What's your preferred scale for a space setting? The good

>>53434860
How I like it, likened to a typical fantasy world

Planetary System= civilized lands.

Planet=city. You can zoom in on them and have adventure hooks, or just use em as pit stops.

Galaxy= the world. Getting to the other side is a big deal.

Interstellar space= wilderness/Ocean
Intergalactic space=

>>53434860
I'd keep it out of the solar system just so you can exert rule 0 with less whining about what is and is not currently true of the real sol system (or maybe you have better players than I do and this isn't a concern)

I think a single system strikes some players as a little disappointing, but if you're keeping it grounded with no ayyliens and so on, it can be a really solid choice- you can flesh out stuff a lot more.

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>>53435010
I feel my knowledge of solar astronomy is passable, as in I can tell my Orcus from my Haumea. Also, it's fairly easy to look stuff up, and on top of that I can just let my players know that I'll be applying a bit of artistic license.
The bigger problem with running Sol is that I'm aiming for a Traveller/Firefly free-trader campaign, and I feel having one system with one (maybe two if you handwave Mars' terraforming) makes centralisation easier. Even if Earth, Mars, and Titan are equal powers (say), there's still less cracks for the players to work in.
Especially seeing as you literally can't hide your position. Though I guess you can hide your identity

>>53434980
I get what you're saying, but the problem with that is that interstellar space is fuckheug. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to interstellar space.
Maybe a better analogy is that the habitable world/worlds are City-States, the inner system is the lands that feed the cities, with asteroid-mining and all that, and the out-system is the badlands where brigands and worse lurk. Systems without habitable worlds are entirely wilderness, so better hope the patrols are regular

>>53435176
>with one (maybe two if you handwave Mars' terraforming) makes centralisation easier.
Meant to put "habitable planet" between "terraforming" and "makes"

>>53434860
One star, or a handful, and a lot of stuff in each system.

one of which is a smoke ring

>>53434860
The idea for a setting I've been making would be on the relative local scale. Humanity has a dozen or so colonized planets, and there's some alient civilizations or roughly comparable (same order of magnitude) size in the vicinity, but most of the galaxy is unexplored.

I've also been wnting to run a game in a 1950s science fiction version of solar sustem (no interstellar travel, but Mars and Venus, and maybe some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter are habitable).

>>53439150
In the early days they thought Jupiter was a terrestrial planet. I'd say have some fun with that.

>>53434860
My ideal is always something set in the (relatively) near future. Anything past Ceres is just a bunch of probes and maybe one or two expeditionary rockets. Mars, our Moon, and Venus are on relatively similar levels of colonization because of their own unique logistical problems that colony funding expensive, but they've all got tiny populations. And Near Earth Asteroids have the highest level of colonization/development both because of mining profits and because of their ease of access from the Earth.

>>53434860
Depends how big and important I want the players to feel.

>>53434860
>Or do you go full Xeelee and have the whole universe?

This. I always love the idea of a universe scale war. Which is most of the time what I go for when I design scfi. That or hard scfi based in the Sol system.

No FTL, humans only, destination: Mars. I'm working on a campaign for Ops & Tactics' futuristic splat where a Martian independence movement is brewing, and the players can choose to support the revolution or keep it loyal to Earth. Considering how far Mars is from Earth using current space travel tech (an average 9 months of travel time), any sort of colony there would have to be self-sustaining and physically independent. I imagine a desire for political and cultural independence would logically follow.

>>53440920
>This. I always love the idea of a universe scale war.
You can't even visualise that. Even the Xeelee were only using minuscule fraction of the universe. IIRC the Ring wasn't even a million galaxies in mass.

>>53442963
I don't think its mass or size is ever stated.
And the Xeelee were definitely waging war over the whole universe, even if the ring was only a small part of it.

>>53443889
I'm pretty sure it's given various masses, but googling gives me "a hundred thousand times the mass of our Galaxy" from Vacuum Diagrams, "the mass of tens of thousands of galaxies" from Ring, and some references to it having the mass of a bunch of galaxy clusters. One megagalaxy seems a reasonable upper bound.

They were fighting all over the place, but not in any particularly interesting way - nothing really uniquely universal in scale, just really big stuff that any war spread over a few billion or so galaxies could cover, which is peanuts to space.

I'm fond of the SWN / Titanfall scale. The area where the PCs are is stranded from civilization as a whole and you have to make due in the hostile frontier.