: Re: 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

@Berumen699

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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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