Looking to recreate the feel of Firefly, The Outer Worlds, The Expanse, or similar, in a ttrpg that is somewhat leaning to the hard sci fi side. Any thoughts?
I’ve been poking Traveller but it’s hard to tell what the definitive versions are. Also Stars Without Number looks interesting.
I’m particularly looking for ship based stuff – where the ship is statted and you can have ship to ship combat.
I’ve been enjoying Starforged since it came out. The PDFs are available of course, but it sounds like they’re also getting another reprint here in a month or two.
This needs to be at the top. Starforged is amazing, because Ironsworn is an amazing system. All the influences you mentioned in starting post are also mentioned as influences for the making of Starforged. The only problem I see, is that your focus on mechanical system for the ship stuff.
Ptba is inherently not as mechanical as other meta systems. But I highly recommend checking it out.
Second suggestion would be Stars without Numbers, Crawford is praised for almost every release he does. You can’t go wrong for Sci Fi with his system, it offers quite more crunch than Starforged (from my knowledge, I didn’t read or play SWN myself!). But it offers, similar to Starforged, amazing tools for building worlds in a scifi setting, which can be used in any other system you might prefer.
Ah, yet another PbtA sci fi game. Between it and Impulse Drive (from another comment), I have some reading to do. Appreciate the recommendation :)