I had some difficulty coming up with a good system for translating the flat traveller maps that you generate as part of the rules to a sphere and started to wonder if it wouldn't be useful (in some cases) when defining a world to not use hexes but points on the world defined in latitudes and longitudes, and then in some automated way convert that to the traveller style maps for gameplay (or for shorthand reference, with the three dimensional coordinates being the "real" ones.
My goal is to be able to draw a given traveller map on the surface of a world and be able to orient it relative to spacecraft:
From my point of view it's easier to deal with map data this way, but has anyone done something like what I'm describing before - generated some method of converting map data between projections (spherical or geodic or what have you) to game?