@Dannyalcatraz Yeah! Those are great examples of the sorts of things a crew exploring space or colonizing worlds or whatever might encounter. And meanwhile, the Rangers might be more closely organized than in past eras, functioning a bit more like my favorite childhood cartoon, The Galaxy Rangers! lol but seriously, rangers would be out there in space, checking in on colonies, exploring worlds first to make sure the native spirits aren't going to just eat any civilians that come there, looking for signs of The First Gods and their minions, tracking down omens and portents from their strange dreams if they're Benedanti or Shamans or the like, or even just Champions of gods or other supernatural powers.
I started thinking of spacecraft in the form of dragons and then the idea struck that what if Spirits have integrated into machines forming functional mechanical bodies which allow them to interact and travel to the stars - perhaps the PCs ship really is a dragon spirit, and the Helm-Mages task is to interact with the Ships AI-Spirit.
Then I thought about spider spirits who use their mechanical bodies and a new metalic silk to act as replicators able to spin raw materials into new structures, and they hitch a ride on the dragon-ships are repair drones, swarming to any damaged sites and repairing the wound.
Star bases could be possessed by Genius Loci and have whole colonies of tree, water and gravity spirits keeping the place functioning,
Somehow, other than Dryad ships, I hadn't thought of living ships in terms of ships possessed by spirits.
This stuff is excellent! The bases with genius loci and various nature spirits is definitely a big theme already. Space stations, especially orbital cities, need the spirits in order to keep the gardens that scrub the air and clean waste and produce food operating reliably. A human screwup could kill a whole city, otherwise. Having reliable rain, growth, plant health, etc, increases the number of people a city can hold comfortably.
Perhaps advanced computer usage in these places pretty much requires some ability to interact with spirits competently.
But what about the ships? My current idea is that most ships need the use of a mass driver planetside in order to leave Earth or an Earthlike planet, because you just can't carry the sort of fuel required to get escape velocity in atmo, and mass drivers allow for it without the use of polluting fuel waste. Basically, you have mile long rails up the sides of mountains (or in one famous case, the side of a mile high tower), that accelerates a ship at just a slow enough rate that a human can be in the ship with relative comfort.
Shorter drivers can be used for cargo ships piloted by computer and then picked up by larger long distance cargo ships or towing vessels in orbit, but you need very long rails for living cargo, because going from 0 to escape velocity over a quarter mile is lethal.
Now, that all works okay, but it doesn't incorporate magic at all. But there is Geomancy, which can change the gravity and manipulate the momentum of objects. A single person can't normally throw around very large objects (without doing serious harm to themselves), but an enchanted object, running on an enchanted mass driver rail, using the will of the pilot as a focus rather than the source of the magic, could at least iron out any "the math doesn't actually work out on that system" wrinkles.
