Versatile Gothic Space Setting

[O Senhor Leetz]

Maybe the atoms present in air wear down shields, just like shells, bullets, and missiles would, albeit one a much slower scale, but a scale big enough to make having them in a non-vacuum completely impracticle and/or dangerous - ala static charge, ozone production, radiation, etc.

[Humabout]

That sounds like sufficient technobabble!  But it still seems to leave the massive planetary invasions in a nasty spot.  Probably where they should be.  I'm seeing some really weird war scenes in my mind, now.  Thank you so much!

For subluminal flight, I think I'm going to use a lot of handwavium and generally treat starship engines more like car engines - you have X hours of fuel, and you can accellerate at a certain rate.  That'll give enough manueverability to allow for ships dancing around each other, bombarding each other and attempting a boarding, but stear clear of the massively unfun mess that is the rocket forumula.

[Humabout]

This has me considering returning here again.  Oh the juices are starting to bubble again!

[Tangential]

I read that a few days ago. Incredible, no?

[Humabout]

Honestly, I don't find it all that surprising.  Considering the nature of the systems we have observed and how seemingly strange and extraordinary those are, I've adopted the mindset that no matter how bizzare a system we try to imagine, nature will top it tenfold, at the least., and judging by the staggering number of stars in the Milky Way alone - heck, within 100 ly of us (well over 37,000), and even that volume fo space is a mere 0.00005% of the volume of our galaxy.  Now couple that with the fact that organic compounds not only can, but do form naturally in space and that the gas clouds present when a star first forms is naturally condusive to their formation so that they would simply rain down on newly-forming planets, and the probablity of extraterrestrial organic lifeforms greatly increases as well.  At the least, it's totally justifiable, even in hard SF.