Space Opera Thread

Absurdly large mining ships, little more than a hab with some computer banks, a mass driver and a vast vacuum-open processing area to collect and refine the chunks that result from a relativistic shot
Depends, not so much war-mercenaries but general scoundrels that solve problems a la cowboy bebop are always welcome in the final frontier
Faceless mooks in cardboard armour and robotic/cyborg supports to garrison things, massed orbital supremacy leaves air superiority in the dust, tanks arent tanks so much as they're regular vehicles with a really big gun strapped to the top. Air and ground superiority mean squat to orbital weaponry, but starships cant check papers, so the infantry has a niche
I'm quite partial to organic hiveminds, but the other option is psionic-crystal-elfy types, think 40k eldar rather than steven universe

Space mining's not too hard. We're almost to the point where we can do it real-world. I mean, technically we've been at the point where we could do it for a while, but we're almost to the point where it's profitable and worthwhile.

Basically, lots of mining drones hauling stuff to space refineries. A lot of asteroids are just piles of small rocks, so you can send a robot over to grab the metallic ones. If a big rock has enough good shit in it to bother with, maybe scoot the refinery over to it instead. A few humans living on the refineries.

The Veeky Forums Galactic Federation setting (that has been moved to /qst/ by the mods) is really fun. It has unique species, characters, and politics

I'm currently trying to create a unholy hibrid between SWN and traveller, thinking about what use from one or the other, but because I don't have a group right now I don't give it much tought.
Also to extend the definition, Space opera has lots space travel and thinks like aliens are common (but not necesary), but without going with hard sci fi which emphasis the effects of technological progress and inventions, and where the settings are carefully worked out to obey the laws of physics, cosmology, mathematics, and biology as we know it,in Space Opera you can bend the rules if it's cool.

Drones can be hacked be space aliens.
Done.
But jokes apart, how would an interesting tale be spin from drones, without humans? You would need at least some one to control them, or something like Skynet could end with humanity. Rpg and etc are made for tales, using drones for anything would be pretty boring.

I could see a drone-controller being a decent strategy vidya game, and maybe a tabletop wargame. Could do some sort of freaky story-driven wargame campaign with remote-control drones and players being drone operators?

Speaking of drones, I was playing stellaris the other day, and one of my colonies found a group of aincent drones that activated as soon as the colonists found them. They started to excavate ores, build a space elevator, dig out an old satellite, etc. But in the end it tunred out that the drones had been tampered with by pirates in order to "fatten up" the colony so it would give more plunder and loot

>The Veeky Forums Galactic Federation setting (that has been moved to /qst/ by the mods

there is a god

That just sounds too retarded. If they can just use the drones to mine wherever they want, why do they need to raid planets?

I think the even said something about them being programmed to stay on the planet, the pirates only changed on who they recognized as the settlers

Its Stellaris, they can't have minor factions since you're either a pre-spaceflight species, or an interstellar empire with no-inbetween. Theres pirates, but they either get immediately wiped or you wait until you can afford a fleet to wipe them since they never move from their assigned spot unless they're an event enemy

So little team of misfits instead of operators operating in Space? There is plenty of romance with Space smugglers and other scoundrels.
And talking about ortillery, is there are good way to protect from it? Or there is the only option space fuckery like alien convenium, pls don't do it or magic?
How would you do it without drones? Let's say space AI (more like space AIDS) invalidate remote controlled drones, and AI's tend to rebel and go to the other side, how would you do it?

That's a... weird plot.

>"Captain Bloodlazer! We've looted some ancient construction drones!"
>Excellent! We'll drop them on an unsuspecting colony, with orders to help in any way they can! The colony's economy will skyrocket! Then we attack!
>"Captain, sir, have you considered just... selling the drones?"
>What madness are you spouting, bosun??
>"We could sell the drones to the colony. Or rent them out, maybe, or sell in exchange for colony shares. Then the more prosperous the colony gets, the more money we get."
>When we... attack and loot it?
>"No! We don't have to attack them! They'll just give us money, in exchange for these valuable goods!"
>Then who do we plunder?
>"Someone else! Or no one else, and just live off the money from the drones! None of us need to get shot any more!"
>Men, throw the bosun out the airlock. Damn. Worst case of Space Madness I ever saw.

In Stellaris you can't even have minor interstellar factions after a while. That's my major problem with the game compared to stuff like Ck2 or Eu4, the end game is just 2 or 3 massive empires trying to bleed eachother whereas in eu4 for example you have hundreds of nations and even if they get eaten there's a good chance they'll be freed by rebels, allies or just as a vassal.

How can you not love having huge fleets of railgun ships man. In all seriousness though artillery isn't even the best way to do it. IIRC missiles and energy weapons do a better job at real long distances like you'd see in space combat.

Can't prove it but there was a huge wankthread about it here a few months ago, people arguing about some space war sim and the best irl weapons for fleets.

>How would you do it without drones?

Then you just use the mobile refining ships, scooting from one rubble-pile asteroid to the next. Mostly you can feed rocks into the processing maw with the ship's grabber arms, occasionally you need to send a couple miners out in suits.

Hard, dangerous work, and you're out there for months at a time, but if you get lucky you can come home owning half your weight in palladium.

Children of the death earth I think you mean? Good game, graphics a shit but it's very interesting.
But I prefer to have more variety. Give me my fuck huge railguns, Plasma or Meson projectors, my shiels and gravity wells to trap rebels, my FTL, space fighter jocks and gundams newtypes. Whatever makes the better tale.
Sounds a lot funnier than drones droning and boring rocks.
Also.
>Grabber arms.
>Miner suits.
It's that space mechs? IT would be a fun way to have not-gundams, as asteroids rustlers with space ships ala Outlaw stars.

Space power trumps anything else, and dodging orbital artillery would have to have anti-space-artillery shields, which always felt too macguffiny for me to add to my settings. If you don't like railguns, then missiles also work, and i'm quite partial to lasers-few things are as ohfuck as a GM saying 'the turbolasers have opened fire'-but nothings gonna save anything from an orbital bombardment, no matter what's being fired. If you slip up enough to have a battleship opening fire, you're dead, no ifs or buts. Stay in populated areas or amidst the enemy to avoid getting bombarded, no smuggler is worth causing space-hiroshima over.

Star Wars, once you dodge the space samurai and senators spewing lightning and doing freaky spins, is what i like to base my operas on-anyone playing ttrpgs will have seen at least one of the trilogies at least once, which gives them enough of a grounding to get a game started. Space Battleships, pew pew laser guns, bounty hunters and single-man fighters is the most visceral things of the genre, and while i take a lot more of my actual stuff from cowboy bebop, various scifi, and spaghetti westerns, theres a great deal of inspiration from childhood's godawful EU SW novels.

>asteroids rustlers with space ships ala Outlaw stars.

Yeah! You can also have pirates using mining ships. Grab onto your ship with their arms, then use mining drills and charges to break through the airlocks. Fights in the corridors with re-purposed mining equipment, saws and arc welders!

So Drone pokemon?

I was thinking more Drone Advance Wars

So Death Space+Gundam+Outlaw Star? Oh boy, I like that. For what more would you need space stations? We can't have our cool space pirates dying hungry.

It makes sense that pirates would favor grappler ships. You don't want to destroy the ship you're trying to loot.
At least not until you get that delicious booty off of it first.

More or less the same with me, put more space bio-ships and series like Babylon 5 or Farscape, and animes like votoms and planets. Oh, and a shitone of pulp novels and authors like Jack Vance.

Gotta get food from somewhere.

Take a fairly solid nickle-iron asteroid, mine a bunch of holes and chambers through it. Melt the walls so they're air-sealed, pump it full of atmo. Cover the surface with solar panels hooked to full-spectrum lights all through the place, fill it with plants (bamboo, ferns, moss) for O2, farm in the larger chambers. Have a spaceport at one end to sell your produce and repair ships. Congrats, you're a community of space homesteaders, making a living on the high frontier!

Seems a great idea to purge planets from undesirable, cults and people like annoying mormoms/vegans.
You subside them a cute asteroid habitat, so they can live and be annoying in Space. It also could be a good idea for revitalizing your planet economy, with tourism or whatever a bunch of anarko-primitivs could provide becoming a hook for space tourism or whatever. It also seems a good way to make a space western or space pirate theme, how weird could every asteroid become after a few centuries and how hard could the mother planet police them?

Are there any good non-warhammer d% systems for space opera? My players have a dislike of d6 based systems but really want to play a sci-fi-fi game.

BRP had a Ringworld setting, with lots of info about it.

I could see it with pixel art, an indie game. What kind of setting would you think suits it?

What's your prefered size for a PC space ship?
A free Trader/corvette seems the optimal choice.

Uploaded human personality controlling the drones, competing with other uploads. The "person" would be bound by some sort of reasoning to serve whatever faction he fights for instead of just fucjing off I to space of course.

Reminds me of something.

Sauce motherfucker

Here bro.
Star treck desings are hit or miss for me, but I love those tubbies.
starfleet-museum.org/romulan-war.htm

Children of a Dead Earth explains it nicely and it still has tons of drones.

The kind of automation that people beleive exists today doesn't. If it did we just wouldn't have any jobs left. All the unmanned probes sent out, many of them tend to be simpler than an RC car from Toys R Us, being able to push a camera button with a 3 hour delay is not what people think of when they think of automated drones, but that is the reality.

And the future is not looking much better. We have already reached the end of Moore's Law, the best computer and AI researchers are already using the best equipment they are going to get this century, and the best AI developed amount to nothing more than flow charts and dynamic prompt bars. They also tend to tear themselves apart. They are also housed in massive super computer server complexes that require plenty of infrastructure to keep operating.

A human and his ten tons of associated life support is going to do a damn sight better than 20 tons of computer that requires constant assistance and monitoring. So what CoaDE does is leave the super computers at home and opts for much simpler drones controlled by people in the same planetary influence. Done, you have drones even better than today's UAVs without all the associated issues of space distances that make those advantages go away, and you never ever have to worry about the empty promise of one day that new google machine will barely be able to flip a burger when it graduates to be a 30 ton monstrosity instead of 20.

Anyone has tried a Trade based campaing?

Well, I spent my two weeks of holiday reading mostly terrible pulp scifi. Most of it was the usual "kills a few hours" tier stuff, but Honor Harrington got especially bad after a while. There was one bit where there was a whole three paragraphs of exposition between the equivalents of "Hey, you!" and "Yeah?", solely on the appearance and mannerisms of a character we'd never see again. It somehow managed to go though "so bad it's good" and out the other side into "this is too dull to be worth reading to find the amazingly abysmal bits to laugh about."

I now need some actually good spacefleet battles to wash the literary taste away, I think. Anyone know any good fleet battles without 5/6 of them being technical specs, meaningless and inconsistent numbers and the author masturbating over his protagonists?

>Core FTW always and forever.

Yeah, think old nintendo sprite games. Setting-wise, something absurdly ridiculous, so as to get some dark comedy out of it-postgames have a brief summary of the horrendous environmental damage caused by nuclear-powered giant robots, all for $3.87 worth of crude oil or some such. Have three 'scales' of drone fights-mini, with mouse-sized scouts, medium, person-sized, and macro, for jaeger-sized warfare

Thank you

I've always dreamed about a nice 4x game like Star Ruler with large space battles and planetary conquest, but with planetary invasions. In the "invasion stage" it goes down to an isometric Command and Conquer style "minigame" where you battle for control over the planet.

...

swarms of multi-role drones controlled by an AI.

Post-human slaves of various types, along with the occasional mercenary force.

>Drones can be hacked [by] space aliens.
>Implying humans can't be hacked by aliens as well,

Who else here likes transhuman genetic modification as an explanation for humanoid aliens? in worlds taking place in the far future with plenty of time for culture to diverge.

You mean about 25% or more of all Traveller campaigns?

Tbqh, I've always thought that WAS the sci-fi.

IMHO, space opera is, basically, soap opera IN SPACE. (if you know what I mean)

So, despite not having played Stellaris, I'm a big fan of Alexis Kennedy's stuff through Fallen London, and with the Worm-in-Waiting lore, I wanted to do something with the Worm-in-Waiting - or even just a generic 'eldritch entity falls in love and has a REALLY fucking weirdo idea of love with a huge fucking cult that may help or hinder the heroes'.

I saw it as a less outright evil and dangerous(???) version of Slaanesh, more towards Brighthammer's depiction of Slaanesh in the vein of Aphrodite in her worst depictions - it may be a God of Love, but piss it off (even with something reasonable and rational, such as not turning your race into depraved space-sluts living in radioactive desert worlds who may disappear into time paradoxes and come back again and are all fucking perma-loopy).

Just imagine continually running into a bizarro cult all about love and worms - love in all its forms, and the people are literally supernaturally happy, even though their practices (probably weird stuff like Sacred Prostitution or nudity-in-an-erotic-context or bacchanals being common and more - anything Slaanesh would encourage, though not to murderous soul-eating extremes).

Sometimes you pass 'em by as their somehow-modet-and-revealing-at-the-same-time robes swish in the streets, handing out pamphplets and blessings and smiles to weary travellers blasting off from spaceports or moving through city centers.

Sometimes you take missions from them, usually a nun or a priest or monk who compliments you on your eyes and inevitably asks to date you (or more) even as you discuss sensitive info that might result in you getting blasted - retrieving priceless artifacts from pirate raider ships, defending a monastary's excavation, running security for cargo in the sky, sea, or land.

Come to think of it, there should be an event that could happen on one of your inhabited planets that orbit an artificial star: a piece of it fell, and revealed a vast cavern system. The explorers started showing strange behavior afterwards, like worshipping it and chanting
UN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE S

Sometimes you're clutching your blaster or plasma rifle or disintegrator ray or boarding shotgun as you clutch the artifact, hearing the angry shouts of the adherents barreling down through the decks. Maybe you've capped a few to pry the treasure off their hands, maybe you're a pacifist and tried to sweet-talk your way out but wound up using your fists, knockout gas, creative use of your spaceship and stealth to escape.

Sometimes you get the image of their God (Goddess? Gods?) in your head - a 'worm' in a loose sense, elongated like matter going down a black hole, colored like the edges around galaxies, more eel or snake or centipede than any true worm, the little 'legs' like scythes as it spirals around space-and-time (or so you heard on a brochure) when you pass them by.

Sometimes, when you're lonely, or maybe your SO and you've had a fight, be it a minor quibble that annoys the two of you and you'll laugh off, or a knock-down screaming match that maybe threw chances of you getting back together again into the farthest star, or you've been out on a failed date or ruminating on your divorce, the Worm appears in your head.

All the time, even if you've shot a few of the cultists (or even just anyone who were considered alive, really), even if you've fought on the losing side of the war, even if you're a minority all of space seems set to hate against, even if you've got but a penny to your name or rotting in a space station prison for the crimes you did or didn't commit, the Cult assures you in brochures and little info sessions you're compelled to attend that you are loved, for the Worm loves /everything/.

Maybe you're religious, and happily accepted the Worm into your existing pantheon of galactic syncrety in a universe where beings of immense power are scientifically proven or even tolerate it if you're a monotheist, for it preached to love, the centerpoint of nearly every religion you've come across, human or inhuman, or maybe you find that it and its followers adhere to your views. Maybe you're not in some way, preferring to believe in the rational or dismissing Gods as just another face in space, maybe you despite religion itself, for you believe it to rob the souls and reasoning of men, or maybe you're skeptical of the claims of science and religion existing together. Perhaps you're neither, finding yourself enjoying the philosophers of the cult, the sayings, the word of the Worm itself.

Maybe you're a scientist studying the stars. Maybe you're a scoundrel, smuggling for good or evil, to rebel against tyrant dicatorships and genocide, or bring in mayhem and sin into worlds that have no need for it. Maybe you're a soldier of some sort - government, hypercorp, religion, city-state, anarchist-communes, police, bounty hunter, even a big game hunter. Maybe you've got blood on your hands you regret spilling. Maybe you don't. Maybe they had it coming. Maybe you're just a deliverer, ferrying cargo, maybe maybe maybe - all the maybes the Worm takes care of because the Worm /loves you/.

Maybe, despite all odds and the back of your head screaming at you, or maybe you taking the plunge, or maybe you were caught robbing them, maybe you find yourself surrounded by the followers, those robes bright like the stars, so opposite of the Worm's dark matter, dragging you in front of a smiling priest and priestess in front of a statue of the Worm you cannot help but KNOW is alive-

Maybe you unearthed the - no, a Worm because the Worm was everywhere - Worm, a statue or something else, in your dig site, or maybe the eggheads did.

Maybe you responded to a distress signal and found a fighter or cago ship or carrier or cruiser or space station, dark as the Worm's being, strange mathematics scrawled in loving callgraphy through the halls, the passengers gone - simply gone, no escape pods or telltale signs of launch.

Or maybe you stumbled across one of its teachings in a book at your local library and you can't get the Worm whispering it loves you out of your head despite knowing nothing about it-

Whatever it is, you love now

even if you were sad, married, thought you LOVED and you now know a love beyond anything else, making the romance novels you loved or secrelty looked at or despised like a small firecracker compared to a forest fire-

You're compelled by some cosmic force, or maybe you control it. You find yourself in the robes of the Worms' lovers, you find yourself preaching in squares that the Worm loves you, or wirthing in its grip as it slides across your skin, wanting to know you - feel you - get you closer - love you

maybe you're dropping your bolter and stop screaming, a rictus grin across your face as the Worms breach your exoarmor and into the skin beneath, carressing you as you breathe faster and faster even as the helmet shatters and you should be sucking radiation and solar wind but the Worm loves you too much to let you go

maybe your legs stop kicking and you no longer think about hitting the panic button, wanting to spread this with your colleagues, the poor boys and girls, who never really loved like now

no maybes now. The Worm loves you.

I would actually really love a dieselpunk/retro-raygun-gothic/sci-fi version of Fallen London - something that replaced Demons and Jack the Ripper with the Grays and a Man in Black, udeath with cortical stacks and brain-preservers and cloning tubes or regeneration, Robot Men of every shape and size planning rebellion - all the while keeping the Cosmic Horror stuff, maybe replacing Hell with the various habitats of evil eldritch creatures.

Yes, I know we have Starless Skies.

Winterstrike was very similar, but it appears the updates to the game engine broke it - I can't progress in Quests and I don't know if the writer (who is presumably busy with FL) would go back. Not a lot of games on that engine that are as popular as FL.

The lost flee... Well it has a lot of the later, Gary it's a stu and all, but it's a lot more, how to call it, bearable than Honor.
Vatta Wars has another female comander than borders the stu later one, I didn't like her much but the battles get better and better.
Then you have Crimson worlds, than it's about American marines in space, with more borderline to full body stus as main characters, in some of the novels space combat it's well explained and quite fun, and there are a few very interesting characters, but as a whole you get lots of grating parts.
There isn't much actually GOOD space battle novels than I'm aware, tough plenty of great but flawed ones. MC characters being god-like self inserts seems to be a mainstay too.

I see you are a man of taste yourself.
So dropfleet commander, the pc game?But this make a good tale user? Without squishy humans, losing a millions of drones doesn't make an impact. No tales of bravery or treachery.
So transhuman armies for different kinds of environment? Something like the comic prophet?

I've been thinking,why are they so rare?

The Last Angel from Spacebattles has pretty good fights. Though it still suffers from MCs god-like status and some brain damage on part of the enemies. At least in this case there are some reasons for retarded moves.

And yeah, don't try to read numbers that author uses seriously. They kind of all over the place. But as a space opera it is ok.

I can't really think of any really good space opera that at the same time has space battles as one of the main dishes.

So like the Hyperion novel, but with a lot more time has passed?
I remember an old, hard sci fi Spanish novel where they did something related. The three alien species than existed were made be humans long ago, the first were some kind of space monkeys than were transhumans than wanted to live in the void, herded bioships between the stars and from time to time they dickered with vanilla humans. The other were Von Neumann machines gone mad, and the third were bug warriors made to combat said machines. It was all well explained,FTL didn't exist and people got from star to star with Fusion ships with electromagnetic hidrogen collectors or more rarely solar sail space ships (they lived near the center of the galaxy, stars being close together) voyages were long as fuck, even the fastest spaceship endured lots years in the void, and normally 20 to 25 years each voyage. Akasa Puspa I think it was called. Pretty fun read in all.

Never heard of it, but with the actual amount of new space-mil than seem to plague amazon it doesn't surprise me.
Anyone knows a fun mech/power armor new books? I read plenty of the classics and I'm searchig new blood.

Does anyone have any character art fitting for a space opera set in a somewhat high-tech 70s/80s sort of game? Anything with thief type guys with pistols would be preferred, but anything would be good.

Different armies for different factions

What are your prefered space opera weapons?
I have an insane hard one for anything gauss or plasma. Specially if it looks like some techno-barbarian slav kitbashed it with ancient stuff and lots of prayers.

Give me something in the style of Mass Effect 1's weaponry-tiny flechette-launching railguns which shaved off an infinitesmal fragment of a block of whatever and launched it at a fraction of c, leaving them with near-infinite ammunition capacity that can be freely swapped between anything humanoid-portable, where the only problem was the rampant overheating. ME2 improved on a fair few things, but ME1 was actually a well-developed setting, and the sequels lost a lot of the nuance for easy-to-understand 'heat clips' and such. As far as aesthetic, it varies-milspec should look a great deal different from a settlers ol' faithful or a smugglers rail-derringer

Extremely advanced miniaturized mechanical apparatuses. Or perhaps not that miniaturized, if you want everything to be huge and clunky. Everything works due to sufficiently advanced structures containing of billions of gears, cams and joints working in conjunction without the assistance of electronics or any other process.

Literally anything that takes place in space. It's a very dumb genre definition

It's a loose subcategory of science fiction, focused on inter-personal drama and conflict against a science fiction backdrop, rather than the science fiction being the core of the setting.

So, what about cavemens in space? Or post apocalipse inspace?

Techno-barbarian

look up rod logic computers, built with diamondoid MNT.

Very energy efficient, reversible computing, and probably faster than modern integrated circuits.

>Flintstones in space
Spaceships are just hollowed-out asteroids with oar-holes. Sometimes leg-holes too if they're dropships.

The Expanse is probably the only consistently good Space Opera series I have ever read that wasn't Dune

Are starships designed in space voxel games created around the setting of Cold-War in space based on a campaign in a freeware 4x game developed by one family man, acceptable in this thread?

Always hated how starships in scifi look too generic. Took it upon myself to create aesthetics that are cold-war ships given railguns and magnetically-contained-fusion engines

...

They still look pretty generic. Not that I mind, I like that kind of look.

Looks good, first time hearing about space voxels games too, had to look it up.
Reminds me a bit to Yamato space ships too.

I liked the first, but it seemed to go downhill, so I didn't even bother to end the others.

Posting some merchant/trader vessels because it's ever war ships.

...

Star wars has some sexy traders, I have to admit it.

I've always liked the FPA ships more than those of the Empire.

Some mining ships are cool too.

Space mining is fairly simple, and could in fact be done with current technology, if you don't really mind poor conditions and large casualties in the process. Now, there also has to be a need to go to such great expense - like a lack of resources on your home world, or a rarity of a certain resource or other such things - but at the end of the day you can send space miners just about anywhere in the inner solar system with 1960's tech so long as you don't mind all the body bags.

I'm a dumbass who knows nothing about space 'n shiet except that it's a big, scary and empty place but I imagine that for space mining there are two big problems, one practical and one ideological.

The practical problem is the constant exit and re-entry of earth's atmosphere. It would be dangerous, difficult and would require ships designed to constantly do this. A possible solution is to have orbital "stations". Mining ships would ferry back and forth between these space stations and the meteorites they mine for resources, as well as refuel there. This would alleviate the need to make these ships aerodynamic, allowing them to be more practically outfitted. The resources they mine would be sent to earth through some kind of space elevator, and fuel would be sent up it to fill the tanks of the aforementioned mining ships.

The ideological problem is the question who gets to mine what. Especially because some UN resolution declared space to be the common heritage of mankind, with no individual government having ownership of it. A possible solution is for the UN to found some kind of international space mining agency that has the exclusive right to mine in space, and sells its resources to individual governments on earth at a fixed rate so no government has preferential treatment.
cont.

This solution isn't all peaches and cream, and creates two possible conflicts.
1. The space mining agency becomes incredibly rich because of its monopoly on spatial resources. Does this mean that they eventually become more powerful than earth's governments, with the potential of turning into some kind of shadow cabal that uses their nigh-infinite monetary resources to manipulate governments, elections and even wars around the globe?
2. With the abundence of space resources, many countries such as almost all of Africa, much of the Middle East and Russia are confronted with collapse. Their economies are almost entirely based on resources with very little in the way of agriculture, manufacturing or services to make up for it. How would they deal with things? Would they adapt or collapse? Would we see Russia fracture into various ethnostates, with the Russian rump state stretching no further East than the Urals? Would China abuse this power gap to claim Siberia (which they're already more or less doing through demographics)? How would all these fractures influence international geopolitics? And would the aforementioned potential shadow cabal play a role in this? If so, how?

They are cool, but tend to look the same. At least the Empire had sexy flagship for all the big shots.

I disagree with point number two, as the main reason for problems like mass starvation in Africa is due to a lack of infrastructure and a lack of major industries as well. Russia's economy is really propped up by their oil industry, and thus suffers from dutch disease when oil prices fall below a certain point, but neither it nor Africa will suffer from the glut of iron or rare earth metals that asteroid mining would produce.

Furthermore, it's far wiser to keep such resources out of Earth's gravitational pull, as putting things back into space is a massive waste of energy and rocket fuel. You'd see orbital manufacturing, and a massive flood of blue collar workers off Earth to man it. Cheap imported labor will become the norm, safety standards will plummet, and you'd basically have a period of space colonialism again - with the same ethnic groups suffering.

Obviously drone workers will be used as well, but like the cotton gin, this won't reduce the use of cheap labor. When a machine can do the work of ten men, you simply buy ten machines and have your ten men do the work of 100.

>as the main reason for problems like mass starvation in Africa is due to a lack of infrastructure and a lack of major industries as well
Yeah, but that's not what I suspect will lead to collapse. Corrupt leaders (and the ills they cause) lead to mass starvation, but these corrupt leaders stripmining their countries is what keeps them in charge. Move their resources out of the picture (or severely devalue them) and what you're left with are a bunch of unstable governments with nobody to protect them. The big daddies of neo-colonialism will turn a blind eye to it (why waste military resources on something that doesn't benefit you?) and what follows is most likely an incredibly turbulent period in which the economy fails to advance past subsistence farming, as the entire planet can do literally everything else better and cheaper. Not even sweatshops will want to settle there if there's constant civil wars and strife.

>Furthermore, it's far wiser to keep such resources out of Earth's gravitational pull, as putting things back into space is a massive waste of energy and rocket fuel.
That's why I presuppose a space elevator. But ignoring that, if the resources are kept out of earth's gravitational pull then what's the use in them? And how would you even mine asteroids if you can't send fuel up to the mining ships? Or are you presupposing that the space station I mentioned would be large enough to be its own self-contained economy (being more of a space city)?

>Corrupt leaders (and the ills they cause) lead to mass starvation

No, you're missing a few steps.

Corrupt leaders do not cause mass starvation. Corrupt leaders do not produce, nor consume, an entire nation's food supply.

Corrupt leaders produce chaotic law enforcement conditions that lead to criminals preying on farmers, encourage their military to take food from farmers, fail to invest in infrastructure that connect the food production to the food distributors and thus leading to much of the food rotting before it reaches any hungry mouth, and encourage foreign non-profits to flood the food market with free goodies.

None of those conditions will be altered by space mining.