[Space / Spaceships] Society limited to fission?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by JackFalcon13

It would also help allow piracy

Your tech base is hostile to piracy. There's no real way for pirates to lurk undetected while they're waiting for a target and no way for them to vanish after they've dealt with one.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by JackFalcon13

Yeah, but you reach a certain threshold where dodging isn't really an option, despite what the Spaceships rules say.

Yes. Realistically, the only drives in Spaceships that can execute a dodge against Spaceships weapons are Subwarp drives.

[Michael Thayne]

What you're describing sounds very similar to the video game Children of a Dead Earth. Big ships tend to use nuclear thermal rockets, though ion drives do show up. Drones and missiles use chemical rockets. Interplanetary transit times are slow, though in the fluff they're made a bit faster with drop tanks for extra delta-V. Manned fighters aren't a thing, both because the pilot adds mass and because drones can be treated as expendable such that there's no need to save delta-V to get back to the carrier.

Note that to justify why anyone would want to go to space with such limited tech, the setting posits a massive war that included three or four different types of world-ending weapons being unleashed.