A couple of words about the setting, just so you can have a bit of knowledge about the universe you're moving in.

Major players
The year is 2271. Earth still exists, and is still the major player. All corporations worth mentioning have at least an office space on Earth. Culturally speaking is also the one with the biggest influence.

Biggest second player is Mars (currently in its final stage of terraformation). Few other colonies (mostly mining and scientific stations) are set in the solar system, but they've lost almost all importance due to the hyper-drives becoming increasingly cheaper. Thanks to the hyper-drive, humanity has colonised many other systems. The expansion is completely uncontrolled, whomever can spot a habitable planet first, and has the money to build a colony ship, will do it. Space exploration at this stage is similar to the American frontier, with many independents settlement popping up wherever there's habitable planets.

Braga-Peshawar Orbital Station, in the Lusistan system, is an important nexus of commerce, and only several weeks of travel away from Earth, on average. The Lusistan system was colonised by a unique mixture of Portuguese and Pakistani colony ships, almost 100 years ago, and because of its special position in-between several trade routes it has now become a thriving trade center. The massive Braga-Peshawar Station has become the de-facto capital of the system, despite the presence of a few settlements in its two habitable planets.

Alien life
No traces of living aliens yet. That is very perplexing to xeno-biologist. Although there is a lively black-market of alien archaeological artifacts.

Space travel and political unity
On the subject of hyper-space travel. Harnessing quantum fluctuations to locally alter the vacuum expectation value makes possible the use of jump-drives, but canonically conjugate variables such as distance and velocity still cannot be simultaneously well defined, since they form a symplectic basis. As a consequence, ships going through hyper-space can either know with an acceptable level of precision where they will arrive or when they will arrive, but not both. Generally captains tend to be happier with some uncertainty on their time of arrival rather than the non-negligible risk of appearing near the gravity well of a gas giant.

Due to the long times involved in space travel, crew sleeps in cryochambers during the years of travel, while the ship AIs and the androids take care of astrogation.

Sending information between systems is limited by the speed of light, which makes it impractical (systems are at the very least few decades, if not more, apart). Because of that, the only reliable way of sending messages from one system to another is to load it on a ship bounded to the desired destination via hyper-jumps. Hyper-jumps (and ship) are expensive. As a consequence, news of distant systems arrive very sporadically and can be months to years old, and not always useful.

Because of this the Universe is quite fragmented ad any attempt at creating any sort of cohesive political unity has failed. Each system tends to have their own laws, customs and morals.
This message was last edited by the GM at 12:09, Tue 28 Apr 2020.