Ok, thought Willy agreed to it, but he never responded to it. 

[quote=@WilsonTurner]
I'll go ahead and propose something:

FTL is possible, but the energy requirements for a pure system-to-system jump over a long distance would bleed a ship's reactors dry, and then tear itself apart as the ship slowly exits the warp across several lightyears. 100 lightyears? Never. However, it'd be much more likely that, say, if solar systems are an average of five to twelve lightyears apart, the maximum distance a regular spaceship can go is, say, 20 lightyears, max, and then they have to wait, let the drives cool down, and go again. Micro-jumping is obviously much less demanding, as is sublight. 

FTL weapons I would not recommend. It's one thing to load a cargo ship up with water [which would both serve as the fuel and the mass], and then RC it to hit something really far away at the max sublight its drives can go, and to have cannons spitting out FTL weapons. Energy weapons might be feasible for that, simply because a laser going at sublight or FTL won't demolish half a moon.

Limited FTL will allow tactical jumps and all that, but would prevent someone from simply going from one's homeworld to another, regardless of any defenses or occupied systems in the way. 

And also- FTL shreds a ship if in a gravity well. Say, the acceleration within the affecting force of gravity screws up the drive while it powers up, and turns the ship into a lightyear-long debris field. 

[img]http://clowder.net/hop/railroad/Gravitywells.jpeg[/img]

This is combat and tactics in space- well, what use are tactics when you go anywhere and everywhere in an instant without penalty, and where there is very little need for 'tactics' when you can simply appear elsewhere? You won't be able to bombard the surface accurately at all from outside the gravity well- and a gravity well for a planet is MASSIVE, when you actually think about it. The area of the gravity well is so much more than the size of the planet itself. Look at the above image as an example.

That way, 'trapping' people between orbital satellite defenses or asteroid fortresses between a fleet above, on the edge of the gravity well, with the trapped fleet stuck in between, unable to FTL, well, that's incentive for a desperate battle for freedom or to conquer. Would be much better for the story, anyways, since you guys like using that to say no to something. 

Having characters sweat from being trapped between two powerful forces, individually weaker but more powerful combined, after being confident that they'd easily break the defenses, well, that'd be pretty cool to write, I think.
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