Hm, look like I lost my reply.

Anyway, I agree, the gray hexes worked best. Here's an update; I made the gray darker after test-printing this map; the lighter gray was almost invisible.

Scale is 2ly/hex. The lower-left portion (and the top row) has randomly-distributed star systems. The irregular gray line marks what hexes I rolled for. I added some dummy system names, had to use a very small font to make them fit. Overall I gotta say that this is simply too small and "messy". I'm also wondering if I shouldn't just simply stick to the 1 hex = 1 parsec scale if I do something like this.

sector-tiny-hexes-004.png