I may have mentioned it before, but I wanna throw in heaps of Aliens (the technology, not the xenomorphs; I just love the design look and feel of Aliens!), the Tau from 40k, the remnants of humanity fleeing across the stars looking for a new home like the new BSG or Homeworld or Macross or (etc.), and finding that home on a Niven-inspired Ringworld.

The Tau aren't (necessarily) the bad guys, plus there's a surface area equivalent of six hundred million earths to explore, and who knows how many other star-faring races...

System wise I've decided to go with a simplified Hero System; when I get a group together I'll have everything pre-generated, and narrow the corridor on what they can spend XP (character points) on, so nobody gets cute and tries to slowly build a superhero brick, or buy flight, or nonsense like that.

My sourcebooks are the Codex Tau, the Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual, some of the visual designs of Kow Yokoyama, a copy of Ringworld and anything else I can think of.  I realized I've overthought the "how" of how humanity came to the state they're in, and lost the focus of the "what": you're the guardians of the last few million humans in the universe.  You've got a "patrol area" nearly a billion times larger than the planet, and 99.999999999999999999% of it is uncharted.  Exoatmospheric flight is a no-no since the Ringworld's built-in meteor defenses frown on things that move fast inside the diameter of the Ring, above the atmosphere, so reconnaissance is going to be slow.  You've just bumped up against a space-faring humanoid race that seems as surprised if not downright shocked to meet another intelligent race out in the universe.  Their tech levels aren't that far out of line with yours, but they have a definite edge.  They're not overtly hostile, but definitely aloof and not really forthcoming about their foothold on the Ring either.

What do you do, hotshot?

What do you do?