Our main area is the Alliance (full working title is The Alliance of Independent Worlds), centered on Tau Ceti II (not the second planet in the Tau Ceti system, but a terraformed world in the Triangulum Galaxy. Long story), a loose alliance of (mostly) human-colonized worlds. Some of these “worlds” are actually space habitats, mobile asteroid colonies, etc. The Alliance also includes and/or is allied with some independent worlds (even more so than the others) and small confederations of worlds. Alliance government varies by planet; some are anarchies (usually low-population recently-settled colonies or asteroid belts where the biggest political unit is an extended family), and some are borderline-totalitarian. Theocracies, especially militant ones, have been frowned upon for a few hundred years since The Celestial Host War, but there are a few including Kolob and Teegeeack.
There are a few major alien empires, but they require in-depth posts of their own and at least two are supposed to be a mystery at the beginning.
The tone of the thing is much more Stainless Steel Rat, SeaQuest DSV or Star Trek than Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica; the core concept is best described as “look at what humans could do if they’d get their act together and stop killing each other for a while.” The Alliance doesn’t even have a Navy. The closest thing to it is the Patrol, which does mostly police type work; anti-piracy patrols, regulation of shipping, helping ships in distress, etc. On the vast majority of worlds, planetary defense is much closer to the National Guard than a standing army; until someone shows up trying to do something evil (usually pirates on a resource raid) they’re basically a public works division building infrastructure and clearing areas for settlement, with some humanitarian work as well (disaster relief, etc). The Alliance Council also maintains a special operations and investigation group called the Troubleshooters. They’re kind of a cinematic version of the ’30s or ’50s FBI.
Personal armaments are usually pretty limited. There are planets where almost everyone goes armed, but these are frontier worlds with local wildlife that would consider an irate grizzly bear about as dangerous as an annoyed kitten. The Swiss Army laser pistols probably help too; the beam can be remodulated to anything from a cigarette lighter to a welder in addition to its use as a sidearm. On most frontier planets that have access to them, they’d be no more threatening than a survival knife in a rural area. There are also heavily-settled planets where possession of a handgun would get someone immediately labeled as a paranoid lunatic, and even the cops only use the equivalent of tasers. The Patrol carries multifunction sidearms that can (and usually do by regulation) fire nonlethal charges to incapacitate their targets. Short version: people running around kitted out like an arms locker are usually either nuts or mercenaries. Not that there isn’t an incredible array of hardware available, it’s just not used much outside the military; most PDF weapons are useless for hunting as they’d tear the animal apart instead of leaving a useful carcass for harvesting. This also applies to self-defense on a civilized world, since the courts are going to take a pretty dim view of a self-defense claim in which the supposed assailant was reduced to offal.
Automation is very widespread. On suitably high-tech worlds, the majority of industry takes the form of robotic factories. Starships are populated by swarms of maintenance robots that take care of most of the day-to-day maintenance and passenger service duties, possibly led by a living engineer who exists mainly for creative problem solving and to give the Captain someone to yell at; not that that’s ever stopped some Captains from screaming at their robots.
Computers are everywhere on suitably high-tech planets, and even relatively low-tech worlds usually have a source for the equivalent of smartphones (which are more powerful than modern-day supercomputers, assuming current trends in computer power continue). Nearly every settled planet has the equivalent of the internet, though quality varies widely depending on where you are; billions of full-sensory sites over a systemwide network in the Core, or a few blogs and government websites (the equivalent of the weather channel and agricultural news network) on some frontier worlds. Oddly enough, a few frontier worlds have very developed networks with extensive publicly-accessible databases.
As of right now, psychic powers don’t exist officially. “Officially” probably also means “in reality, at least for humans and the vast majority of other sentients.” I thought the Force was a serious weak point in Star Wars, and other backgrounds have run with it enough to make me very leery of adding it to anything of mine. In particular, once psychic powers are added to a setting they tend to become a major component that drowns out everything else; Babylon 5’s Psi Corps and Minbari psychics, Warhammer 40K’s psykers, Star Wars’s Force, some of the more annoying Counselor Troi episodes of Star Trek, etc. If I was to add psychics, they would be aliens, low-powered telepaths (or empaths), or both. There would be no equivalent of Emperor Palpatine or an Eldar Farseer.