Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by cptbutton

(And I am not even going to try to make sense of the “dozens of planets and hundreds of moons” suitable for terraforming part.)

That's not nearly as tough as everybody makes it out to be. Joss just missed the obvious: It isn't a single system.

It's an open cluster. FTL drives exist, but jumps to pretty much anything outside the cluster (e.g. back to Earth) are not possible without some major infrastructure (some kind of jump booster array) that is well beyond anything anyone can now manage.