Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

[Mailanka]

I've been digging around in space opera and hard sci-fi for awhile, attempting to see how I can get my vision of space opera to fit into GURPS, and I've quickly found a few problems that I think I can finally encapsulate neatly:

Space Opera (and by "Space Opera" I mean the fantastical narratives filled with space tropes like starships and aliens, but with little actual science beyond the techno-babble necessary to justify such a setting, as seen in the popular conscience thanks to TV, movies and many video games. We're talking about Mass Effect, Star Trek, Star Wars and Firefly, if I'm allowed to make broad generalizations) tends to focus on the personal. It has human heroes that go toe-to-toe with easily understood enemies, usually other humans or humanoid aliens/robots, and this hero fights his enemies at a close enough distance that he can see them, talk to them, form relationships with them. It's something we can grasp on an intellectual level.

More and more science and technology might be lathered atop this core assumption, but anything that violates it is discarded, changed or ignored. In Dune, we introduce those strange shields to encourage knife fights. In Mass Effect, despite having weapons that can shoot amazingly long distances and facing an AI threat, all the fights inexplicably happen close enough that you can run at your enemy and reach him in the space of a handful of seconds, and said enemy has two arms and two legs and a head-like point, rather than being something completely inhuman that snipes you from miles away. This is true of 40k as well. Similarly, Star Wars features laser swords that can conveniently parry (remarkably slow-moving) laser blasts and the Jedi that wield them, despite having remarkable reflexes, control over remote objects and precognition, Jedi never whip out gun-fu and snipe their opponents with bent laser-bolts. They fight with laserswords. My point is not that any of this is bad or poorly justified, quite the opposite, it's that it is so. Every one of these settings fights to keep combat and problems up-close and personal, on a profoundly (modern, recognizably) human scale. Some justify them better than others, but they all have these concepts in place.

Hard Sci-Fi is more interested in exploring the ultimate implications of technologies and scientific discoveries, and thus it strictly adheres to verisimilitude. For example, if weapons continue to outpace armor, then you won't see power armor. If weapons and sensors continue to expand their ranges, then one would expect warfare to be fought at amazing distances. And if AI continues to advance and we still care greatly for human life, then we'd expect push-button warfare to become the norm. Why even have soldiers if AI can fight your wars better for you?

Likewise, the problems faced in sci-fi are often beyond the scope of a single human. You can't punch a nano-plague in the jaw. You can't negotiate with a star on the verge of going nova. You can't fall in love with an alien princess, because "she" won't represent anything remotely humanoid, much less something you could actually breed with, and it might not even understand or have the concept of love (It'd be like falling in love with a crocodile princess, except it would probably make less sense).

GURPS tends to favor this latter approach, as it fixates on realism by default. Ultra-tech firearms extend their ranges further and further and continue to increase in lethality (with some of the more mundane, uninteresting weapons like guns and nukes beating out exotic physics for combat solutions) and following the implications laid out in UT tends to lead one more in the direction of a setting like Transhuman Space than like Star Wars.

GURPS players tend to match it. Hand one of my players a Jedi, and they'll start to wonder why, exactly, they can't use blasters and destroy their enemy from a range. Thus, I cannot rely on tradition or genre savvy to keep my players in line. They want in-setting or in-system justifications, and I don't blame them.

So, my question to you is (TL;DR): What suggestions do you have for taking ultra-tech equipment and keeping the scale of adventure at a personal, human-oriented scope, using in-setting or in-system (ie cinematic options or house rules) justifications?