This may sound weird, but I have long struggled with this when coming up with background ideas for an SF game. The genre is relevant because the degree of tech involved.

Say you have an authoritarian state/government/empire of some description, and you want to have a frontier/outlaw type of region. How do you reconcile the two if we also posit that the former is large and powerful?

It's different with, say, a fantasy setting because a) it's earthbound and so the environment makes a difference - there is a wildnerness and then there are cities. Space doesn't really represent that wilderness as well because it's...space, empty and inhospitable (as opposed to a forest).

And b) it's lower tech so thus the state doesn't have the kind of tech in sci fi to exceed those sorts of physical boundaries. A sci fi empire may simply have the manpower/naval power to push into outlier regions, as well as the tech to perhaps infiltrate it by other means.

How do you reconcile a frontier with an empire?

Logisitcs? Exerting influence requires a supply line to get your assets to the region.  If supply line hasn't been developed, Empire might be able to get to the region on a case by case basis, but not able to maintain any real control.

Consider the British empire and the Wild West:
A lot went there with the promise of getting wealthy (GOLD), some went there to get away from all the rulings in said empire, and continued to move west as "civilization" caught up with them.
Some went there to settle down.

Why is it hard to reconcile an empire with a frontier at all?
It seems all empires ever has had some kind of frontier: the point is that it is hard to get to for varying reasons, be it traversable hazards or pirates, On a planet or in space, hidden away behind cliffs or an asteroid belt, or simply being a long way away from the stronghold of the core empire.

Well, there is an expense in establishing a community and government. Maybe its easier to let the frontier folk set it up themselves then either wait for them to ask to formally join the empire, or to invade and seize it.

In the standard sci-fi universe where there are habitable, Earth-like planets every other star system (and a star system every few days travel, by whatever ftl is available), people can go and live basically anywhere. Assuming that the authoritarian empire has any kind of limits, then it can only control so many places at once. People who want to be free of the empire will simply choose to live wherever the empire doesn't focus on controlling. Thus, the frontier is defined by wherever the authoritarian empire isn't.

Your typical RPG SF setting has interstellar spaceships that are capable of being owned by a single RPG party. Humanity can expand outward as fast as they can travel and find habitable planets to live on. An empire can only expand as fast as it can establish a bureaucracy for governance and/or military control in an area.

This can lead an empire looking to slow exploration and expansion, as a population spreading as far as technology allows becomes impossible to keep within their control. Restricted expansion can be useful in a game as it makes exploration parties rarer, and thus more special. They could be operating legally with a special license, or they could be operating illegally, scouting into officially unexplored space dealing with the alien and with other humans who outside the law. Their motivations could be to get rich or maybe they are motivated by resistance to the empire. Either way, you get a dangerous borderland to explore. It not only had its own threats, but there is the threat of the empire moving in to take control.

Traveller helps the idea with slow travel (1-6 parsecs per week) and communication no faster than travel, but even with really fast travel and even with almost instant communication, there must still be some limit to the empire. And if a frontier is important, make sure you set up your travel and communication speeds to facilitate that.

Frank

Simple.

The Empire doesn't care.

It has all the technology necessary for post-scarcity either way, and there are billions of harvestable planets for it's population's consumption in the galaxy, if not the whole universe. If somebody doesn't want to join it, why'd they force them? It's their loss. Let them live in squalor and poverty.

Others have gotten to what I would say, but I want to ping a little harder on Frank's point:

The original Traveller rules introduced two SF conceits that made it really unique compared to lots of other SF settings that came after it (all other SF conceits would be added by the Referee):
1) Space travel is relatively slow
2) Communication moved at the speed of travel (no FTL travel)

This layout of the technology was built by Marc Miller specifically to affect the default setting of any Traveller game and offer up plenty of spaces that were off the beaten path and create frontiers at the edges of space.

On top of this, another lay in the rules: Certain worlds would be more frequently visited by trading ships, while others would barely rate a trade ship more than one a year. (The 1977 edition of the rules established "Space Lanes" between worlds with regular travel, which meant worlds without space lanes will depend on free traders and speculators to bring news and traffic.

Combine these two elements and an important thing happens: There is very limited communication and cross-pollination of culture and technology. Many worlds remain isolated, and given the sizes available for ships based on technology, very little travel as well. Most folks stay on their worlds and live their lives. Thus, we have, as other have noted above, situations like those of British Empire or the U.S. Territories. (This is also why the Main World generation system of original Traveller provides such a wide variance of Tech Levels and cultures, even for worlds right next to each other.)

Finally, on top of that add in what several above have also noted: The ship technology and economics allows individuals and groups to buy or use their own ships to travel great distances on their own. Those who want to go find worlds and "get away" will do so. The government can't stop them, and communities will form or be founded beyond the boundaries of civilization.

I think Traveller's tech conceits of travel and communication between the stars are genius in this regard, helping to establish settings of play that rich in the soil of adventure settings while still allowing high tech SF ideas among the stars.

Notwithstanding the good points made so far, the OP has a point in that "stretches of frontier" even at the fringe of imperial space are harder to justify than scattered backwater systems interspersed with more developed ones.

Quote from: Arminius;973761Notwithstanding the good points made so far, the OP has a point in that "stretches of frontier" even at the fringe of imperial space are harder to justify than scattered backwater systems interspersed with more developed ones.

Why?

Quote from: Arminius;973761Notwithstanding the good points made so far, the OP has a point in that "stretches of frontier" even at the fringe of imperial space are harder to justify than scattered backwater systems interspersed with more developed ones.

I see your point, but I think this comes in with the second step (which is very specific to the setting the Referee creates):

What is the history of the setting?

In other words, a rises and fall and rise of interstellar civilization (or several cycles) easily allows there to be a unified polity growing outward again ... and the "frontier" is are those "lost" words (that don't consider themselves lost at all, perhaps).

Either pocket empires or clusters of worlds or lots of individual worlds cut off from each other or whatever the Referee wants.

However one sets it up, his offers plenty of juice for colonial/exploitation models to play around with, as well as political conflicts when encountering pocket empires that are not very powerful but have no real desire to see citizens from "The Empire" arrive on the uncontrolled worlds around them.

Quote from: Arminius;973761Notwithstanding the good points made so far, the OP has a point in that "stretches of frontier" even at the fringe of imperial space are harder to justify than scattered backwater systems interspersed with more developed ones.

Not a bad notion to forego a classic ideal of geography and placing it in space, and instead base the empire on loose planets all over the places, connected by trade routes, not geographic closeness, as with FTL it does not matter.

Quote from: Rincewind1;973766Not a bad notion to forego a classic ideal of geography and placing it in space, and instead base the empire on loose planets all over the places, connected by trade routes, not geographic closeness, as with FTL it does not matter.

This reminds me of my pet peeve when I see sci fi game/movie/TV show maps and they are laid out in only two dimensions and the federation or empire is all clustered in one area (and apparently all the systems are on the same plane) when there is no reason for that to be the case when you're traveling at multiples of the speed of light.

Quote from: Dumarest;973790This reminds me of my pet peeve when I see sci fi game/movie/TV show maps and they are laid out in only two dimensions and the federation or empire is all clustered in one area (and apparently all the systems are on the same plane) when there is no reason for that to be the case when you're traveling at multiples of the speed of light.

Well I've seen IRL suggestions that the habitable depth of the galaxy may only be about 50 light years.