Issues with Sectors? Read This!!!!

[The Founder]

Could limit it to only show 1 every four months and only keep logs for a year

If we only bother how much Data the storage it would take it would be per build order:
The internal ID of the building. Wich is a string according to the building file. building_basic_power_plant is 26 characters, for example.
The internal ID of the Planet. Wich should be a bigger integer type.
The internal ID of the governor. Wich should be a smaler integer type.
The internal ID of the sector. Another smaler integer type. May or may not also need the empire ID.
Energy and Mineral Storage. Should be two larger floating point value. We know the game is using floating point or at least 2 digit decimal math in the background.
possibly the specific tile (could be 2 very small integers).

And we would still have to do the whole string representation afterwards. Even if we can save a bit for redundancy, I doubt we come out ahead. And then there is the whole issue with the Governor dying or changing during the collection of the report.
Again, would love it but I do see where this would all be very troublesome. In particular under the memory constraints of a 32 bit process.

 

[sr999]

Take the United States, for example. 50 states, a governor for each state, and Washington D.C., where the head of the federal government resides. Now, how much sense would it make to combine all 50 states into one super state, with one governor? The inefficiency in how that super state's government would run would be insane compared to how 50 smaller state governments run.

I like the analogy, but it can be extended/improved in a suitably geeky fashion.

One variant is the Union has hit the cap of five colonies under direct control: DC, Guam, Northern Marianas, Puerto Rico, and Minor Outlying Islands. Then you have your fifty other planets, each having its own planetary administration, which obviously could be split into ten regional sectors.

Another, more chaotic, approach is that of the EU, which has just two sectors: Germany, with 16 planets underneath it (the Lander); and the UK, with 3-13 underneath it - England&Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and up to 10 (depending on context) colonies/ex-colonies/tax havens in which UK law still applies to a greater or lesser extent. [leaving aside the three jurisdictions and five legislatures under the Crown to which UK law has no application]