I've been thinking of a way to improve the planet tab a little so here are my suggestions

Legion's Occupied Territory
An interactive map showing the entire galaxy could be made and by typing a legions name in a search engine it could show us the extent of their territory. It will tell us the amount of planets occupied and unoccupied by them in their territory and the general area where most members of that legion colonize.

Scanning Abilities
A player can type the name of the legion and find their territory and scan in that sector of the galaxy, but depending on the cloaking power of the planet and the scanning power off the ship a successful scan can be a percentage as it is now with the current scanning system.

Offensive/ Defensive Abilities
Legions can defend sectors that are controlled by them and leaders/ Officers can build defensive structures in their sectors to help defend from attacks. Legions can preform an ability called territory expansion, any neighboring territory can be invaded and an area between the two sectors becomes a war-zone. All planets in the war-zone are available to all legions involved in the war.

A map of the entire galaxy would consist of over 1,100,000 planets. -1

Well obviously no one has that many planets in their scans, it's just a map that depicts the galaxy. Although instead of showing the unoccupied we could just show occupied. Unoccupied planets can be found through normal planet scanning

-1. planets in this game just 'exist'. it would be a waste of time to 'map the galaxy'.

something like that would require changing the entire planets system (all planets would be lost) then something like a Hubble star chart implemented with stars/planets that currently have been found although you end up with names like: R4856.982-7 or sumthin weird. awesome idea but to hard to implement

There have been previous ideas of having "sectors" that change the type, rate, and chances of finding NPCs and planets.