Hmm, I think you are looking for SP-GiST (unbalanced space partitioned GiST), unless you meant that implicitly. It can be much faster for...space partitioning.
Oh damn, I don't know how I missed that section of the docs. Indeed, though I haven't really profiled this, an SP-GiST index does seem quite a bit faster for me.
Thanks for the tip!
Still can't plot from Sol to Colonia with a range of 100 Ly (near the very dense center of the galaxy) in under 10 seconds though. But I'm aware of some larger issues in the search algorithm itself that are probably my next task on this journey. The performance of this index feels closer to what I think I was expecting to see on it's own.
