Pull up a map of the Sirius sector. Look at it for a minute.
Liberty and Bretonia are close. Multiple jump gate connections run between them — fast, maintained, official. New York to the Bretonian border is a short flight through well-kept trade lanes. The two houses are allies in the game's political structure, and the geography says the same thing before the story does.
Kusari and Rheinland, meanwhile, are awkwardly connected. There's no direct gate route between them. Getting from New Berlin to New Tokyo involves a journey through Bretonian space or a longer path through Sigma systems — through contested territory, not clean highways. The two houses have a cold political relationship in the lore. The map makes you feel it before you've read a line of faction dialogue.
And the Border Worlds — the Omega, Sigma, Tau, and Omicron systems — are structurally isolated from the rest. The gate network doesn't reach them. You get there through jump holes, through unmaintained paths that require you to know where to look. The political isolation of the border worlds is spatial. The map tells you they are outside the system before any NPC does.
The clearest example is the Omicron systems — deep space, Nomad territory. Getting there from any house system requires navigating a chain of progressively harder-to-find jump holes through the most dangerous space in the sector. The game doesn't put up a warning sign. It just makes the route hard enough that only players who are deliberately going there will arrive. The geography is the warning.
This is what handcrafted world design does that procedural generation doesn't. Every connection and every absence of a connection was a decision. The map is a political document.
New players often treat the nav map as pure navigation information. It's also the first piece of world-building the game shows you.