The original story is that you're a package inspector. After 16 hrs of training, you're the required "human-granted approval" in an automated process. One day, you get a canister that's oozing black stuff, and, not having a process for returning based on the specific observable quality, you simply opt to dump it in an unused storage room and mark the parcel as lost. This is well within the shrink rate of the fulfillment center, so it just... poofs. That cannister turns out to contain a controlled substance, and after you mention it to a coworker, you both contrive to sell the stuff and profit.
That story is still there, but we start a few weeks later, when you sold the stuff to a privateer who offers an unregistered light cruiser (ship) and a business opportunity. While enjoying an interplanetary ride with him, his license is revoked and he's arrested. You and your coworker escape by piloting a light craft towards a pre-set destination, which is an abandoned asteroid mine that the privateer occasionally uses as a safe house. As the mine is fully automated, all you need to do is plug in the privateer's keycard and poof, the mine starts mining and refining raw material (This is where the game begins and trains the player to the game loop > you choose to set up a loop, a core resource appears, you make choices to grow that core resource and further the story.)
Back to the story: You now have fuel to return back to your space station fulfillment center and more to spare. However, the mine will fully exhaust soon after a few more "hauls" of ore and fuel.
You and your coworker then decide to get into the "last-klik delivery service". From there the story revolves around meeting humans for special deliveries and to let them past a mostly automated customs process. You buy ships, rent hangar space, pay taxes, negotiate with customs. In this world there is FTL travel where the problem to solve is not energy but navigation, and only the 2 most successful system federations have pilot systems to navigate through space-time. One system uses humans with AI that is trained with them (as a symbiotic relationship) at a young age and another system uses a certain hallucinogenic drug to grant prescience to its navigators. These ftl ships are beyond the ken of fully-organic humans.
In some star systems droiding is not allowed, whereas in others it's okay to borg yourself. You live in a wealthy federation system where thinking machine institutions are slowly being dismantled in favor of human/AI systems. The SysFed itself is wealthy but only if you're born as a citizen. You're not – you're a Citizen Aspirant, and you can choose if this is because you're from a failed colony or from a slower-than-light ship-only tribal culture (the Wandering Tribes). The end result is a mostly automated world where "non-citizen" humans are being added into automated processes as makework, as there is no easy way for them to "earn" or "prove" their citizenship. The goal of SysFed is ultimately status quo - maintaining wealth and dominance. And in order to keep the SysFed in its status quo (wealthy), it has to at least STAY dominant, which means that if their rival is looking for shorter, more energy-efficient routes or more planets, they have to look for those too.
Note that what powers ships may have to be different depending on the ship, with Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators being a popular entry level power source + solar. We can call it a nuclear battery. In current science this is done through fission. In gundam it's done through fusion. The following link explains how it works and that we use Plutonium-238.
On the development bit, I'm setting up vim-coc to help with autocomplete duties as JS is pretty long. Maybe one day I'll set up linting, or something.
