Please help bounce ideas
Characters, plot flesh, a standardized setting, and what fans would like to see.
Here's what I've figured I'd do for the setting:
1) Ships are expensive
2) The Bounty Hunter's Guild has agents in every major settlement (30,000+), but only a few elite teams have craft. The average BH gets where he's going using commercial ships and apprehends in person using small arms.
3) Space conflicts are rare, but very serious affairs.
4) The Sirius Sector is a widely varying place - Border systems are exceedingly seedy (pirates are NOT glorious)
5) The established navies protect large interests, perform customs, patrol borders, and safeguard major trade lanes.
6) The really dirty security work falls to professional mercenary groups such as the LSF (who have access to capitol ships). They are the ones that go flying into nebulae to hunt down pirates after some action tees off whatever local gov. there is enough to order a strike.
7) Liberty and Bretonia are tight-nit.
Kusari likes to be neutral and profit.
9) Rhineland is more aggressive with its borders and doesn’t have mercy for pirates like the Hessians.
10) Lucrative small scale space faring civilian ventures are smuggling, running supplies to deep space outposts, exploration (chancy like a gold rush), and galactic tours.
11) Mining is only done by those huge semistation ships. (Large scale = profit)
12) Capitol ships are larger. Liberty battleship=frigate Gunship=Patrol Boat
13) Torpedoes, massed assaults, and nukes kill capitol ships. (B5 style)
14) Most conflicts between nations involve a terraformable planet or two, MOX clouds, mining field rights, and the like.
15) Kusari speak Japanese, Rhinelanders speak German, Libertarians and Bretonians speak English, and a few border locations have Spanish established.
For the plot:
1) There are two protagonists who begin on opposite sides of the law. Shades of gray will bring them closer as far as legality goes. The two will come from the same lower-middle class.
2) To be clear: They never become buddies, maybe assocciates but rarely would their aims coincide.
3) One is on the merc and bounty hunting side of the law.
4) The other is on the freedom fighter/raider side.
5) Both kick arse but go about it differently.
6) One is more brutish with properly applied force (not stupid) and the other uses more cunning (both are equally cunning), uses people in a likable way, and strikes sparingly but lethally.
7) One of the premises is that the readers end up rooting for one or the other and in the end only one wins.
Your thoughts please.
Edited by - HeyThere on 7/11/2006 9:37:06 PM