Yup. That was our point, Echo. 

[quote=Echo]Unfortunately, very few people seem to care about doing much outside of the missions.[/quote]
If people are railroaded into the missions, then they don't have chance to invent events. Leaving things unsolved not only IC but OoC will inspire unexpected plots. Set up events where you have no idea of what the result will be. Don't decide everything yourself, and you hook your players even more.

Of the players we know decently in here, we know they are all fully capable of crafting unexpected events. When everything becomes waiting around or otherwise utterly predictable, it gets very boring. 

To give an example:
Right now, the RP is Earth vs. Lucian Alliance.
Or rather, to be precise: A perfectly unified Earth against a perfectly unified Lucian Alliance. Neither of those two exist in true SG lore. There are countless factions on Earth, each trying to be better than the others. The IOA, while it holds Earth interests on top, is a political beast of people fighting to favor their country over the others. Its not clean. The civilians fight to take control from the military, while the military tries to keep control. Where the civilians have advantage in not needing to follow the hierarchy, the military have advantage just because of that; they are excellent at making up a crew because they have a clear chain of command.

In a DSC-304 that isn't owned by any single nation, that should be even more visible. Sure, the military officer on top can keep (in this case her) subordinates from open conflict, but there might still be some conflict of interest. The civilians might want to gain more power. Scientists will want to have less military shackles, to have their own interests first and only do what the military wants when it is truly important. And scientists tend not to have the same regard for chain of command that military people have. Many of them even scorn it.

Same goes for the Lucian Alliance. Its not a single unified whole. Even back when Netan lived, the alliance fought within itself. It started out as a rough empire of criminal factions. Those factions later developed into clans of sorts. Like the invasion on Destiny in SG:U, two such clans were involved. They believed something valuable was on that ship. Thus they cooperated somewhat. Not all Alliance clans feel that way. 

The Alliance hasn't had a single leader since Netan's (presumed) death. None of the various warlords that took over at the time of his fall have become powerful enough to control all the others. One result of this is that although the Lucian Alliance has many, many times the number of ships as the Tau'ri, they cannot use them to full effect, as they always have to keep a few eyes on each other. That is, if they're not openly fighting each other.

The there are the other factions, like the Free Jaffa and the Tok'ra. They too have their own interests. For the Free Jaffa, the politics are probably about as convoluted as those of the Lucian Alliance. While they're more unified, there are many styles of behavior. Not to mention the age-old conflicts they had against each other while serving different Goa'uld.

The Tok'ra on the other hand, are potentially the sole faction active that is the least divided. But their disadvantage is the lack of numbers. Their interests in these times would lie in building a society, hunting down the goa'uld and in gathering information. You don't stop a tradition of eons of espionage overnight. These interests don't overlap fully, so there's probably factions here too.

The lesson we're trying to give out here is this:
There are factions inside every faction in the Stargate Universe. So long as they have free will, people will have conflicts with each other, no matter if they are human, Jaffa, or something else. Only hive minds and true slaves are exempt from that. Don't imagine that a faction is cooperating fully as an integrated whole. Its not. It never is. There are probably even factions among the Nox. It might not be all that apparent, but they probably exist.

Finally: Don't try to hold and control every rope, Sep. Either you lose track of them and they slip away, or you cling too tightly and what they are attached to is incapable of moving.