Prime_Evil said:
You don't think that it is possible to create a setting that advances at roughly the same rate as the SF genre itself?
That isn't Real Life? No, not really. Any SF setting depends on interpretation of the available technology and environment. That's what SF is about. As soon as that interpretation hits paper, you've locked those technological and environmental assumptions in place.
2300AD depends on a particular FTL technology and the arrangement of local stars to hang its setting on. Recent Astronomy discoveries change the arrangement of local stars, by adding a potentially endless and ubiquitous array of brown Dwarf stars and rogue planets between visible stars, that blows away the setting's assumption of Arms that intermix (and CAN intermix) only at or near Earth. The setting ceases to work, and in fact would never have worked. You can't simply "discover" Brown Dwarf stars halfway through the timeline since we're already finding them now, 300 years prior.
The Third Imperium depends on classic SF understanding of planetology and a "common biosphere" assumption. If you adjust the setting to account for what we have seen in exoplanets to date, the shirtsleeve worlds drop to a handful per sector, if that. Comprehensible alien life vanishes. Adventures go almost entirely indoors since most colonies are on airless rockballs. There are no friendly moons of gas giants, and nearly any gas giant is trying to kill you during a fuel skim in ways that make Jupiter look lazy. The entirety of the Three Imperiums' history becomes quite different.
This is why I generally support the updates that strengthen the settings (like removing most of the Dwarf stars from the Primary positions, stripping the tiny rockballs of their improbably air, etc) but really have no use for the updates that invalidate 35 years of work. If you are going to do that, go play in your own sandbox instead. Examine the technology and environmental limits anew, and come up with a setting that matches them.
