and brave the reavers..... equipped with engine disrupters, crew killers and kamakazi fighters that ram(you can order them to ram right, I've never tried fighters)
You could make the arrangements of the systems (planets, empty space, asteroids) circular like a spiderweb, that would allow for a reasonable approximation of our solar system. Each system would be connected to systems that were adjacent in the same "ring" and have connections to the upper and lower "rings".