Thinking on "Your Sector, Your Problem" (SHIELD/Stargate Command but responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds) in particular in the light of Uncanny Spheres MEGACORP: The Evil Mothership Campaign - why not just use that?

Uncanny Spheres portrays the dark mirror version of Mothership, scheming executives within the iconic megacorporations of that setting - and there is a ton of material there that I think I could wrangle but the 'close, but not quite' sense I get is really helpful to clarify what I am trying to get at with Your Sector, Your Problem.

The high-level pitch in 'DIO - Cosmic Defense Brigade' was "you are responsible for holding down a sector your corporation has newly acquired protectorship of and have a scarce amount of Sector Defense Assets of varying levels of effectiveness and you have to deal with all the problems that come across your desk with those."
The key difference with MEGACORP as I think about it is that even though you are representing a very large entity, an interstellar megacorp, the problems you are dealing with are greater still, so your margin for the kind of back-stabbing and internal politics that MEGACORP foregrounds is less. Not zero, but less. YSYP is like domain management on a dangerous frontier, with potentially hostile residents and unknown buried problems within your realm.

My vision for the setting is a Banksian one or "portal fantasy in spaaaace" - lots of aliens out there, not necessarily all hostile but certainly humans are only small fish in what has turned out to be a very, very big, very inhabited pond.

Pondering on how to run "Your Sector, Your Problem" - "SHIELD or Stargate Command but you are responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds" - it lurks in my mind like a splinter.

Questions I have been having are 'what exactly is the fun here', 'why is this not a board game',and then 'what is the minimum viable game to get going'. I have written about this before in 'DIO - Cosmic Defense Brigade' and d20 Sector Defense Assets - the high concept is that you are responsible for holding down a sector your corporation has newly acquired protectorship of and have a scarce amount of assets of varying levels of effectiveness and you have to deal with all the problems that come across your desk with those.

Looking at the first of the questions - 'what exactly is the fun here?' - the core gameplay loop I have in mind is:
- "spot the problems" - gather info, figure out what is going on across your sector
- deploy your resources - typically not enough for easy answers
- resolve incidents
- recover/maintain your resources

Following up on this Cosmic Defense Brigade I had ideas of a system for domain defense on a stellar scale.

As mentioned, no-one told you all the problems, you got volun-told to take charge here. You arrived to find a bunch of dossiers on your desk - your options in the case of things going wrong.

I have an idea - back in a previous life I would have called it the widget to hang a Con game on, now I'll call it a bolt on rules module.The idea cycles back to my previous DIO - your sector, your problem campaign. The player may or may not have combat capabilities but they certainly have command and control.

Inspired by the opening cinematic of the Space Marine game

Calling back again to the Do It Ourselves prod by the Grumpy Wizard I wanted to sketch out the sci-fi campaign I would love to either play in or run.

High concept for this campaign springs from Iain M. Banks Algebraist - in that there is a thread of interstellar civilization that sees military defense as a thing like the fire brigade. Humans have stumbled to the stars into the midst of this and through the arcana of ancient opaque interstellar governance processes bid for a bunch of star systems. The humans understood they were taking over the systems. The galactics understood they were just taking over responsibility for those systems. The humans won the bids because noone else wanted the hassle. You are some of those humans.

The pitch is "SHIELD or Stargate Command but you are responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds". Throw in some Babylon 5 but the aliens are not bothering to come and talk to you.

Picking up an interesting challenge from Jim at d66 Classless Kobolds which goes:
1. Pick a genre, setting, or time period
2. Write one or two paragraphs on context
3. Produce one page of random tables
4. Give advice on tropes and how to use them

So here is a thought I had kicking about for a while - portal-fantasy in spaaaaace.

The aliens do not care. There was a brief flash of attention when the war front passed near Earth before that all got quelled. Unfortunately humans escaped their world but they have nothing worth trading and their planet is a mess so ... *six shouldered shrug*

The time is the medium-distance future and our setting is an update on the planetary romance; you can go almost anywhere, walk under the distant suns, and so on as long as you spike your nano-treatments. All the different aliens are out there living their own paradigms and you can walk through the portal networks between them. In places it looks like Mos Eisley or Kill Six Billion Demons, other places it looks like Coruscant or Illium.

Something happened long ago and galactic civilization, such as it is, is jumpy as hell about backups and redundancy. They have portals you can walk through, portals with trains, they fly light-sails, they use habitats, they use generation ships, they use jump drives. They thread the crusts of worlds with bio-engines that can manufacture anything, then leave them mostly dormant.