One of the major annoyances and frequent nuisance of flawed worldbuikding is the introduction of new rules for what non-realistic things are possible in a setting that contradict things that have already been established at an earlier point, or whose existence should have significantly changed how characters behaved in previous scenes. This is most commonly a problem with long running series that have dozens of writers and nobody checking scripts for such inconsistencies. But it also happens frequently to series written entirely by a single writer, and then it is particularly annoying and distracting.

The proper way to prevent this from happening with a fantastical setting is to establish the rules for how the non-realistic aspects of the world work before creating the plots that will revolve around them. The audience or even the characters don’t have to know all the rules from the start. But the writers need to create clarity for themselves what things are possible or not in their world, so they don’t retroactively invalidate the resolution of earlier moments in the story. This does not just apply to technologies or magic spells, but can also include social pressures and power balances that will likely affect how different characters can act in various conflict situations and get away with it.

All of the things shared here are information that is openly known to well informed people in the Galia Cluster, and available to any player characters.

Space Travel

• Ships move faster than light by moving through hyperspace, where the speed of light is much higher and acceleration requires much less energy.
• Ships in hyperspace are completely isolated from any signal and are undetectable and unable to communicate.
• Hyperspace is still influenced by the gravity of any objects with mass. Hyperspace jump drives must overcome the gravitational force between the ship any other objects, which requires keeping a minimum distance from planets and stars.
  • Military ships (and pirates) tend to have more powerful jump drives that work relatively close to planets. Commercial cargo ships have much more cost efficient drives that require a greater distance from planets. This makes it possible to intercept cargo ships in the hours before landing and after takeoff.
• Travel times to the next inhabited planet can often be over a week. Travel between the homeworlds and outlying colonies can range from weeks to months, and crossing all of known space on commercial ships can take more than a year.

Space Settlement

• Most people never leave their own planet.
• Over 90% of all people live on the homeworlds and a small number of major colonies over 100 million people. The majority of inhabited planets has only a few million people or less.
• Societies capable to migrate to other star systems tend to have very high living standards and very little population growth, making it actually difficult to find people interested in settling new remote planets. People usually accept a lack of existing infrastructure and limited access to most goods if they are paid very well to work in newly established outposts.
• Space colonization is driven almost by the mining industry. While almost all elements and minerals can be found in huge quantities in most star systems, space travel is cheap enough to make it the most cost efficient for companies to only extract the most easily and cheaply accessible resources on a planet and then move on after a few decades.

Weapons and Combat

• No laser or plasma weapons.
• No force fields.
• Starships almost never explode from combat damage. Instead, battles generally end when a ship loses the ability to continue firing or maneuvering, or loses all power. When losing a battle, crews will usually abandon disabled ships to become prisoners, and blow up their ships themselves to prevent them being salvaged by the enemy.
• Interstellar warfare consists almost exclusively of interfering with trade by capturing enemy cargo ships, and attacking enemy cruisers and starship bases that can protect commerical ships against attacks.
• Major interstellar powers do not compete over natural resources, which are abundant everywhere, but over trade of manufactured goods. Planets are of strategic importance because their location and infrastructure allows the stationing of ships that can protect or interfere with trade, or more rarely because of the manufacturing capacity of the local industry for certain critical goods.
• Planetary invasions of homeworlds and major colonies are almost unheard of, as the costs of transporting and supplying armies large enough to conquer and occupy a planet with a populations of hundreds of millions of people are exponentially more expensive than maintaining ground forces to defend against such an attack.

Psychic Powers

• Psychic phenomenons are caused by interactions between the psychic and the electromagnetic fields. Waves in either field create waves in the other field as well. The electrical signals in the nervous system of living creatures can cause waves in the psychic field, which then cause electromagnetic effects in the surrounding environment.
• The interactions between the electromagnetic and the psychic field are usually very weak, making psychic phenomenons very faint and subtle and difficult to record and measure.
• Interactions between the fields become greatly amplified in the presence of the mineral midorite.
  • All the known intelligent species evolved in regions of space where midorite is extremely rare. The reason for this remains unknown.
  • Because of the near complete lack of midorite in the home systems, where the vast majority of people lives and all the largest science institutions are located, psychic phenomenons remain relatively little researched, and reports of their potential power from remote mining worlds widely regarded as greatly exagerated.
• Most psychic phenomenons are produced by large groups of people being under prolonged severe stress in areas rich in midorite or heavily contaminated with midorite dust from ore refining. These mostly tend to produce sensations of lights, shapes, and sounds, electrical disruptions, and magnetic anomalies, but in some cases are reported to produce echo-like reflections of people and events that haunt the location.
• Extensive mental training can give people the ability to deliberately produce directed psychic effects through their own brain activity. These psychic powers primarily allow a limited perception of other people’s thoughts and to affect the emotions and sensations of others. For some people, these insights into other peoples’ thinking allow them to make quite reliable predictions about their future actions and behavior, which some see as a form of premonition or divination.