Torchship Seraglio

It is the year 2345 and Humanity has exploded on the galactic map.

Three centuries ago, humanity finally left their cradle and expanded across the Solar system. From a tiny Lunar outpost, expansion grew as the greater nations competed against each other for prestige and resources. Mars and Ceres, Venus and Mercury, Jupiter and its moons. Each decade brought a new frontier. And as the frontier expanded, so did expand the number of players in the game. What started as a dozen nations and one supra-national bloc working with a handful of commercial companies, ballooned to hundreds of entities by the early 22nd century. After all, why risk national assets on a risky asteroid mining operation when you can outsource it to a freelancer outfit? With their help, humans not only settled the asteroid belt, but also expanded to the icy depths of the outer system, especially once fusion power had finally been solved, though it remained expensive and dangerous, leading to almost everyone banning fusion-powered vessels, known as Torch ships, from making landfall on planetary surface or entering docking bays inside asteroid habitats.

Two centuries ago, the interstellar void was made meaningless by the invention of the Liebermann-Funko jump drive. This device required immense amount of power and was extremely delicate but with the right configuration, it would create a bubble around itself that would literally teleport from point A to point B. As long as you weren't too close to a gravitationally significant mass. It wasn't practical to build these engines into every craft and since the drive only worked outside the gravity shadow of a star or a planet, it meant that a jump ship could not operate inside the Sol system. This led to the development of massive carrier ships, that would carry parasite vessels from one star system to another but could never actually enter the systems themselves, forever stuck at the outer edges.

The nature of the jump drive and the fusion engine thus led to a three-tier system of space travel. Jump ships would carry other ships from system to a system, freeing them from the burden of having to carry the massive jump-drives or the enormous power requirements, but would themselves be dependent on support and supply from the systems they were servicing. Torch ships weren't allowed to get too so close to any inhabited body that a malfunction of their engine - or careless piloting - could threaten life and property but they could, relatively quickly, cross vast interplanetary distances. And thirdly, Landing ships or shuttles - often just a pressurized cabin on top of a chemical rocket - would ferry passengers and cargo from Torch ships to colonies and back.

A century ago, humanity fought its final war, that ultimately settled the issue of national dominance across light years. When communications inside a system were still slaves to light speed, and communications between systems required a courier ship to carry messages, encrypted in their databanks, it became impossible to maintain supra-national power blocs as politically, culturally, and socially cohesive units. Nor was it possible to realistically project power across the stars when a missile at a jump ship would cut off a system completely as well as wipe out all passengers. In other words, while nation states remained on Earth, elsewhere the human political system fragmented and fragmented, until it reached a level low enough for its location. Humanity became truly diverse in a way it hadn't been in centuries. Religious and political groups could now flee to a newly discovered planet and claim an entire continent for themselves, if not the entire body, to practice what they preached. Hollowed out asteroid habitats housed extremist groups and a barely inhabitable moon could be the personal playground of a trillionaire. What was everyday activity in one place could be illegal and immoral in another place.

Today, the hardy pioneers, brave explorers, and cunning traders are even more valuable as before as they push ever further into the Milky Way galaxy, searching for new planets to colonize, new asteroids to mine, new gas giants to harvest fuel from, and new trade routes to create.