The traveller universe: the way it is.

The driving logic behind Traveller is the Jump drive. A ship sublights out to 'shallow space' (at least 100diameters from any celestial body) charges up its jump grid, does some calculations, and falls out of existence.

It remains in Jumpspace (a poorly understood other quantum of reality) for about a week, undisturbed, and pops out somewhere between 1 and 4 parsecs (depending on the quality of the drive) away. A jump always takes about 160 hours.

The implication is a powerful one: Information from another star system is at least one week old. There is no other form of FTL travel in the traveller 'verse. No FTL radio. The capital of the Empire is about a YEAR away from the imperial fringes on 'swift boat' 4 parsec mail carriers.

This means many things: progress has a hard time equalizing itself--to support the technology level we have on earth we need a 6 billion person economy. To support more advanced technology, even larger economies of scale are needed. So there's sort of an upper ceiling on what technologies are out there in the market.

For two, there's lots of nooks and crannies in the universe for the little guy. Because of the information gap, small(er) businesses can thrive because of the agility compared to the interstellar megacorporations.

For three, the only way such a huge volume of worlds (there are hundreds of trillions of souls in the imperium) can be governed is through federalism. In fact, the Imperium is just the interstellar layer of government; anything beneath is the business of its member worlds. The empire simply subsists on tiny revenue tarriffs on interstellar trade, and even with so little, there's a fleet for each subsector of space.