[Spaceships] Making a setting work...

[Ejidoth]

So, I'm currently running (sort of; still in the initial phases) a space game of sorts. After some false starts as I'm adjusting the spaceships rules and such, I think it'll work out okay mechanics-wise. I'm hoping some of you can help with rationalizing and justifying why the setting is the way I want it to be, though. :P

Suppose I should list assumptions first:

1) There is one type of reactionless drive (using the stats for 'hot reactionless'), called an Etheric Drive. It only works within a limited radius of a star, and if it accelerates something too fast (1% c, I think) relative to the star, the ship goes ethereal until it slows down. This doesn't prevent all problems, but it lets me avoid pseudovolocity and lets me make handwaving 'why can't we crack planets?' a little easier.

2) Similarly, planetary point defense have Ether Wave Projectors, which can push relatively small objects they hit into the ether for a few seconds. In the even that someone does work out a planet-cracker, the idea is that civilized planets can just make the kinetic weapon phase through them harmlessly.

3) Travel between systems uses a Phase Conveyor. It's a sort of Jump Drive that requires you to be a certain range from the nearest star (75 to 100 AU, multiplied by the stellar mass relative to sol), takes an hour to activate and then about another week to arrive. During the week of arrival time, the location you will arrive at in the target system has some ether turbulence that sensors can pick up, alerting pirates and patrols and stuff that someone will be at that location within a week or so. The only info about your ship it gives them is your rough mass, though.

4) The phase conveyor doesn't actually convey the ship any distance, it just shifts it to a star system in a parallel universe based on the coordinates input into the computer when it was activated. This means no two inhabited systems are in the same galaxy, or even the same universe. It also means you can go from any system to any other system you have the coordinates for.

5) No alien life, so far. I might add some alien races, but in general they probably won't have the etheric superscience technology that enables reactionless drives and phase conveyors.

6) The setting is TL10^, with the only superscience being the etheric tech, torch drives, and plasma weaponry. Most worlds are fairly safe-tech, with some fringe worlds and such more heavily into cybernetics, bio-tech, etc.

7) There are psis and mutants and such with supernatural powers, but they're uncommon, many have unique powers, and nobody's pinned down a way to reliably produce them.

8) There are space pirates, often based in uninhabited systems. Since there's a nigh-infinite number of possible Phase Conveyor coordinates, they can just put an outpost in a system that's not on the normal maps, and when patrols and stuff finally do figure out the coordinates, they just relocate to another uncharted system. The pirate ships themselves tend to hang around in the phase conveyor zone (the 75 to 100 AU thing) watching for vulnerable ships to phase in, which they try to intercept.

9) There are tramp freighters and such, usually wandering around in the less pirate-infested systems, but occasionally heavily armed ones wander into the frontier systems to make a better profit.