Duke Street Alley

I invite your speculations: How could an interstellar economy work? Assume FTL travel is possible, but not instantaneous.

(Given that our own economies seem, from my point of view, to work on a principle of not being examined too closely, feel free to propose outrageous possibilities.)

EDIT: To answer questions, mostly about the parameters of FTL...

FTL does not rely on a constructed infrastructure, but does rely on naturally occurring, unevenly distibuted features of space-time.

The economy is the several-kinds-meeting type.

FTL has more in common with a train than a hand-pushed cart, but sailing ships are a better analogy.

Travel is expensive, but not ludicrously so - think sun holidays now; you can't do it all the time, but once a year is ordinary. More importantly, it requires a skilled pilot. Certain routes have size limitations on traffic. Space tourism is definitely a happening thing.

Travel time is about one to four hours to a neighbouring star system at the very best (local conditions may increase that greatly, but never reduce it below a theoretical optimum) and about a year and a half to cross human-occupied space one way. [Actual numbers subject to change, but about that feel.]

So I'm working on this science fiction setting, Starbound. There's a post coming up on duekstreet.org wherein I'll tell you some of what I want to do in it. Meantime, though, I want to do some market research. What do you want to see and do in a scifi setting? Some bits are preset - it's going to be epic-scale, stretching across many solar systems, and high tech. It'll be used for short stories, maybe even novels, possibly comics, and certainly RPGs. Give me a wishlist.

(I'd really like to see a lot of responses to this, by the way - even if they're just "Die Shatner Die", or "I want lots of dakka", it's all grist to the mill.)