I agree that an Insystem Traffic Control organization would be a vital
necessity for a busy system, especially in two critically dangerous
areas -- everything within the approaches to the main world in the
system, and at the system's primary gas giant. The chance of hitting
a ship leaving jump as one approaches a jump point is pretty small,
especially in low-traffic systems. Space is big; I leave it to the
math people to figure out the area of a 100-diameter sphere about a
typical planet, and compare that to the area of a typical starship.
But near a gas giant, you have many ships swooping around at high speed,
who don't know much about the weather down there and are flying nearly
blind as they try to refuel. Near a main world, traffic would be even
worse; communications sats, weather sats, power sats, restricted orbits
for military use, shuttles, stations, other ships landing and lifting,
suborbital or low orbital surface-to-surface flights, debris from
centuries of space travel, and so on.
Some low tech or remote planets wouldn't need much at all, though. When
one ship visits a week and you don't have aircraft yet, the sky should
be pretty clear.
You'd still want approach/departure routes to the jump points in
controlled systems, so that the risk of collision would be reduced.
But once the ship crosses a certain point, it should be more or less
free to file whatever flight plan works best. Besides, it lets the
government know where it should put its patrol cruisers so that it
can check out incoming ships for customs violations....
By the way, I do use psionics, but very sparingly. It's more impressive
that way, and gives the game more of a high-tech feel when its not
overdone. Having it can be useful for little surprises like Zhodani
commandoes teleporting onto the bridge.
- - --Steve