@ Gamerdude, I see what youre saying and I agree with you, however these are planets we're talking about.
A single planet has vast areas of different types, take modern Earth, we got deserts, the arctic, cities, countries, towns and villages each with different governments and temperatures, hydrographics. One planet.
I just dont see Planet-of-the-week as hard scifi, not saying I dont like it, just its not a very realistic viewpoint as it belittles the point of having FTL travel in this setting, when infact FTL should be a big thing.
Also, I enjoy adventure town tales, just it seems that scifi writers lose a sense of scale (of space) when writing it into planet format.
Of course Traveller completely destroys the lack of sense of scale by going onto TravellerMap.com and seeing whats been mapped out there. But again, no-one is going to be visiting every single one of those worlds in a campaign, I doubt many venture past about a Sector's worth of space in their games on average.
A single subsector should be more than enough to travel in, as like you point out, some players'll probably only want to stick with two worlds anyway once they find a nice pair to travel between. That shouldnt mean they have to go to the same area of these two each time they go, these things are large enough to go somewhere different unless they land at an orbital or asteroid. So anything above Size 1 can be made into the full buffet you can back to again and again :wink:
Thanks *bows to crowd and leaves*