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I was thinking it'd be fun to do space opera in a setting that treated things more or less from our current understanding of how things work. For example, if a ship is able to generate artificial gravity, in wartime, why not aim the gravity generator at a planet and suck the atmosphere off it? Or tow the planet out of it's orbit (that may or may not work dependent on how the gravity generator works and how powerful the ship's engines were). Why couldn't the planet hit the ship with a "gravity beam" and pull it down to crash into the planet?

Another thought is that traveling between stars is likely to happen far in the future. Who's to say where computers would be at that point. Would programming and processor power dwarf the human mind? If that happened why have the humans do anything? The computer can already pick targets and hit them better and faster than a human can. Astrogation would be as simple as "take us to earth" and the ship would do all the work. There would be almost nothing that the humans could figure out that the computer wouldn't have already given them the answer to. Where do the players end up in that?

What happens when a torpedo is fitted with an FTL drive and hits the enemy before you've even fired? Again the computers would do better with this situation than humans would.

What happens when a ship (or torpedo) drops out of FTL? How fast is it going? If it's anywhere near the speed of light, a single torpedo would hit before anything could detect it and would pack enough punch to devastate an entire planet just from it's kinetic energy.

Aliens would of course would almost never be humanoid at all. Maybe DNA is not the "normal" method of storing biological data?

It all starts to look more like Hitchhiker's Guide than any Star Trek universe. Still I'd like to try hammering out a setting where these things are facts but are dealt with. Any other problematic implications of spacefaring technology that you can think of.

Its been said before, that if a ship can go near FTL in real space, you're looking at a planet destroying kamikaze weapon, and there is going to be very strict control of every vessel. I would not be surprised to find both political officers and the intentional use of analog back-ups to prevent anyone from hacking the systems.

Time Dilation is also going to screw with things. If you're traveling far enough, fast enough - you might as well write off everyone you know as dead and figure your planet will be as alien as any other world upon your return. (Consider the novel "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman.) This also works in the other direction - space travelers will probably never be seen again, both from chronology and danger. After all there aren't escape pods on most ships, since that would be equivalent to carrying a second ship around with you and space is too big to expect rescue. Leaving port would probably be proceed with a funeral like ceremony, and those staying behind get a "death benefit" rather than wages sent home monthly.

Another old adge is the "Zeroth Law of Science Fiction" - humans empathize more with other humans than machines or aliens. A lot of stories these days include some sort of "Schrodinger Drive" that requires a living person to observe the hyperspace jump, claim a computer can't feel the vibrations of subspace, or hand-wave FTL as a psychic phenomenon to justify that people need to be on the ships.

You might want to look Ben Bova's novel series - its space opera confined to our solar system. Over the course of the series it goes from tentative exploration to infamous space corsair Lars Fuchs instigating the asteroid wars and beyond.

Personally, I want to see some space opera based around Orion nuclear pulse propulsion. Because every ship being equipped with a few hundred nuclear shaped charges is perfectly sane.

I've toyed with the idea of a space opera all around a blue giant star with no FTL but plenty of weird aliens each with it's own planet or planets. It avoids a lot of problems with having to muck across a whole galaxy to get to an alien planet. You could almost do it hard science fiction.

People have objected that the radiation would be too intense to support life in the zone where liquid water would exist but who's to say the life that was born around such a star wouldn't be capable of handling the radiation?

Just be aquatic, and retreat to the depths during the most intense periods (h20 is a great radiation shield). Or perhaps the dwellers weren't originally native, but did have the tech to deflect radiation allowing them to settle there and hide from their enemies who couldn't enter the area. (Perhaps they were also cut-off from coms, and are still fighting a war that ended decades ago?) I had a long discussion with a friend once about a world with no free oxygen, and thus how would you get life or intelligence without readily available combustion (you'd need enzymes/internal chemical reactions like deep-dwelling organisms for one.)

Underwater Space Opera... Its hard to move an entire 13,000 ton sub, so maybe it all focuses on min-subs things properly sized for a player group like or alternately Spaceships are SSNBNs with the missile tubes replaced with a warp-drive. (A Boomer is already self-contained, nuclear powered, and designed for 90+day operation...) I kind of want to see the aesthetic of WWII diesel-electrics and 1950's Guppy type subs, and if you argue digital systems aren't hardened enough or too difficult to repair on an alien world...

There are actually a lot of reasons to make space-ships aquatic capable. If they're using a nuclear drive, you don't want them contaminating land or near civilization, H2O can be used as Reaction-Mass, and Hydrogen makes a good fuel (for rockets or reactors depending on the isotope). A buoyant hull is less stress than small landing pads, you want to be on planets with water anyway, Ballast tanks can slip you into the correct vertical launch orientation rather than a gantry reducing ground support needs. Radar doesn't penetrate oceans very deep, sonar doesn't work unless you're in the water - so it would be a great way to hide from the enemy - they can't find you unless they land and make themselves vulnerable.

Enough space operas use metaphors from sub-warfare anyway, might as well go all the way. (Birds of Prey cloaking and un-cloaking, rising out of the nebula to fire, TIE bomber's depth-charging the asteroid to find the Millennium Falcon...)