot of stars can and will be on the screen at once. If the stars had numbers and names, that you mean a lot squiggly symbols at once - some of which are behind each other and some of which are too far for readability among other problems. Thus, I opted to use as simple ways to convey information as possible. Star values are the little circles around them and you can see the value of the stars at a glance much easier.
• Star ledger - I very quickly understood that some things that I took for
  granted on a 2D map, were not possible on a 3D map. One thing was estimating distances between stars. Another was quickly skimming my stars and finding stars with the biggest numbers. Ledger(or list) was a solution to that. Not just a simple ledger, a ledger that works in parallel to the star map. If the user selects something on ledger, it is also selected on the star map and if the user selects something on star map, it is also selected on the ledger. User doesn't even have so select the star on the ledger to understand where it is situated on the star map. User only needs to hover their mouse over the star entry in the list and look at the star map to see which star lights up.