Technology

Oh, this'll be fun -- what flavor? Let's start a list.

• Interstellar travel - routine enough to be like air travel in the 1930s.
  • Are there painful tramp freighters that take a couple of years to reach destination?
  • Faster ships, better "pin-drives" -- freight priced according not only to quality, but speed of travel (if perishable?)
• Terraforming
  • These peoples don't terraform; they've encountered a cluster of star systems with multiple habitable planets (varying degrees of comfortable life support) which some science experts say show evidence of having been terraformed
  • Pinpointed various suitable locations via telescope; later investigations turned up more habitable locations.
  • Artifacts point to prior settlement, but they're badly weathered and impossible to identify with any detail
• Personal weaponry?
  • Pistols of some kind; maybe have ammunition with self-contained shock thrower, like rubber bullets that expend an electrical shock on contact. Still not sure how I feel about that.
  • No swords. Utility knives are reasonably common; may have greater cultural importance for certain nations.
• Communications - The war can provide an easy excuse for things not being instantaneous. Some messages have to be relayed by ship comms from pilot to tower to pilot; being done as a courtesy in some cases, but some captains are trying to turn a profit
  • Interstellar coms are as interrupted as they need to be by the war
  • Planetary comms are a bit more reliable; some are wired, some are satellite, many are a little of each
  • IS comms and Pcomms use different systems/formats; receivers can be the same, but the systems that transfer data are different.