Threepony Wrote:One: Other than Mal, and (sort of) Dartz, everyone has stories that involve more small-scale issues close to home, or that would otherwise have no reason to go out.
This was 100% intentional. The hassles involved with interstellar travel were baked into the setting way back at the beginning, specifically to keep things close to home for as long as possible. It's also entirely my own damn fault, too. I'm not sure if that qualifies as irony or karma.
There's three major issues with the setting-as-constructed keeping interstellar travel from being a thing in Fenspace beyond what it already is. One is hardwired but cheatable, one is changeable but it potentially alters things in ways we don't want and the last one is easily alterable but it'd require dictatorial bullshit or actual work on the Collective's part--probably both--to make it functional.
The first issue is that handwavium-based FTL, the common stuff that everybody uses in constant-speed drives, has a hard limit of 500 times lightspeed. That allows the nearest stars (everything out to about 10-15 light years) to be just doable by randos in a camper-van(*), but anything more would require a fair bit of logistics. That was a deliberate gimping: at the time I was worried that cheap and fast FTL would make the setting too diffuse at the beginning. The Whole Fenspace Catalog gives us some room to cheat, since it explicitly has a bunch of different FTL schemes that might work for faster expansion, but that runs into the second issue.
The second issue is the whole "the 'Danelaw isn't interested" thing. This is one of the foundations of the whole edifice, and the general cultural indifference helps keep Fenspace its own thing instead of a wholly-owned subsidiary of USA, Inc. or whatever. Still, it has its limitations and probably the biggest one is without the massive population/economy sink of the terrestrial nations doing anything substantial on an interstellar basis is a couple orders of magnitude harder. But then that brings up the issue of more Earth involvement and how that affects Fenspace, and it's hard to not see how that would mess with the setting in a negative fashion.
The third issue is, simply, time. We're still very early in the Fenspace timeline, handwavium is barely a generation old at the current stop point and things are still very much in flux. Back at the beginning, this was a semi-conscious choice to let us use current memes, create SI avatars of the appropriate age and other stupid fanfic tricks. On the other hand, living in the late 00s-early 10s "now" means that a lot of things just aren't accessible to the Fenspace of that period. Of all of these, this is probably the easiest one to "fix" while at the same time being the hardest. I would happily work on Fenspace 2112, I've already got some half-baked ideas about what's changed & what hasn't. But, moving the timeline forward can't just be me, no matter how Fun Tyrannical I am, it has to be a group effort and I'm not 50% convinced that there's any real interest in doing that.
Which is the final sticking point, I think. The current active writers (save yours truly) seem to be perfectly content with the status quo, and honestly the quality of work continues to be pretty good, so there's no impetus to change. Unless and until that shifts, I expect interstellar ops in Fenspace will continue to be a dead letter.
(*) There's also a certain allowance for ego there too, as Ptichka and the Soviets were explicitly interstellar from the moment we added FTL to the mix.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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