Do you prefer real-world settings or "science fantasy"?

[Sarevok]

What is out there which is unavailable in Earth for less of an investment?

Room. Unowned resources on a very large scale. A realistic hard sci-fi future would include such things as AI and Von Neumann machines; which means that individual citizens or small groups can, if allowed, pursue projects on enormous scales. Earth, with billions of people is just too small and restrictive for that sort of thing; people would object if you had a legion of replicating robots disassemble a mountain range for your projects. In space, there's a huge amount of, well, space. You can indulge in large scale projects, do all sorts of things that would be hugely environmentally destructive on Earth, and in general do things that would never be allowed on a world crowded with billions.

Also do not forget freedom. It would be very hard to enforce what a small group can and can not do in space. People with different values will find the initial high investment to leave Earth worthwhile. This could be one of the big drivers behind interstellar colonization which normally does not generate any revenue to justify it.

[Darth Hoth]

Everything is utterly insignificant on any cosmic scale. Take Star Wars' "Galactic" Empire. On the higher end of the estimates, they have millions of systems.

The high end is billions, actually. Connor dug up some WEG quotes to that effect, and another source has been mentioned since in this thread.

A galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars. Being as generous as possible, the Empire is still a fractional percentage of the galaxy. And, of course, the galaxy is just one of billions of its siblings.

They still exercise more or less effective control over the whole Galactic territory (minus arbitrary Unknown Regions of varying sizes, dependent upon how retarded a particular author is), even if not every stellar system is permanently settled. Still, the point remains.

Of course, what we see on screen doesn't look at all like millions of systems. We see maybe a dozen planets in the films. But, what really gets me is half the cast are members of the same family, by coincidence! Small world, eh? Even tech wise, the grand battle in RotJ had maybe 100 ships total - not exactly a cosmic scale.

Well, the story follows that particular family, so from that perspective it is not such a big problem. The existence of such a construction as the Death Star also demonstrates the scale of the civilisation required to build it. But the films are certainly not intentionally "maximalist" if compared to some of the big-scale space opera (say, E. E. Smith, or even modern writers such as Baxter).

What if you stuck to show, don't tell? How would they know the difference?

As noted, it is more a matter of feel than appreciation of real total scale as such. Even if the system shown is vibrantly industrialised and populated, it will still "only" be a single system to the audience.

Uploads could still be quite human mentally. They would only become inhuman mentally if they deliberately modified the brain simulator program to make them so. It's pretty plausible that most of them would choose not to do that - I imagine people with no attachment to their mental humanity would be considerably rarer than people with no attachment to their physical humanity.

Frankly, I doubt that a creature that thinks of time in terms of many millennia will be able to retain a human mindset or relate to people who live ordinary lives. Though perhaps that is a failure of imagination on my part.

That is true. I don't dispute that it is more limited, I dispute that it's some kind of creative straightjacket that severely limits what the author can do. There's still lots of things you can do within the limits of hard science.

In the sense that you can write varied stories within such a framework, certainly. I do not disagree there. It does, however, more or less eliminate many/most of the "classical" features of soft sci-fi genres such as space opera, military sci-fi, and the like.

[Junghalli]

Frankly, I doubt that a creature that thinks of time in terms of many millennia will be able to retain a human mindset or relate to people who live ordinary lives.

I doubt they would actually be aware of most of that time passing. Interstellar space is pretty empty and drifting through it would be probably usually be incredibly uneventful and boring even if you were in the middle of a giant galactic war. They'd probably mostly "sleep" during that time or run themselves at a very slowed down clock rate.

It does, however, more or less eliminate many/most of the "classical" features of soft sci-fi genres such as space opera, military sci-fi, and the like.

You can have those things, you just have to be a little more creative than usual. Larry Niven managed a fairly hard space opera setting with early Known Space. Granted he had some pretty soft stuff mixed in there even then (Thrint stasis fields, telepathic powers, Kzinti gravity drives), but he managed to do it while having the setting for the most part not defined by the magic the way most soft SF universes are. The only magic in there I can think of that would really radically change the story if you eliminated it is the telepathy and maybe the stasis fields (depending on how much you could buy something surviving billions of years without one).

[Darth Wong]

This isn't a discussion on whether one shouldn't exist, or whether characters are more important than setting or anything like that. Instead:

All other things being equal, do you prefer stories that adhere rigidly to real world physics to the best of the author's ability, or ones that do not?

Why do you feel that way?

Here's my attempt to win the "quote which looks most incredibly stupid at first sight but can be explained after the fact" award for the day: I prefer stories which obey the laws of physics and logic all the time except when they don't.

By that, I mean that if there are physics-defying conventions in a story, I want those conventions made clear right up-front, and then I want everything else to make sense. What I (and a lot of people) generally want in a story is the ability to immerse yourself in it, and a number of elements need to be in place. You need characters you can identify with, a situation you can comprehend, and a universe which has comprehensible rules.

Even if those rules violate real physics laws, that's OK but the establishment of a physics-defying convention in a movie doesn't mean (as far too many apologists think) that any violation of physics from that point on is fair game. That's just laziness and stupidity: laziness on the part of the writers who can't be arsed to keep things straight and stupidity on the part of fans who (more often than not) honestly didn't realize that the other physics violations were in fact physics violations at all until you pointed it out, and then fell back on this "it's not real anyway, so don't nitpick" rationalization after the fact. You see the same behaviour when you point out plot holes: whenever you point out a plot hole that a defender of the film obviously never thought of, you can predict he will start attacking your psychological motivations for going after the plot hole. He'll never say "Oh wow, I honestly didn't notice that one, it bugs me now". It's too wounding to his pride, especially if he's a film geek.

[Samuel]

The only magic in there I can think of that would really radically change the story if you eliminated it is the telepathy and maybe the stasis fields (depending on how much you could buy something surviving billions of years without one).

Maybe you could produce very good self-repairing systems, although obviously the version you unleash won't be the same as the origional, but a copy that has piece by piece replaced over time.

Of course the problem with the stasis fields is the same- they don't break down even after all that time.

(Thrint stasis fields, telepathic powers, Kzinti gravity drives)

Only the second was really big in the series in a divergence from reality. Kzin ships still moved substantially less than light speed and the stasis fields mostly meant that you could have artifacts from a lost age be recoverable. Telepathy in the series meant you could have a weapon that killed all life in the universe instantly, which is a massive departure from reality.