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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GuardianLurker" data-source="post: 9337717" data-attributes="member: 786">Now THAT's a respectable FTL drive! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />That's ~70 KiloLights.  Which means it could cross the entire disk of the Milkway in about 1.5 years. That's approaching near-galactic neighbor speeds - only about 3 years to the Magellanic Clouds. And only about a year away from the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, on the other side of the Milky Way's disk. At those speeds, you're rapidly approaching Speed-of-Plot.I've always figured the big speed constraint was time; in a near-future, Slower-Than-Light transit you'd have essentially independent polities, that are essentially self-sufficient. At approximately 500 Lights, Star Trek (TOS)-sized polities are possible. At low Kilolights, you've advanced to ST:NG era for polity size. Once you crack 10 Kilolights, you're probably at Star Wars Galactic Empires.I use time-neighborhood equivalencies:Travel TimeA few hours = a local metro area; a nation-stateA few days = a regional polity; for the US a state, elsewhere a small-area nationA week = a LARGE regional polity, most of a continent (with modern transport); the USMore than a week = Depending on arrangements, the sub-polities will be more-or-less tied to their centralized polity. You'll probably end up with a hierarchy of loyalities - to the Region, then the Meta-region, etc. Ex. The States at the time of the US Civil War.More than a month = At this point, the more distant polities are functionally independent of the central one, no matter what it likes to pretend. Independence movements are more or less likely depending on the connections.More that 6 months = The central polity can't pretend any more - the outlying areas are going to be independent. If things go well, they'll be friendly.These time frames are, of course, all human-centric. Aliens will have differing tolerances.</blockquote>

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