For getting the feel of the milky way, I think there's nothing that is better able to simulate it than a video game, ala Elite Dangerous. I loved to navigate its galaxy map. The size of the Milky Way, the numbers of stars and distances between them are of scale in there if I recall correctly.
I am not familiar, so I don't know, but do they assume something like 31,536,000x speed of light to make the galaxy even remotely navigable, e.g., the ability to navigate from Earth to Alpha Centauri within 4.34 seconds?
There's FTL travel of course, but you can navigate at 'normal' speeds as well. The normal speeds really show how there's no way to get to any other object even at full throttle (without FTL). It's just for asteroid belts, space stations and so on. the way they did it gives a really nice intuition of the enormous size of space. It's a fantastic game!