'm soliciting some feedback on 'Frontier', a sci-fi background I'm writing. I'm likely to use my own system (previously used for the 23rd Letter) for the game mechanics.
The setting background is presented in this category on my blog which may be a slightly unconventional way to do it but it's easy to manage/update for me.
http://www.lategaming.com/category/g...sign/frontier/Influences for the game include Charles Stross, Iain M Banks, Star Trek - there's a little post-apoc in there, a lot of AI, not much in the way of resleeving and hopefully a heap of aliens.
Summary:
The basic setting assumes that players are highly skilled, highly motivated members of the Explorer division of Human Unity, a 'federation'-alike government. Their job is to make contact, explore gaseous anomalies and try not to get killed in the process.
Terms:
Human Unity - the Human 'empire' based upon very liberal concepts and including humanity and sentient/sapient synthetic intelligences called Experts. Natural humans are definitely transhuman but not generally posthuman - this may start to occur within the scope of the game.
FTL - based upon a discovered wormhole network which permits FTL travel though travel TO the wormhole within a solar system can take a long time. The key to wormhole travel was 'bought' by Human Unity from their first contact, an alien race known to Human Unity as 'The Traders'. There were a lot of items and concepts traded and the science used to catapult humanity beyond the solar system.
Aliens - they're as alien as I can imagine them. i describe a few. In the end, we can see the immense diversity on this one planet so there will likely be a considerable amount of convergent evolution though there are no 'humans with forehead ridges' or 'dark elf analogues'. There are alien races and one is even reputedly 'humanoid' (and the Traders dealt with us using 'androids') but for the most part they are as alien as this biologist can make them (while still making them 'possible')
Science - this is a tricky one. I'm not a physicist but I'm basing it on 'firm' physics. Sure - we have FTL (which immediately makes it not HARD science) but other areas are progressions as I see them. Some areas are vague i.e. I'm not going to talk about memory capacity, processor speeds because I've read sci-fi where these were defined and they were awfully dated within a decade (2300AD and High Colonies spring to mind). There's some science I'm deliberately leaving out because I don't think it's possible within the time and ethics constraints of the setting but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Combat - ship/ship combat is very deprecated though there are obviously ship-borne weapons. The ability of a stellar society to hit planets with asteroids and the harm that a missile at even low relativistic speeds would do to a craft cannot be underestimated. In other words by the time you detect it, it's likely too late. Combat like this is handled by computers - thinking beings that can think down to the billionth of a second easily.