Space Exploration Worldbuilding

[Tiger]

I'm going to be custom designing much of the tech based on my own calculations and pet design ideas - UT is a reference but not a shopping list for PCs. The Pyramid articles for designing Cutting Edge and UT armor, as well as the one for designing blasters and lasers, will be used extensively.

I appreciate the advice on jump drives. However one thing that stops me from using it is my desire to have travel be extremely long rang and somewhat discontiguous. If I could figure out a rationale for why only some jump points are known or valid I'd be down for it. For example: - maybe there's a set of viable jumps from any given system, like the lagrange points or electron orbits, and these could lead almost anywhere. Trying to jump 'between' these points either sends you to one of the valid points or kills you. Likewise, calculating a jump could require planetary Super computers so ships can't try jumping on the fly - at least not safely. They need specific precalculated navigation data that only these computers can provide. Every system has different valid bands. But again this is basically just wormholes renamed.

I'd also appreciate some advice on psionics. I have Powers, Supers, the Psionic Campaigns and Psis books plus the Pyramid issue Psis II currently and I've looked through them all. But I would like to try to keep psi somewhat more 'realistic' or controlled. Telekinesis in particular screams to allow reactionless drives which I don't want to do. I'm not necessarily opposed to powerful Psis but i don't want what they do to be obviously magic. Telepathy, for example, should be limited by light speed and compatible brains. So I'm going to have too modify some of the powers. Most of them would be more plausible if confined to physical contact, since then it can be explained by physiology and the nervous system utilizing some bodily energy. But lifting two tons at a hundred feet without burning yourself alive sith waste heat seems very dubious from a physics perspective.