Iridium Moons - A retro-futuristic industrial Space Opera

[Yora]

Last year I bounced around a whole number of ideas for an original space opera setting inspired by classic Star Wars, but stepping away from the Rebels and Empire conflict and avoiding the focus on the Jedi. And I got a lot of responses that provided me with a lot of great ideas. Having it let sit and settle for some months, the overall picture remains the same, but some of my perspectives on several elements have changed, and some have fallen out as not quick clicking with the rest or adding anything of interest. That big bucket of ideas has now settled in something more of a real setting that is very much worth creating secific details for.
Starting a new campaign currently isn't in the cards before spring, so there's still plenty of time to really knock myself out with this. Potential rules systems for the campaign are Stars Without Number and Scum and Villainy, which both have really quite similar ideas about the worlds they are set in, despite these assumptions being translated into really different mechanics. Working largely with these assumptions, both systems should work very well with this setting. I am favoring Stars Without Number, but that choice doesn't really make a difference for the campaign setting that has not started to solidify.

THE SOURCES
I've settled down on a style that draws heavily from 80s sci-fi movies and 90s sci-fi games inspired by the former.

• The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
• Outland (1981)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• The Wrath of Khan (1982)
• Return of the Jedi (1983)
• The Search for Spock (1984)
• Dune (1984)
• Enemy Mine (1985)
• Dune (1992)
• Albion (1995)
• Shadows of the Empire (1995)
• Starcraft (1998)
• Homeworld (1999)
• Knights of the Old Republic (2003)
• Knights of the Old Republic comic series (2006)
• Bioshock (2007)
• Mass Effect 2: Lair of the Shadow Broker (2010)
• Prey (2017)
• Kenshi (2018)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)

CORE CONCEPT
All these sources come together to create a rusty and grimey world with a strong industrial focus. I am a big fan of 1920th design elements and the technological clunkiness of Star Wars, which frequently draws on designs of old planes and weapons. Together with the sociatal themes of cyberpunk about rule of the rich and technology being able to be both a tool of liberation and oppression, I came up with an idea for a retro-futuristic world based on the early 20th century, dominated by powerful industrialists, the struggles of the working masses, and radicalization in the labor movement.
At the heart of the setting, it is about small independent space mines trying to gain economic autonomy and break free from their dependence on giant interstellar companies that operate unopposed by government regulations in the far reaches of space. Into this world come the heroes, encountering many opportunities to secretly deliver prohibited shipments into exclusive economic zones, bribe or intimidate leaders of rivial factions, sabotage opperations, expose traitors and hostile agents, or protect or take out people who have the influence and connections to really make a difference. There's rarely true good or bad guys, and the heroes of the campaign could find a home with any of the major factions.

BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
In addition to these main themes, a big part of this setting is the idea to take the classic archetypes of space opera, but also apply to them three important concepts that are now very well established but have traditionally been ignored out of convenience, and see how this creates new situations and dynamics.

1. No object or signal can travel through space faster than light.
2. Planets are formed from the same elements with the same physical processes everywhere.
3. Industrialized populations stop growing.

INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL AND COMMUNICATION
As a space opera, having the characters able to travel to planets and moons around other stars within the scope of an adventure is mandatory. The easiest way to get around the limited speed at which anything can travel through space is to go through something like hyperspace instead. Hyperspace is separate from normal spacetime, so its existence doesn't break physics too much, at least at the casual physics nerd level. It can have completely different rules of physics that make traveling at much higher speeds much easier. But what if travel between stars still takes between several days and a few weeks, or possibly even months? And what if only ships can enter and exit hyperspace but signals can not? The only way to communicate between different star systems is to record messages and have them delivered by ships going back and forth between them. In the same way, you can only notice approaching ships once they arrive in your system.
Even while interstellar space travel and trade is perfectly possible, star systems become much more isolated from each other and are on their own. Any possible help that could be called from other systems could only arrive in weeks or months. This very much changes the dynamics of both small scale adventures and major interstellar conflicts that make events much more immediate and heighten possible threats.

INTERSTELLAR INDUSTRY
All the elements that make up all the stars, planets, moons, and asteroids in the universe have been created from the fusion of primordial hydrogen inside stars that have died since then. The laws that govern these processes are the same everywhere in the universe, and we know today that all the elements have been mixed very evenly as they were scattered throughout the galaxies. This means that every star system is made up of the same building blocks, which have been shaped into their current form by the same processes. There are no new stable elements to be found anywhere in the galaxy, and the ingredients to make any kinds of molecules or minerals that you could think of should be found in huge quantities inside your own star system. This means that realistically, there is a very low probability that traveling to other star systems to extract resources would ever make any sense.
But things do change a bit when interstellar travel becomes both fast, and more importantly cheap. As is always the case in any large scope space opera. While any element can be found in any star system, getting at these elements can be a lot easier or harder, depending on how they are integrated and concentrated inside asteroids or the crust of a planet. If deposits of highly valuable metals are discovered deep in space that are much easier to mine and process than those that have already been largely depleted closer to home, then there can still be great profits to be made, even with the additional costs for long diatance transportation. In Iridium Moons, the mining of high value metals is the sole basis for all interstellar industry and commerce. Any business that operates in interstellar space that isn't engaged in mining is offering its services to the mining companies and their employees.

INTERSTELLAR DEMOGRAPHICS
When populations start industrializing, mortality, and especially child mortally, tend to drop very significantly very quickly. People from agrarian societies are used to having lots of children being vital to prosperity and economic security, and as such populations numbers explode in a matter of just a few generations. Eventually, people start getting used to large number of children no longer being needed in the new society they live in, and actually become an economic burden. Then birth rates also begin to drop, population growth stops, and the total population peaks at its maximum size. As different populations begin the process of industrialization at different times, they don't experience their rapid growth at the same time. But eventually all populations will have fullly industrialized and the maximum global population is reached. On Earth, we expect this point to arrive within the next two or three generation, with a maximum global population of 11 billion. And in many populations that have industrialized some time ago, birth rates have fallen lower than mortality rates, and population numbers are going down. There is nothing to indicate that this won't also happen to all the populations that are currently still growing. Assuming the human population of Earth being a representative example of the demographic and technological deveopment of a species (and in the space opera genre it is), then by the time a species has the ability to travel to other stars, it will long ago have stopped growing in numbers. There is no overpopulation in interstellar space. In fact, it might very well be difficult to find enough people to establish stable populations on newly colonised planets.

THE POLITICAL SYSTEM
Following through on the three concepts outlined above, a quite interesting political system comes out naturally that is pretty different from what's usually seen in space opera.
With travel through hyperspace taking considerably long times and communication being no faster, star systems have quite little direct contact with each other. News arrive only with great delays, and the amount of information that can be delivered by courier ships is limited. As such, people usually only hear about events of significant historic importance from other systems, and often months or even years after they have happened. Similarly, planetary authorities will have to wait at least weeks for replies to messages send to their homeworld, and even if any help can be dispatched to respond to emergencies, it will take a very long time to arrive. In a world like this, colonies and outposts around other stars have to be highly autonomous and able to take care of their own problem. And in many cases they will completely independent states of their own, connected to their homeworld only through economic and defense treaties. There are few multi-planetary states in Known Space and no real interstellar empires.
Because planets that have reached the technological capabilities to send ships to other star systems do not normally have overpopulation problems, there is little incentive for people to leave their homeworld, where gravity, air, sunlight, and climate are all exactly perfect for the needs of their species. The main thing that draws people to move to other planets are the profits that can be made from mining, or from supplying the mines with necessary goods that will be cheaper than importing them all the way from the homeworld. Accordingly, nearly all settlements in space are either mining or agricultultural colonies, with various fuel refineries and stations between them. While the pay is often great, the extreme costs of living in colonies is quite well known, and most people see it as a risky gamble to try making a fortune in the space mining industry. There are of course always people who simply love the idea to start a new life on an alien planet, far away from all the hustle and problems of their homeworld, but these are usually even lower in number. As a result, 99% of all people in Known Space live in just the 14 home systems where their species originated. But with a total of over a hundred billion people across all species, that still leaves a billion to inhabit a large number of major colonies and minor outposts. There are over a hundred colony worlds with populations of several millions, ranging from major cities to mid-range counties.
There is no single comprehensive account of all existant outposts in Known Space, but the number of those with populations in the tens of thousands is estimated to be well over a thousand.
Since the main reason behind establishing colonies in space is economic profit, most national and planetary governments in the home systems are more than happy to leave these enormous undertakings to private businesses. As a result, large numbers of colonies are in fact company property, with most of their population being company employees. The longer the distances to the homeworlds, the less meaning there is to legal regulations for working conditions and the treatment of workers. Some governments have created laws that allow doing business within their territory only to companies that follow certain labor standards, but these are typically very difficult to control when inspectors have to travel for months and end up only being shown what they are supposed to see. This situation has created a powerful elite that exists only in the colonies, called the patricians. The patricians are often large extended families of very old money, who have basically become the nobility of space. They don't use hereditary titles, but in many places the official job description of a company administrator will immideatelt give away to locals the difference between a born patrician and a well educated prole who has risen to a high position in the company.
Military conflicts are quite rare between governments as their claimed territoies are usually separated by hundreds of lightyears, and any claimed ball of rock in space is a good as dozens of others that nobody is trying to defend. Armed conflict is usually about trade in valuable resources that have already been mined and refined, and piracy is always an issue.

[Yora]

RULES OF THE SETTING
Much more than geography and even factions, space and fantasy settings are really defined and set apart from each other by their special rules of how certain things works or people in society interact with each other. The limits of what characters can do and can't do obviously have a huge impact on how they will behave and what happens in adventures, so these are things I always want to establish very early on.

SPACE TRAVEL
Nothing can travel through normal spacetime faster than the speed of light, which is painfully slow for interstellar distances, but the limits are completely different in hyperspace. To humanoid perception and even most instruments, hyperspace is a completely empty void. Nothing but perfect blackness in all directions forever. The most important trait of hyperspace is a significantly higher maximum speed for objects. However, a side effect of this difference is that any matter will be instantly ripped appart into subatomic particles by just the smallest amounts of energy, such as their own internal heat. For ships to travel through hyperspace, they have to be protected by a field that artifically limits the speed of light within it to the same speed as in normal spacetime. This field is created by hyperspace generators, which are also used to enable a ship to enter hyperspace or leave it.
Ships in hyperspace are completely blind, and while hyperspace exists separately from normal spacetime it is still affected by gravity. Hyperspace generators do not work close to the gravity of stars or massive planets, and ships typically have to travel for a few days to get sufficient distance after taking off from planets in a star's habitable zone. The reverse effect applies through ships in hyperspace, which are automatically pulled back into normal spacetime once they reach the vicinity of a star. This makes manual returns to normal spactime typically unnecessary for ships.
Ships in hyperspace also can get pulled at by the gravity of stars even over very long distances, which will slightly alter their course. To calculate a course through hyperspace, a ship requires an extremely precise chart of any massive objects like stars and black holes near the path they plan to travel, which list their masses, speeds, and direction of movement with a very high accuracy. Even tiny errors in a course can make a ship completely miss the star system it was heading for and continuing on into hyperspace. The course also has to take into account the exact speed of the ship in hyperspace, or it will cross the calculated arrival point before the star has moved into that position or after it has already moved past it. This is a particular danger with low mass stars moving at great speeds. Ships shut down all engines before they enter hyperspace and then perform the entire jump only with their own momentum. Without navigation it is impossible to make corrections and no engines are so accurate and precisely mounted that they can make a ship fly perfectly straight while accelerating. In the same way, any gas leaks on the outside of the hull can potentially move a ship off course over several days enough to make it miss the gravity field of the destination star.
If a missjump is detected early and the course error not too large, the distance to the destination star can be close enough to simply aim the ship straight at it and initiate another hyperspace jump. But given how small a star system is compared to the vast scale of interstellar space, the chances of hitting the target can be quite low, especially with smaller and fast moving stars. While ships have navigational equipment to use the stars for calculating curses between the planets of a star system, the calculations for hyperspace jumps usually require being in orbit around a charted star to use as a precisely known reference point.

Hyperspace charts are created by a number of astrometric services throughout known space, which use large orbital telescopes to measure the sizes, positions, speeds, and directions of stars to a very high accuracy. These measurements can be taken to such a high precision that they will accurately predict the future movement and position of stars to a degree that will be sufficient for hyperspace jumps for the next 20 years. However, such accurate measurements are very time consuming and expensive, and most charts that are being sold have expiration dates of 5 to 10 years or even less. Most astrometric services guarantee that their charts for important sectors will continue to get regular updates for the next 100 years, but charts for sectors that don't sell well enough to justify the costs of updating them are simply allowed to expire. Unless private customers commision charts for a course between a specific system in such a sector and the next maintained route, any such systems will become completely cut off from interstellar travel. There are countless stories from the frontier sectors about small outposts in defunct sectors who couldn't afford to commission private charts but refused to leave their planet. But since many such outposts were never officially registered anywhere it's impossible to confirm any such story. This fate did however strike the early Netik colonies after the sudden collpase of the Udur civilization 6,000 years ago, who had relied entirely on Udur charts for interstellar travel. The current Netik civilization does in fact entirely of the descendants of these early colonies, as the rediscovery of their homeworld has been unsuccesful throughout the 4,000 years since they regained access to hyperspace charts from the Baykat.

COMMUNICATION
Ships traveling through hyperspace require the protection of hyperspace generator to avoid instant disintegration, but no such technology exists for electromanitic radiation. Any signals leaving the protective field instantly disperse into nothingness, making it impossible to communicate through hyperspace. The only way to send messages between star systems without waiting for decades and being limited to very small signals is to pre-record them, transmit them to a courier ship or mail barge on the edge of the system, have them carried through hyperspace to the destination system, and then transmit them again to the planet of the recipient.
Merchant houses, mining clans, military forces, and diplomatic services usually maintain their own courier ships for this purpose, but ordinary proles are typically limited to privately run mail barge services. These mail barges may visit a given system only once per week or even per month, and possibly be doing circular routes between numerous different system, which can make mail delivery very slow. Mail barges typically also collect periodic news journals from the systems they visit and might also distribute annual reports from the homeworld to remote colonies and outposts.
Another common service of mail barges is the distribution of books, shows, and movies from the homeworlds. These often arrive many years after their original release, especially productions from species of other regions of Known Space. The mail barges transmit all the data they carry for a system to a distriution station which will then send messages on to the recipients and sell their growing content library of news and entertainment to local customers.

Local communication depends greatly on the available infrastructure on a planet. Spaceports typically grant access to the local communications network as part of the docking fee. In larger colonies, these are typically part of a larger network that connects the various cities, but most commercial communicators can only get access from within a few kilometers of the next city. Some of the wealthier colonies have coverage over whole islands or small continents through satelite links, but global coverage is usually found only on the homeworlds.
Smaller outposts typically rely on radio communication which varies in range depending on their equipment, which is also used by crews of visiting ships. Communicators can easily be identified as being manufactured for the home systems markets or the colonial market by whether they are capable of radio transmissions or not. Even the smallest spaceports and planetary fuel statiins have at least one radio antenna powerful enough to contact ships in orbit while they are overhead.

INTERSTELLAR TRADE LANGUAGE
ITL is a simply but practical language that has been specifically designed to be as easy as possible to learn for the largest number of species with very different mental ways to process verbal information. The language has a single standardized writing system, but three completely different ways of pronounciation. The three phonetic systems are designed so that every species is physically able to pronounce at least one of them. While one system is enough to speak ITL, to be considered proficient in it requires being able to understand all three. For people working in space mining and interstellar transportation, being somewhat fluent in ITL is typically the most basic of all job requirements, but it's typically the first second language tought in all colonial schools.
With 15 different species that each have their own specific ranges of vocalization and hearing, it is inevitable that some are simply incapable of physically hearing everything said by some others in ITL. People who encounter such problems on a regular basis typically have hearing aids that aplify inaudible frequences into their hearing range. But most halfway decent communicators also have a function to play back everything spoken into them in an adjusted frquency range in real time, just like speaking into a microphone. It is considered a common courtesy to use them unasked when approaching a person of a species where this is a known issue, and not doing so often immediately identifies one as an inexperienced newcommer to the space of another species.

[Yora]

WEAPONS
Like everything else, weapons are somewhat low-tech and clunky. To create a more industrial feel, I made the decision to deliberately not include any energy weapons or force fields. Instead, armaments focus on slightly more futuristic upgraded versions of weapons from the early 20th century.

BLADES
The tight ineriors of many space ships frequently lead to fighting taking place at extremely close ranges where enemies can grab weapons to keep them pointing away from themselves. In such situations, a big knife or even a short sword can be a highly effective weapon. While most people have a very strong instinctual aversion to getting into a fight with blades, some species are much more comfortable with it and deliberate seek out such situations to use to their own advantage against a scared foe. While it is possible to fire guns when losing gravity, aiming becomes quite awkward and slow. Grappling and fighting with knives isn't easy in weightlessness either, but can often be a much more effective option.
Short swords are a standard part of most military and paramilitary combat equipment and lots of people working in space or on remote outposts have some basic training with them. Knives are also much easier to conceal from casual inspection and don't show up on most security scanners that are primarily designed to detect advanced guns and explosives, and many planets and spaceports that ban guns have much lower restrictions on blades.

GUNS
The most common types of pistols and rifles on advanced planets and in well equipped combat forces are railguns. But worlds without advanced manufacturing capabilities still widely use gunpowder weapons, as these can be made and repaired with relatively simple tools and don't require any complcated electronics or expensive materials. For a given size and weight, railgun weapons fire with more energy to have a longer range and produce significantly less noise. While still quite loud when fired, they have significantly reduced risk of hearing damage, especially inside crammed space ships.

SHIP WEAPONS
Two types of weapons dominate in space combat: Railgun cannons and torpedos. Neither of which are perfect.
Railgun cannons operate on the same principles as handguns and rifles, but scaled up to much larger size and power. In the great distances of space, even railgun projectiles that travel at incredible speeds can still take a considerable amount of time to reach their target. Even though large ships are not very maneuverable, they are travelling at very fast speeds, so that small changes in velocity or slight changes in direction can result in projectiles missing by tens or hundreds of meters once they have crossed the distance. While range in space is irrelevant, the speed of projectiles is the determining factor in the ability to hit a target. Larger gun designs typically focus on reaching higher projectile speed rather than increasing projectile mass. Because of this, ships with larger cannons don't deal more damage with their hits, but hit more often and have a greater ability to hit critical sections of their target. Since the ability to land a hit increases sharply as the distance to the target decreases, space battles typically take place at relatively short ranges where the enemy ship might very well be visible without any magnification. Ships that are outgunned but unable to escape often try to get closer to their enemy to try to reduce the disadvantage in range, but ships that know they have larger guns typically try to maintain a distance that is most in their favor.
Torpedos are an alternative way to damage a target that has a much larger range because torpedos have the ability to change their trajectory after launch, making evasion nearly impossible. However, in the emptiness of space, torpedos are very easy to pick up on scanners to be targeted by defensive range railguns that fire small but very fast projectiles. These are typically too light to penetrate serious armor, but can easily disable or destroy a torpedo. Torpedos are typically designed to try and evade defensive fire just before hitting their target, but a single torpedo is relatively easy to shoot down. The most effective use of torpedos is to shoot at ships with little defensive cannons of their own while staying out of reach of escorting warships. The other way to use torpedos is to launch them in larger numbers and have them arrive at the target from an angle where only a small number of defensive cannons can attempt to shoot them down. But larger warships tend to be specifically designed to have no such vulnerable angles, causing battles between destroyers and especially cruisers to come down to railgun cannons instead.
Space ships hit by cannons do not normally explode. There can be momentary fireballs as vaporized metal reacts with oxygen from the internal atmosphere, but these rarely do any more significant damage compared to the impact itself. Fusion reactors don't explode when damaged and simply shut down instantly. The fuels used in most propulsion systems are nonexplosive, and even the most primitive engines have their explosive fuel stored separately from oxidizers so that they don't mix when one tank is ruptured. The greatest explosion danger on ships are the torpedo warheads, but these are typically stored in the most well armored sections of the ship and are not found at all on typical cargo ships. The most catastropic battle damage that can normally happen to a ship is when its internal structural frame is severely weakened and the engines continue to run with an uneven distribution of thrust. This can lead to a ship bending in half and ripping into two pieces that drift away in different directions, but even that is extremely rare. Typically, a ship getting hit by cannons will simply lose power and propulsion as systems stop working from damage, and the disabled hulk continue drifting on its last trajectory.

INTUITATORS
Intuitation is a neurological alteration produced in people with a certain mental aptitude through long mental training, combined with various psychoactive drugs. The brains of trained intuitators have an increased capacity for accurate memory, and also the ability to rely on subconscious processing for the analysis of information than normal people. Intuitation grants people a hightened awareness of their surroundings and perception of possible threats, an increased intuitive grasp of complex situations and concepts, an improved ability to find connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information, and a highly increased sense of empathy. Skilled intuitators have abilities that border on precognition, but they are still limited to the information and data available to them, and their ability to see and understand connections and pattern is not infallible.
A significant problem with intuitation is that much of the processing of information is happening subconsciously and intuitators are often incapable of explaining their reasoning behind their conclusions or even understanding them themselves. Intuitation is rarely able to provide proof for any insights an intuitator might have, but it is still extremely valuable in directing investigations or to provide warnings for possible attacks or traps. Intuitators can only work with information that is available to them and can be mislead by deliberately falsified or manipulated data. Often predicted possibilities simply don’t come to pass, and sometimes even the best intuitators simply make mistakes. All intuitators have a significantly increased risk of developing paranoia, delusions, and other disorders because they regularly have thoughts entering their minds that don’t appear to be their own, or have extremely strong intuitive convinctions about things that can not be proven and they can’t explain even to themselves. Typically, gaining access to more information about a subject can help developing a conscious understanding of the previously purely subconscious connections, but in the lines of work in which intuitators are commonly employed mysteries regularly remain completely unsolved. In most organizations, intuitators are employed only in strictly advisory roles and are very limited in their authority to make important decisions. And many officials, administrators, and officers have a strong distrust of the reliability of inituitators.
Some intuitators practice their minds primarily in negotiation and interrogation and become extraordinarily capable in detecting deceptions and ommisions, as well as very carefully chosing their words and behavior to create the best positive response from people they talk to. In these situations, having all the facts exactly right is often not completely criticial to achieving success, and it is more about constantly reading the reactions of other people throughout the course of an ongoing conversation. This allows intuitators to subtly dig for specific pieces of information that they need to get a more complete picture and increase the certainty of their suspicions. While such intuitators are much less at risk of developing paranoia, they do have a strong tendency to become highly manipulative of all people around them, even if they don’t mean to, which can lead to just as dificult problems.

[brian 333]

I think best in terms of narratives, and my world building efforts are deeper, richer, and expose obvious, but otherwise un-noticed details when I write them out in a narrative structure.

Would you be disposed to reading some proposals I may offer, given with a narrative format?

[Yora]

I don't find those contributing in helpful ways. Those are about your worldbuilding, not mine.

[Mechalich]

The one big issue that jumps out to me is that metals are easily recyclable (and this is true even considering 'retro' tech principles, the Bayer Process, used to recycle aluminum, was invented in 1888). In the absence of population growth the demand for new metals is therefore exceedingly modest. An Earth with 11 billion people on it (or even 100 billion people) is never going to even come close to depleting the metallic resources available even in just the Main Belt asteroids of our solar system, never mind anywhere further afield.

In order for this to work you need some combination of rare elements to be highly important for essential technologies of you future society; the best candidate is probably the hyperspace generators themselves, and any other form of handwavium tech you chose to produce. Iridium is actually a good candidate because its high density means that not only is it difficult to access on Earth (it's rare in the crust presumably because most of it's buried deep in the mantle or core), but it will be rare on essentially any planet. That means it needs to be mined on asteroids, and asteroid mines will need agricultural colonies to support them.

Thinking further, this also helps to facilitate the rule of the rich. Because the rich don't actually need access to interstellar trade, iridium is not a necessity and therefore the various labor movements among the miners have relatively leverage because even if all the mines go down the rich don't care; the homeworlds already supply everything they need.


One other conflict I see has to do with data storage issues. The hyperspace charts you envision are going to be extremely complex records - effectively they have to be simulations charting the motion of every major celestial body in the chunk of the galaxy in which you expect to travel. That mandates some serious data storage density if you want small starships to be a thing at all. If ships can handle carrying those around, that means they can carry a lot of data of some other kind, which means the mail ships will be able to carry an awful lot of content. Colonies will still be behind the times, but they won't be content starved.

Oh, and I think you want to make it such that not only are the astrogation charts difficult and expensive to produce, but that they require some kind of advanced technological base - like giant super-precise telescopes with manufacturing tolerances measured in single-digit nanometers (we're already close with something like the James Webb's mirror) - that the colonies couldn't easily bootstrap into existence. That means that while colonies could still easily become independent, because they basically have to be self-sufficient at least at the star system scale in this setup, doing so would mean rapid isolation from the interstellar community.

[Yora]

Yes, all correct. Nobody is going to travel to other stars for iron, copper, or even titanium. In cases where it might come up what those mines are actually digging for, platinum group metals seem like great candidates. They have very useful properties but are really difficult to collect in meaningful numbers. Global production per year for iridium is something like 3 tons, and for osmium it's 800 kilos.
Any justification to have interstellar industry will be very flimsy at best, and mining for extremely rare elements seems to me the one that has at least some slight degree of plausibility.

Astrometry to the degree that is useful for hyperspace charts is extremely complicated and requires very expensive equipment. There are only a dozen or so astrometric services in all of Known Space that can make these. What they are doing is somewhat similar to meteorologists making weather predictions. There are a lot fewer moving parts in space than air molecules in an atmosphere, but the distances are much greater, so tiny measurement errors add up into huge discrepancies over several lightyears. Their forecasts also need to be correct for several years and not just the next week. The server banks of astrometric services making hyperspace charts are absolutely massive, and they have enormous computing power.
Fortunately, no ship needs to be able to reach every star system in Known Space from every possible other Star System. Out of ten thousand charted systems with a hundred billion possible courses between them, a ship operating in a sector with maybe 25 systems that also has to make regular refueling stops will likely be perfectly served with the data for just 100 possible courses. And the ships only need the final result of the simulation, they don't need all the raw input data that went into calculating the simulation.
Compared to just the plain text of newspapers, those charts would still be really big files. So yes, a mail barge could carry a lot of books, audio files, and even video files. If you really want a file even on the most remote outposts, you can get it. But a hundred billion people from possibly a thousand different countries, who nearly all have nice computers, are producing a lot of content every day. Most of which will be completely uninteresting even to most of their own planet. Mail barges will only carry media to add to local server libraries that the company thinks they will be able to sell in that system, or which someone has placed a specific order for. There are interstellar superstars whose works become available in every inhabited system within a year after release. But those are only a tiny fraction compared to creators who've nobody ever heard of outside of their home planet. There's probably some subcultures on some planets who are really into outdoing each other with the most obscure garage bands from planets nobody has ever heard of. But that would be an expensive hobby.

[Telok]

Gotta say, this reads a whole lot like an early era Traveller setting. You have the beginnings of the x-boat network (fast message drones) and subsidized mail (slow for consumers & small steady income for ships). Nobody fights wars for resources, stable populations on homeworlds & travel rate about 2 weeks for the shortest jump, up to near 2 months for the longest.

Edit: and almost firgot the navigation tapes. Accurate jump info for a jump read by the nav computer. Computers in classic Traveller were huge so it sas oftem better to rely on nav tapes than shell out for enough computing & crew skill to do your own jump calcs.

Biggest thing is setting up most colonies as early rl industrial corporate mining towns. Might want to throw a few religious colonies in, those were a thing during the rl exploration & early industrial.

Only real issue is that with core homeworlds being so big it really is possible for them to exercise military control over colonies. The voyages are long but the usual controlling orbit & having good bombardment.

Also, energy = mass × velocity, those faster slugs from bigger guns do carry a bigger wallop than same mass slugs from smaller guns. One option is bundled flechettes or shot ammo. The per round mass is similar but the bigger guns throw both faster & a spread of projectiles so that each individual projectile has the same e=m×v total as the smaller guns. They way you don't have to change the overall bigger = more accurate at longer ranges thing.

[Yora]

The idea to have a highly decentralized galaxy comes from almost a year back when I was first thinking about making a setting. And I've been blindly sticking to it while I worked out most of the details I have now.
Having spend much of yesterday examining what I like a lot about Star Wars, I've actually been thinking all day today that I really need to revise this entire element of the setting.

If I want to have a big battle fleet appear in the sector to disrupt things, it must have come from somehwere. While I don't want to go all out cyberpunk with megacorp security, having a handfull of East India Companies in addition to some hegemonial state militaries seems like a way forward.
There's not going to be a single Galactic Empire. And for a Star Trek type model there's not enough species.

I think it will be necessary to increase thr colonial population at least from 1% to 10%. That doesn't feel as demographically plausible as it will lead to lots of massive sized colony worlds, but at the end of the day, this is space opera and not science fiction. When plausibility conflicts with style, plausibility has to give in.
I did establish that some of the species started colonizing space 4,000 years ago. On very favorable planets, those populations could have grown a lot over time, even with a very low growth rate. Having a couple of major colonies with a few hundred millions could take up a good amount of the additional colonials. Putting some of them relatively close together could create a few pretty strong confederations and defense alliances. In the end, the math does not have to work out and the total number of colonies doesn't need to be stated either. But I like to ballpark estimate those things at this point to avoid falling into unexpected major logic holes later.

--

New Demographic Concept
After some pondering, here's a new idea. This being early 1900s retro-futuristic actually comes to a help. This is a world in which people still have to go underground with hand tools to chip away at the rock. A world where hordes of people work in factories and shipyards. And that also means working on farms and so on. This is not a post-scarcity setting with freely available robot labor. Also, everything that has to be imported costs money, and it's always cheaper if you can produce something locally. So even if your colony exists because of a few mines, you need to produce everything the miners need, and what the people who produce the things need. And that needs additional resources that need to be mined to the ones meant for export. This snowballs very quickly if you want to have a decent standard of living. A single large city isn't going to produce all of that. And to be fully self-sufficient for possibly centuries to come, even a small country worth of people won't be enough. You'll need to be a pretty big country with some sixty, eighty, or hundred million people.
Now were are those people coming from? Industrialized societies have low birth rates because children are expensive. To get them to have more children, make them cheaper. Daycare, schools, and universities free. Healthcare free. Additional housing costs and costs for food and clothing all tax deductable. If that's enough to get a 2.2 birth rate I'm not sure, but it will make a big difference. The other way with which countries with low birth rates maintain their population is migration. And there's a near infinite pool of people on the homeworlds. (It always keeps being amazing how much bigger billions are then millions when younactually work with them.) You need to attract people to your colony even though it's not actually as nice as the homeworld, but that can be adresed by lots of perks for new settlers. Of course, all of this costs money. Who is going to pay for that? What is going to pay for that? The profits from those precious metals exports.
Is allmof this macroeconomocally doubious? Probably. But for a space opera it only has to stand up to casual inspection. You need to have an answer ready when questions come up. It doesn't exactly have to be a good answer if it's about something not relevant to the story.

[Mechalich]

If you want big colonies but natural growth is implausible, there's always the option to abandon natural growth. Artificial wombs and cloning are both plausible retro-future technologies, as is Brave New World-style biological manipulation where every pregnancy is octuplets. You can bootstrap up real fast is you make every couple raise 10-20 children to adulthood for even a handful of generations.

[brian 333]

Why couples? Why not creche-raised children with professional parents? Everyone is home-schooled because every school is home to the kids.

This does not exclude natural childbirth and parenting, but it augments it. In the early generations of colonization creches raise most of the kids. When populations are stable, the creches exist only to inject genetic diversity into the population. Frozen eggs and sperm become trade goods, marketed across interstellar sectors to promote interfertility and eliminate genetically linked medical issues caused by breeding within small populations.

Two new prejudices:
Exos are artificially bred and may feel superior, especially when they are the local population's majority.
Naturals are naturally bred and may feel superior, especially when they are the local population's majority.

[Yora]

An option for harder sci-fi, but I don't think I need that for retro-futuristic industrial barons. Migration with greatly overstated work and living conditions seems like it should do the job well enough.

[Yora]

Social Classses

While the social structures in the home systems are very complex and highly varied between the many different cultures, the economic realities of the colonies and frontier have created a fairly simple system that is well established almost universally.

Proles: The vast majority of people living in the colonies and especially on the frontier are proles. They are factory and shipyard workers, miners, cargo ship crews, spaceport workers, farmers, amd so on. Except for the larger colonies, most proles learn their skills on the job, with little in the way of formal technical education.

Equits: Like the proles, the equits are considered common people and aren't as clearly distinguished from each other as they are from the upper class. But in practice, there are typically very significant differences between the two. The main defining trait of the equits that separates them from the proles is that they are making more money than they need to cover their ongoing living expenses. They are afluent enough to have modest amount of free capital to invest into businesses or small luxuries unaffordable to the proles. Since they are distinguished by their income and standard of living, equits are generally found in the more high paying jobs, which also require more extensive formal educations. Colonial administrations and company accountants and middle managements consist nearly exclusively of equits, as are teachers, doctors, military and security officers, and engineers. Compared to the proles, equits can become stunningly rich and rise to positions working directly with patricians, but many of them only posses very modest wealth that barely sufficies to maintain the appearances of their status and not much else.

Patricians: These are the industrial aristocracy of the colonies and in the eyes if many (including their own) the true rulers of space. Compared to the other classes, the numbers of patricians are tiny. Even systems with tens of millions of people typically only have a few dozen patricians among their populations. While the equits possess a wide range of wealth that can go as low as that of better off proles, the gap between the richest equites and patricians is just vast. A true patrician name is not only a business, but a brand in itself. Even when people have never heard of a specific patrician before, they typically recognize their family names instantly. Patrician famiies have employees in the thousands or even millions and they never work for other people. If you are employed to other people, you are not a true patrician, and patrician children learn the trade either in the family business or as unpaid interns under friends of their parents. But it is a very common practice for young patricians to either marry into or be adopted into other families and pursue a career in another company. While particularly well off or academically accomplished equites can gain access to patrician circles or even marry into their families, very few patricians would ever even speak to a prole.

While PCs can be born patricians, it's something they would typically have to hide during most adventures and pretend to be equites. They have no problems interacting with other patricians as one of their own, but would likely have to make up a false identity to cover up their disgraceful way of living. The number of patricians in a sector is very small and the number of families even lower. A patrician openly associating with common equites and even proles would very quickly become infamous among the local patricians and not be given any access to their circles.

[Yakk]

These are "harder" SF suggestions.

AI and ML and automation is missing from your setting. Note that traditional biological life sucks to maintain outside of a biosphere; this gives machines a big advantage.

If you can solve the problem of "keeping intelligent things alive", space is an insanely resource-rich place. And going up/down gravity wells is very expensive. It could easily be the case that planets are backwaters.

Instead of thinking "what resources do we send to the planet", rather it becomes "what resources are worth exporting from a planet". Even stuff like water and oxygen or whatever isn't hard to get in space really. And anything denser than that is far easier to get from asteroid belts and the like than from Earth, where most of the good stuff is deep within the planet core.

In this economic model, the economic heights aren't occupied by planets, but by beings holding the high ground.

If we lean into basic automation, much of this wealth doesn't need people. You don't mine an asteroid by someone with pick axes. You don't even find the asteroid with someone in a space ship. You just have a drone find the asteroid, and an automatic mining facility tear it apart, and robots do repair work as needed. Very rarely you'll need human intervention, and often that would be by presence. Such interactions are fed into ML models, and the next time a similar problem occurs ... you don't need the human.

This produces a set of Corporate Princes -- people who captured this exponential dragon's horde of wealth, and have a mostly automated economic empire. Their empire is busy converting stuff into more stuff -- more mining craft, more space stations, more exploration vessels, more everything. Why? Because who doesn't want a space station full of dinosaurs, and another full of ice age mammoths and proto humans, and another with gene engineered musical fairies.

By divorcing the super-rich "Corporate Princes" from needing human labour to generate wealth, it puts the humans who aren't Princes into a horrible spot.

You'll have humans in craft trying to mine, or prospect, or whatever. And when they produce stuff of value, they can sell it to the Corporations. But they aren't efficient at it. So they are going to be on the edge of poverty, and poverty in space means hard radiation and oxygen shortages etc. While that stuff is "cheap", the human poor who want it are cheaper.

Corporate Princes may literally be moving oceans of ice asteroids to terraform a moon into a resort while poor belters go thirsty, because the corporate prince doesn't care, and the belters aren't worth providing water for. They have little economic value.

Corporate employees would basically be slaves of the Corporation. They aren't really that valuable to the Corporation. They'll have implants that are used to keep them in line (to the level of "pop goes the head" if they get out of line). As water/etc is cheap, a few Corporate dones are also cheap. And fleshy security troops are also cheap and expendable. (The troops would be ordered around by ML algorithms, and if they fail to comply the units are decimated).

In this variation, most humans in space are basically rats. Not worth the bother to exterminate, but if they start causing problems not a problem to get rid of them. It is very bleak.

Planets are both worse and better. Planets don't have anything worth exporting really; the gravity well adds an energy cost to everything by the kg. Human lives aren't worth much, so exporting humans isn't of value. Without being able to lean on space production, pollution would continue to get worse on most planets. Attempts to rival Corporate Princes with their huge resource base by planetary governments would lead to harsh lessons in the power of the high ground.

The "used future" look comes from this naturally. 99.9999% of humans live on the waste products of the 0.0001%; even Corporate proles are being used because meat is marginally cheaper for not-important problems. You'll have these gleaming mega engineering structures that aren't for people, but for the amusement of the Corporate Princes. Rivalry between said Princes will cause devastation and destruction, not out of malice towards the masses, but out of not caring at all. But for the most part, the Corporates have all of space to grab; fighting each other is a waste of resources. So you might have a few thousand troops slaughtering each other over a disputed system, but that is like a game of chess, not a real war.

The Corporates mark things as owned by them -- planets, asteroids, etc -- and violating those rules results in harsh punishment. Having the right to register things as owned is out of budget for non-Corporates, so the best they can do is find unclaimed resources and gather up wealth before the Corporates notice and claim the resource for themselves. The only way out of this trap is to gather up enough resources to register as a Corporation yourself and gain the right to register stuff. This happens rarely.

[Yora]

The big issue of this is that the exploitation of people is happening because their labor is actually extremely valuable and the consumers of that labor don't want to pay the price that the workers are demanding for their labor.
If workers have no value to the super rich, and neither do planets, then what reason is there to be for the super-rich to interact with the planetary populations at all? Planetary economies would be self-contained systems, possibly without access to the luxuries and technologies of the super rich, but able to sustain themselves with the means of their own resources and production. The problem with megacorporations and colonial powers is that htey are extracting value in the form of resources and labor from a system without feeding back matching value in return. That's what's making exploited regions desperately poor.

[Yakk]

You can be extremely poor without being exploited.

Planetary populations and belters would interact with the Corporates because the Corporates have things they want. The Corporates wouldn't really value the contributions that the belters and planetary populations have, but extreme despiration would make the belters and planetary populations offer and accept really bad terms.

The Corporates would have claimed almost everything of value. If the Belters had equal access to the claimed resources, they could be rich -- but (in an extension of Citizens United) the Corporations themselves are the only first-class "people" with the right to make claims.

People can be exploited into poverty; but they can also be shoved aside into poverty, which is way way worse. A future where the marginal price to raise a human to adulthood is greater than the expected surplus value of that person working their entire life. Where maintaining atmosphere for a person to breath costs more than just building an automaton to replace them.

The brutality of the state apparatus is limited by the utility of the workers; the final power that the masses have is to just die rather than be slaves. When their death isn't a problem for the overlording "state", this makes the situation even more bleak and dystopian.

Another horrible part is that with space being so large, it isn't as if the corporations need to actually displace the belters or the planetaries. They can maintain exponential growth by exploring new systems -- extending the map, solving for new routes, and prospecting. But sometimes it is cheaper to claim territory belters or planetary civilizations are using than it is to explore, or to piggy pack on their exploration and just take what they find. Maybe they'll even make treaties with the belters or planetaries to get most of what they, the corporates, want -- a little less efficiently than doing it directly, but requires less bother than doing a population relocation. After all, they can always get around to the relocation later when there are surplus security units beyond current need.

This is the genocidal expansion of the USA over the US continent; this colonialism wasn't "we want to exploit the native population", it is "we want the native population out of the way so we can claim the territory". Except here, there is an alternative path to expand into that is slightly further out of the way with no people claiming it. Such a bother to go out of the way, tho, when they could just grab the local stuff.

It is the colonialism of forced marches, demonization, genocide, small pox blankets.

What more, in the first waves, it was somewhat cooperative. The native population often saw what the US citizens did, and they formed farming communities and the like. But the US simply cleared them out of the way, as they had no legal claim (in the US system) for the land. The same kind of thing happened in the Canadian west ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North-West_Rebellion ).

The early phases of the genocide of North America involved trading with the native population -- fur trading posts, alliances including military ones, weapons, etc. But the exponential growth of the European settlements meant that more and more raw territory needed to be consumed in a way incompatible with the existing way of using the land. The colonizers had not all that much interest in exploiting the existing population -- European settlers and population growth could provide more than enough bodies to throw at the problem -- but the horror was real and so was the resulting poverty.

But you could also do the "they need to exploit the under class" option. It results in, I suspect, a less dystopian society. I just like the idea of doubling down.

The idea of a small number of capitalists who no longer need a worker class, have a vanishing need for a middle class, and even an upper class which is being discarded, could make an interesting setting.

[Yora]

Yeah, maybe, but that completely changes both the targeted style and the entire premise of the setting.

[brian 333]

In this case, I might suggest that AI either does not work the way we currently envision it might, requires massive investments of resources which make them a net negative profit, or have become violently aggressive too many times in the past to trust with control of the material production processes.

Let us assume the first: AI, for all its promise, eventually becomes entangled in nonsense logic. Logic that looks good on paper but has no real world application eventually causes AI and anything it operates to eventually fail. Catastrophically. This means that humans must limit the capacity of AI to grow, and constantly monitor and correct that growth. Robots are intentionally limited in their computational capacity in order to prevent their ability to chase logic down rabbit holes, and humans must be on hand to direct and repair them.

The second premise is that AI works, but few resources are worth the cost of producing them. Schools of science, ships of exploration, and a very few other applications make use of AI, but the entire process of extracting resources, refining them, manufacturing goods out of them, and getting them to markets that want them are more efficiently performed by machines operating on Boolean logic, directed and maintained by humans.

The third premise is the plot of so many sci-fi works it hardly requires explanation. When AI achieves the degree of sophistication required to operate independently of humans, even if it is not or can never be self aware in the way we think of it, logic dictates that the now obsolete biological units not be permitted to interfere with the operation of the AI. When humans try to maintain or reassert control, the AI defends itself, with ruthless efficiency. Humans have learned to not make that mistake because eventually, AI doesn't need humans and does not care about them at all.

[Telok]

Hmm... Let me see if I can summarize what I'm seeing so far.

A. Not a human-only setting but more limited number of species Star Wars/Trek like spread & integration of species. Home worlds & systems vast majority mono-species, out-system is generally mixed and its all generally just "people". No severe differences like methane breathers or sessile psychic clams, hive minds, blue whale size or squirrel size sapients, etc.
B. Want corporate domination & severe social stratification with oppression of the workers.
C. Undefined role of homeworld governments.
D. Tech for getting routes to new resources have an extremely high initial cost plus non-trivial ongoing costs.
E. Tech for FTL travel is relatively common & economical, as is general space travel & infrastructure. Privately owned tramp freighters are a thing (therefore all non-FTL must be non-relavistic).
F. Want the homeworld polities to not be enforcing rule of law on the coprorate frontier systems.
G. Want to discourage over the use of robots & AI over meat based workers.

So, seeing homeworlds with their own old-style mega-rich & politics & oppressed masses. Cut deals with the space-corps for exclusive expliotation rights. Space-corps get access to the desperate masses for cheap labor. The homeworld elites have abdicated frontier law & enforcement to the corps because its economic (read "don't have to spend money on") for the homeworld elites. Homeworld will have a defense fleet & capability to up production to a massive fleet but doesn't want the expense. Space-corps don't want interference or conflict with homeworld markets.

Something makes pure robot & AI exploration & exploitation undesireable. The 'learning loops needed for any effrctive machine autonomy lead to insanity/murder-bots' thing works. Also people given basic tools & stuff will set up a generally self sustaining environment if at all possible. So just shipping out people & gear gets corps a self sustaining base infrastructure without real effort. Small prospectors & belters make good resource scouts for low investment if you have a way to steal the big finds from them.

Actual "open a new system" is expensive with the initial investments in FTL routes & shipping 10k bodies + basic hab equipment, plus at least a few years of initial support supply runs. But once that's through the corp sells the FTL route data (now less than 5 years to "out of date" to limit resale & require $updates) to independents so they take over most of the low profit bulk transport & risky exploration. Corps keep high value shipping to themselves & take over valuable resource finds. Policing is a few patrol ships capable of taking out a couple civvy freighters/miners & doing orbital bombardment.

Socially have the old-world rich & powerful (billions of people are a major economic engine no matter what), the new space-corp rich, a middle layer manager-specialist-military officer strata with the tramp freighters & belters, the masses of workers. Economically keep the FTL route data artifically high & leave manufacturing at the homeworld systems. No point in shipping expensive factory stuff out system when you can gouge profit off the frontiers by charging shipping both ways & non-perishable goods don't care about 6 month transits.

Damit gota go family crap

[Yora]

Since I'm doing retro-future, I'm just not really having artificial intelligence in the picture at all. What there is in regards to robots is either remote controlled, or just basic automation that only responds to a small set of pre-defined signals without any autonomous decision making. If a robot encounters an unexpected obstacle, it needs to be manually reset.

I am currently overhauling some basic assumptions about scale, which I first want to have locked in before developing more specific details. But I'll probably resume posting new stuff later this week or so.

[Yora]

MAP OF KNOWN SPACE

Spoiler

Show

Typical galaxy maps divide Known Space into 216 sectors that each consist of a cube 1000 light years on each side, though despite the common name not even half of them have really been explored to any meaningful extent yet. This region covers only a segment of one of the galaxy's secondary spiral arms and in total makes up only a small percentage of the entire galactic disc. At this scale, even a galaxy can be treated as a two dimensional disc for most purposes and the specific height of individual star systems within the galactic disc can be ignored.
By long standing interstellar convention, the entire sector surrounding the homeworld of an intelligent species is considered exclusive territory of that species and no other species are allowed to establish any kinds of colonies out outposts within it. The convention merely establishes that no other species are to stake any claims within the exlusive territories. How any claims are recognized is left up entirely to the governments of the homeworlds. Any star systems and planets outside the exclusive territories are in theory up for grabs, but the Damalin homeworld, the main Netik colonies, and the most dominant Enkai states have a long honored treaty on respecting each other's extended claims over surrounding space.

THE NEW FRONTIER
Almost 200 years ago the New Frontiers consortium was established to build a high powered astrometric survey station in sector G5, on the outer edge of the galactic spiral arm. Given the considerably lower density of stars in the targeted region, a single survey station could accurately map the locations, trajectories, and gravitational interactions between the stars for a much longer distance out into space, and calculate hyperspace routes to numerous planets considered candidates for large scale mining of various rare elements. A notable discovery of the New Frontiers surveys was the homeworld of the Amai, who since then have gained access to interstellar star ships and begun to establish first new outposts of their own. More recently, Mahir explorers discovered that a forest planet near their own homeworld is actually inhabited by the Weyrok, who had just started the development of electrical technology a few generations before.
While the New Frontiers Survey was quite successful and led to the establishment of a considerable number of large mines throughout the region, the gold rush days are already well past and there is relatively little new migration happening into the region. But even the grandchildren of people born on the colonies still call it the New Frontier.

[Mechalich]

Typical galaxy maps divide Known Space into 216 sectors that each consist of a cube 1000 light years on each side, though despite the common name not even half of them have really been explored to any meaningful extent yet. This region covers only a segment of one of the galaxy's secondary spiral arms and in total makes up only a small percentage of the entire galactic disc. At this scale, even a galaxy can be treated as a two dimensional disc for most purposes and the specific height of individual star systems within the galactic disc can be ignored.

The Thin Disk of the Milky Way, which is the part usually thought of as the galactic disk, is roughly 1000 ly in height. At the scale you're using sector-to-sector mapping can ignore height, but height is going to be exceedingly important in system-to-system mapping. However, this shouldn't be considered a problem, since dealing with such a map doesn't require any special tools, you can just use the kind of mapping we use today for airplanes - since star systems are in motion against each other adn the galactic center - the only difference is that the 'ground' will be an arbitrary plane defined by the projection.

If I may, however, I would suggest shrinking your sector size slightly. A 1000 ly on a side cube has a volume of 1 billion light years. That is roughly 1/40,000th of the total thin disk volume of the Milky Way. Estimates vary, but even at the low end, such a sector would contain over 1 million stars. Your total 216 sector zone would therefore contain well over two hundred million stars (again, that's a low-end estimate). That's a lot. You might want to reduce down to 250 ly on a side (~300,000 stars) or even 100 ly on a side (~20,000 stars). Admittedly most stars are red dwarfs, but that actually makes them better targets for mining purposes because the in-system distances are considerably compressed.

[Yora]

Having an interstellar travel system that consists of direct jumps between pre-determined locations removes three-dimensional navigation from the process. Effectively, navigation comes down to looking up which systems can be reached from which system and the travel time between them. The relative position of any stars to each other is irrelevant for pilots. All the course calculations have already been done by dedicated supercomputers and fed into a database where they can be looked up.

Further building on the systems in Stars Without Number, each sector has only some 20 to 40 star systems connected to the hyperspace route network. 30 stars out of 300,000 or 30 stars out of 4,800,000 doesn't really make a difference. But with 250 light year sectors I would have to have four sectors stacked on each other, which requires three dimensional mapping. Which I did tinker around with a while back, but seems unnecessarily fiddly for little gain.

[brian 333]

MAP OF KNOWN SPACE

Spoiler

Show

Typical galaxy maps divide Known Space into 216 sectors that each consist of a cube 1000 light years on each side, though despite the common name not even half of them have really been explored to any meaningful extent yet. This region covers only a segment of one of the galaxy's secondary spiral arms and in total makes up only a small percentage of the entire galactic disc. At this scale, even a galaxy can be treated as a two dimensional disc for most purposes and the specific height of individual star systems within the galactic disc can be ignored.
By long standing interstellar convention, the entire sector surrounding the homeworld of an intelligent species is considered exclusive territory of that species and no other species are allowed to establish any kinds of colonies out outposts within it. The convention merely establishes that no other species are to stake any claims within the exlusive territories. How any claims are recognized is left up entirely to the governments of the homeworlds. Any star systems and planets outside the exclusive territories are in theory up for grabs, but the Damalin homeworld, the main Netik colonies, and the most dominant Enkai states have a long honored treaty on respecting each other's extended claims over surrounding space.

THE NEW FRONTIER
Almost 200 years ago the New Frontiers consortium was established to build a high powered astrometric survey station in sector G5, on the outer edge of the galactic spiral arm. Given the considerably lower density of stars in the targeted region, a single survey station could accurately map the locations, trajectories, and gravitational interactions between the stars for a much longer distance out into space, and calculate hyperspace routes to numerous planets considered candidates for large scale mining of various rare elements. A notable discovery of the New Frontiers surveys was the homeworld of the Amai, who since then have gained access to interstellar star ships and begun to establish first new outposts of their own. More recently, Mahir explorers discovered that a forest planet near their own homeworld is actually inhabited by the Weyrok, who had just started the development of electrical technology a few generations before.
While the New Frontiers Survey was quite successful and led to the establishment of a considerable number of large mines throughout the region, the gold rush days are already well past and there is relatively little new migration happening into the region. But even the grandchildren of people born on the colonies still call it the New Frontier.

Having an interstellar travel system that consists of direct jumps between pre-determined locations removes three-dimensional navigation from the process. Effectively, navigation comes down to looking up which systems can be reached from which system and the travel time between them. The relative position of any stars to each other is irrelevant for pilots. All the course calculations have already been done by dedicated supercomputers and fed into a database where they can be looked up.

Further building on the systems in Stars Without Number, each sector has only some 20 to 40 star systems connected to the hyperspace route network. 30 stars out of 300,000 or 30 stars out of 4,800,000 doesn't really make a difference. But with 250 light year sectors I would have to have four sectors stacked on each other, which requires three dimensional mapping. Which I did tinker around with a while back, but seems unnecessarily fiddly for little gain.

Speaking of pre-calculated routes:

In our modern world, passenger aircraft use a hub-and-spoke model designed in the 1940s for ease of control of air traffic. Modern computing power makes this model unnecessary, but since all of our infrastructure is based in the hubs which are accessed by multiple small regional airports, nobody wants to invest in smaller aircraft and devote more infrastructure resources to smaller airports.

Passenger bus companies work on a different model. The route service models do not collect passengers and deliver them to a central hub, from which they are dispatched to another hub, and then transferred to regional stations. They simply have routes that form chains of stops, and one gets a series of links from chain to chain from starting point to destination.

The first model makes it easier to control what moves where and to track it. If Jo wants to go from Tatooine to Coruscant, she must pass through one or more hubs, at which government agencies can be concentrated to make certain people are going where they are supposed to be going.
In the second model, Jo can buy tickets from Tatooine to Coruscant, then get off anywhere along the line. Who would know she didn't go all the way? Even worse, one would have to track and communicate between every station to keep tabs on people. Instead of dozens of offices, one needs hundreds.

From a navigation perspective, navigation routes based on hub service are far easier to calculate. We don't need to connect every planet to every planet in its range; we can connect each to regional hubs, and connect the hubs. This way Jo buys a ticket to Coruscant, takes a ship to the hub, transfers to another hub, then finishes her trip to Coruscant. If necessary, she may take a very large, long range ship from hub to hub to make the final connection.

The first model is less efficient, but easier for large companies and governments to control. The second model makes it easier for smaller companies to compete, but requires much greater investments in navigation resources. I recommend a hybrid model in which large corporations control hub to hub service and smaller companies fill in the less lucrative backwaters.

A final question about navigation:

What role do navigators play?
1. Are they necessary at all? (Plug-in nav programs do all the work.)
2. Do they supervise the nav programs to make sure they work? (Can the program be manipulated to correct for older calculations thus requiring fewer updates from central mapping?)
3. Can a navigator generate routes to destinations with a library of navigation maps? (Does the central mapping service sell maps navigators can use to create routes between destinations the service does not calculate?)
4. Can navigators create their own navigation charts? (This may require specialized equipment and computers not available to merchants.)

I'm not sure how your chosen game system works with levels of skills, but if there are tiers of skills, (D&D skill ranks style):
Tier O: anyone with piloting skill can use plug-and-play navigation programs. Updated ones are not cheap, and are only available to commonly visited worlds.
Tier 1: Trained Navigators can tweak older navigation programs to account for current conditions.
Tier 2: Generating a course is not for the timid. Updated maps are not cheap, often do not include anomalies which would not interfere with hub-and-spoke routes, and may only update the central regions, relying on older data at the fringes. Only well seasoned navigators should try this.
Tier 3: The skill necessary to generate star maps sets one apart. Almost everyone with this degree of skill is a member of the Navigator's Guild, or Survey Corps, or Imperial Astrogation Service, or whatever. From survey ships designed around suites of mapping sensors and computers to regional mapping hubs, to a central database of every mapping expedition ever, these beings are the glue that binds empires. Major corporations bid highly for their services, and rogue or disgraced navigators often find their skills desired by organizations who promise much, and threaten more.

[Yora]

The New Frontier

Spoiler: New Frontiers Hyperspace Chart

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Nearly 200 years ago, several of the major mining clans created the New Frontiers Consortium, pooling their financial resources together to fund a private astrometric project on a never before seen scale. After two decades of surveying the outer edge of the galactic arm with telescopes to search for stars with exceptionally high metalicity, which favors the formation of large numbers of rocky planets with rare heavy elements, over 500 star systems were selected for further close up prospecting missions. The precise astrometric measurements of the stars’ positions, movement, velocity, and gravitational interactions required for calculating hyperspace jumps took more than another decade until the first survey missions could be launched.

Once the first survey reports from the most promising planets came in, the members of the consortium rushed their vast mining fleets into the New Frontier to stake their claims. While first seen as a great success, the initial gold rush that saw millions of miners from the home systems sign up for very well paying 10-year-contracts lasted only for a good 50 years. The first planets that had been mined did indeed provide resource deposits of exceptionaly high concentrations which were easily accessible with only limited amount of energy. But it turned out that the quality of the New Frontiers project had been so high that it had located nearly all of the grade A++ sites before the mining fleets had even launched, and the anticipated discovery of many more new sites of comparable quality never materialized. Large scale mining on the new worlds continued for another hundred years, but the high transportation cost of hauling the metals back to shipyards and factories made it no more profitiable than mining more labor and energy intensive deposits much closer to the home systems. Once it became cheaper to simply move the mining fleets back into the established borders of Known Space, most of the mining clans pulled out of the New Frontier. There are still vast amounts of highly valuable metals in the New Frontier that continue to be mined by smaller independent mining companies, but the profits are comperatively low and not worth the time of the mining clans.

Since there are still 200 million people living in the New Frontier, even after the departure of the mining fleets, the New Frontiers Consortium still continues to release new updated hyperspace charts for the routes between settled planets and a planets that might still have economic value for independent miners. But the charts for the New Frontier now only cover around 300, barely more than half of what is found on outdated charts from over a century ago. And a large number of the systems are home only to refuelling and repair stations along the main routes.

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The sector maps from Stars Without Number didn't quite work for me with how I envisoned the setting. So I scaled it up to 16 sectors.
I even went so fancy that I randomized the star types for each system. I tried to have the distribution of different types somewhat similar to real stars, but I actually reduced the fraction of red dwarfs quite significantly. Only half of all the stars are red dwarfs now. There's nearly everything there except for blue giants, neutron stars, and white holes because these are just too rare to be likely to come up in such a small sample size. I probably will still have a few of those, but those will be deliberately placed for specific weird planets instead of randomly generated.
The colored regions are the main areas of settlements which have some kind of of semi-official authority. The orange region near the center is the original Esekar Sector from my earlier notes, with Ordos, Dresat, Kamara, and Tornesh. I might move Lupai and Kulpin to the yellow region and make that one dominanted by the Enkai Cartel. The teal region at the bottom is the old Teoher Sector that consists of several Damalin colonies that somewhat resemble an actual state. Which I know I haven't even presented here yet, but that's one of the next things I have planned.