Diaspora takes the well known and liked Spirit of the Century into the hard science fiction genre. The game starts with the generation of the star systems, with the stats generated at random but developed and aspected by each player. Contact between worlds is through the slipstream, certain points in the star system that allow ships to travel between worlds.
Character generation follows, using the worlds previously created and following a similar pattern to SotC. Players are required to forge links between their characters in the story telling section and generate aspects.
Aspects, unsurprisingly, form a key element in each section of the game and allows the game to solve some of the scale problems. For example a major concern is how to deal with characters being shot at by starship lasers which the game sets as a tapable aspect. However, the game is a bit tedious to read and tends to bog itself down in crunchy theory. I'm not sure I would ever run this but it has provided thoughts on how to deal with certain challenges in running a Sci-fi game. I like my sci-fi to be a bit more fantastic rather than technical and the focus on physics is enough to put off any sane Biologist, still it can join my collection as another useful reference text!
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