The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years

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!

This was already present in Frontier: Elite II released in 1993. You could travel at sub-light speeds as far as you wanted, visiting gas giants within the same star system and scooping fuel. But to get anywhere else, hyperspace was the only practical option.

The crazy part is that this 3D game was programmed in 68k assembly, ran smoothly on Amiga and Atari ST home computers, and fit on a single 1.44MB floppy. The massive universe with realistic solar systems was almost entirely procedural.

Jupiter is between 4 and 6 AU from Earth. So at the speed of light it would still take over half an hour to get there. It’d be a dull game flying anywhere at sub-light speeds.

It’s been over thirty years since I played Frontier, but I think you could accelerate the in-game time. So you didn’t have to sit still for hours to get to Jupiter. For your character, that time did pass.