This is one of my ideas that I've been throwing around for a while, I have a few features that are key to the world but have some ideas of which direction it could be expanded to. I typed up a 660 word post and putting my thoughts down has helped me to work on it a lot and I'm fairly happy with it now, so I just want to outline the key parts and where my stories are going to be focused:
- It's a hard science fiction world set in humanity's future, more The Martian than Star Trek
- The species has diverged with one race adapted to low-gravity, including physical and societal changes
- There's been a space race and technological golden era after the discovery of free energy, it's no FTL but it beats burning fuel
- A small population have built a self-sustaining but "junky" colony using mined-out asteroids and their ships, making it a trading hub
- Space-based robots and artificial intelligence play a vital part of this colony for resource gathering
- Humans still travel space and there's trading and occasional piracy, it's slower than robots but necessary
I would like to use this world to tell short stories focusing in and around this colony, there'll be a few recurring characters but I want to avoid a lot of the now standard tropes, so there's no big bad or Evil Empire and humanity is far from a Dying Race. It's more a slice-of-life from this colony and a look at it's unique humans.
What do you think, Worldski? Is this world a dead-end without some huge galaxy-spanning conflict? What are the areas you think I should focus on and start building first?