: Dealing with Extreme Distances - Space Travel I know, you can go the Star Wars/Star Trek "hand wave" route and make it seem like everything is a few minutes or hours away, but... How do I

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I would suggest reading stories by hard science fiction authors, especially ones where they discuss how space-travel (or teleportation) limitations determine what is possible in the world. For example:

Larry Niven's Rammer series of short stories explores relativity.
Larry Niven's "Theory and Practice of Teleportation".
Jerry Pournelle's Mote In God's Eye.
Lois McMaster Bujold's Komarr explores how conservation of energy affects wormholes.

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As another example, Asimov's Foundation series does a good job of this.
You say, "I want to be able to write about spacecraft in space as authors in the golden age of sailing would write [about] sea ships on the sea." In that case, you cannot ignore the technology of spacefaring. Those ships in the golden age of sailing were the technological marvels of their era. They required many highly trained people to run them, from the captain down to the deckhands. Even common maneuvers like changing tack were quite complicated. We really don't have a modern transportation equivalent.
I don't know why you don't like the Star Trek "universe" as an example. If you ignore the episodes with pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo, it seems to be exactly what you want. It has massive, complicated starships with 500 people on board: a captain, bridge officers, engineers, and "swabbies" (not to mention red-shirted crewmen and family members). And Star Trek ALSO has small ships, piloted by fairly ordinary people (mostly for "local" travel). And ST also has everything in between. Why is this not what you want?
Again, the Star Wars Extended Universe (SWEU) has many of the attributes you seem to want, with ships ranging from single-person to single-family to "vans" to "buses" to small transport to large transport to ... fighters to ... super star destroyers to death stars.
In all cases of semi-casual interstellar travel, the "science" is explained in a hand-waving fashion for the obvious reason that the real science to enable it doesn't exist yet. (And even worse, what we DO know seems to tell us it's impossible!) So it is functionally equivalent, for a writer, to having magic in fantasy stories. If you want a 21st century reader to take the magic in a story seriously, it needs some "sciency" explanation. Therefore, I suggest you also read some good modern fantasy writers to get ideas for how to explain the "science" in your sci-fi stories without boring your readers. You could post variations of your question on stackexchange's sci-fi and fantasy forums to get suggestions of authors who are good at this.

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I agree totally with Dale Emery, but would perhaps use a long train/boat ride as the metaphor. Not only should the average passenger (a.k.a. the reader's point of view) be uninformed of how the vehicles operate, or the physical principles behind their locomotion, such passengers should not even recognize that their ignorance is unusual. Their attention should be consumed with fighting the tedium and boredom that has challenged travellers across all time. When they sneak out of the passenger's lounge to find the engine room, it shouldn't be to marvel at the ship's hyperspace-flux-capacitor, it should be to find that cute ensign from last night in the dinner-car, to ask her out for a drink.
The ship is your stage. Let your characters play on it.

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If space travel is as common and casual as current methods, then treat it the way you would treat current methods. That is: Take it for granted. Ignore the physics and ignore how it is operated.

When you get in a car to drive, you barely even think about how you operate it, much less the physics of internal combustion engines, or the mechanics of universal joints, or lubrication. And when you're a passenger in a car, you don't think about how it operates at all.

You think about the operation or the physics or the mechanics only when something goes wrong.

So write space travel the way you would write modern travel in a car. If it's just getting from here to there, you might say nothing more than, "Chas drove to the police station."

Similarly, almost everyone in your story will treat space travel the same way. If they don't, that means it's either not common or not casual. Or something has gone wrong with this particular craft or journey.

You will need more details if:

Something goes wrong that matters to the story.
Your viewpoint character is a spacecraft engineer doing spacecrafty engineery things.
Your viewpoint character operates some key aspect of the travel (pilot, for example) and the operation matters to the story.
The story hinges on a special feature of the physics or the operation.
(Maybe some other considerations that I haven't thought of.)

The key is in whether your viewpoint characters have a reason in the story to care about the details. If the physics or operation don't matter to your viewpoint characters, then treat them the way you'd treat a journey in a car.

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