it was a blast. it was flexible enough that they could derail to their hearts content without me running out of material, the back story to the history was that eventually the first large and successful colonization effort started with "Solarians" who were basically pacifist-adjacent scientists and academics tired of our bullshit and settled places starting with the moon, then going to mars, then to Jupiter's orbit, then finally off to Alpha Centauri (from where they launched the first batch of forty-some portships that they'd pop off to to check on thinks and then go back to Centauri.)

meanwhile the people left on earth went the way things go, and it turned into a cesspit, eventually some dumbass using antimatter as a bomb, leading to the second waive of human colonization and Earth sterilized. (They eventually take over the portships they could find, and built the Stellarian Empire. AKA the badguys.

the Empire and Solarian Diaspora eventually start drifting apart with still-basically-human abilties, but some are furies and some are scalies and some have somekinda weird symbiotic relationship with algae in their brains that allows them to retain the memories of their parents and everyone the algae has been in.

meanwhile back on earth, it turns out Earth was returned to a more primordial state and is a stuborn little planet doing the whole life-thing again. Certain asshole-solarians decide to flee the empire, and created a world-religion that saw Solarians as divine messengers and Stellarians as demons, etc, shaping Itrayan society; starting from around their bronze age. the whole point was to unleash the Itrayans as some sort of hyper-zealot warriors. (the solarians kept cloning themselves and used synthetically-created algae for memory transfer.)

Eventually we get to a relatively modern age (slightly ahead of today, with neural implants and a few other odds and ends.) when Stellarians show up on a portship, setting off a war that sees the empire fracture into a dozen fiefdoms and several more political alliances. that war was fought with Augments who were genetically engineered and implanted with cybernetic whosewhats. These augments from bothsides were, when the war was finally ended, stuffed into cryo (under false pretenses) and launched off into the deep of space.

My players wake up, refurbish the broken down and basically derlict ship, find a planet and get resources before they die and all that for the first campaign arc. I still laugh that their engineer guy who had an entire manual for the ship in his starting gear, sold the manual for a little extra energy. Then he kept fighting with the ships automated repair system that kept putting bulkheads that were located in really inconvenient places back in. (Yes. I know how to screw with my party, lol. the manual's instructions were basically "tell the AI to update the blueprints." which was also how they were meant to discover the ship had an AI to handle some very annoying tasks like life support.)