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Originally Posted by tshiggins
So, yeah, I'd call the core planets TL10, with just enough super-science to have relatively inexpensive space travel and "slow" FTL speeds.
(Even an unmanned, light and fast messenger drone couldn't travel much faster than about 1 ly in 12-24 hours or so, IIRC, but it's been awhile and my books are packed in boxes.)
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Fast warships could manage 3-5LY/day. Most would do more like 1.5-2.5LY/day. A liner did about 1-1.5LY/day, as would an unladen freighter. A freighter loaded with ore would do about 0.5LY/day, and for some of them this would make their range limit the fuel for their power-plant when they were that heavily laden.
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That said, I will note that, wholly unlike Firefly, privately-owned starships didn't really exist in vanilla 2300 AD. Most starships were owned by governments, NGOs (of which 2300AD had many) or large corporations.
A few billionaires owned private yachts with stutterwarp capabilities, but that's it. No independent merchants who struggled to keep flyin' in their ramshackle ships. If the PCs needed to travel, they booked flights and bought tickets.
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There were a few freighters that would be within reach of a small shipping company, especially if second-hand, and parts of the French Arm were just getting to the point where there might've been room for a few independent operators (though they'd still be running set routes and mainly carrying freight, not speculative cargo, IMO) when the Kafer War went all hot, which would've killed off that budding trade opportunity.
One thing about the tech that makes it seem primitive to us today is that most of what we see is stuff intended for explorers, wilderness colonists, and small military units operating with little logistics support, so it's rugged and doesn't depend on other pieces of gear to function. Massively networked, talks to all its friends, uses distributed processing over the whole unit, navigates by GPS and wi-fi hotspots, and so on stuff might exist in the core, but out in the frontier it's seen as unreliable, I think. People want self-contained equipment that works when the GPS sats are down, the comm sats are unreachable because of solar activity, and you're on your own and thus have no network.