> What I'm looking for is some advice on what to world-build into this. I've 
> gone out on the web looking for science fiction rpg's, and there seem to be 
> precious few. They appear to be largely overwhelmed by the fantasy sites. 

Some recommendations: take a look at "GURPS Space".  It is a sort of "space
RPG construction kit", with a lot of suggestions and information about world
building.

I'm personally fond of the Phoenix Sector from "GURPS Space Atlas 4"; it's a
sketch of a ~20 world sector, which I've used as a setting for a Space PBEM
game (currently on hiatus along with most of everything else gaming-related
in my life).  (You can see the web pages for this game at
"http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/Omar/phoenix/".)

As for system: choose one you like.  I've started doing some work to
supporting space opera in Fudge; you can find a preliminary version of what
I'm working on at "http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/Omar/fudge/" (in PDF form).
This is a first version, and will be modified, expanded, and updated
*sometime*-- and it may be completely not to your tastes!  But just in case
it is, I point you to it.

If you like GURPS, it has excellent support for space games; GURPS Space is
the definitive starting point, but there are other books as well.  (The two
Ultra-Tech books are good, "Vehicles" and "Robots" if you can stomach
(otherwise ignore them), Bio-Tech if you go in for that sort of thing.)  The
GURPS Traveller series may also be useful; in particular, "First In" is a
great book for somebody thinking about doing space opera worldbuilding.
Part of the book deals with the Traveller scout service, which may be good
for inspiration but not directly useful if you aren't running a Trav game.
A good fraction of the book, however, deals with creating star systems and
worlds.

Many people still like to use the sundry Trav systems (including the
original classic Traveller from the late 1970's) as a generic engine for a
space opera game.

-Rob
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