Sci Fi Vs Sci Fy

Fy isn't a thing, but I needed something...

This is science fiction vs science fantasy.

Niven and Pournelle provided the real distinction.

Science fiction is simply a fiction story with a novel setting which is internally consistent.

Science fantasy is a futuristic setting without such internal consistency.

Niven expounded on it a bit too, I'm going to paraphrase from memory about it.  The advanced technology has implications to it.  Internally consistent worlds simply allow the unwanted implications to happen and work with them.

"Safe at Any Speed" was written to express his disgust at how bad his miraculous technology had become in his "Known Space" setting.  The full implications of the autodoc were explored in the last Beowulf Schaffer story too.

Contrast with Star Trek.  How many miracles have been shown stemming from that damn transporter?  Miracles that served the plot for one episode then disappear never to be mentioned again and never affecting anything or anyone else?

Internally consistent universes have rules.  Rules that cannot be broken to serve the plot or the needs of the writers.

You can get away with a lot by simply not explaining things, but once you do you have to remember your explanation and stick to it.

This is how Traveller got its super crunchy reputation.  The universe has rules and they are adhered to, if for no other reason than players and GM's hold each other tightly to such things to prevent themselves from being screwed by the other.  Like an adversarial court system.

Things like looking at how light behaves and seeing how that limits the ranges of staple sci-fi items like lasers; then giving the weapon ranges in those limited terms.  No matter how disappointingly short they seem.

Things like there being no hiding against the back-drop of space and despite this sensors not being much more effective than "there's something there in the right temperature range to be manned" until you're disappointingly close.

Things like deciding the energy density of your battery equivalent then seeing how big that makes the power-pack then concluding that a pistol sized laser is silly.  Think Desert Eagle with a full fanny pack and a garden hose connecting them.  That was LBB Traveller.  GURPS Traveller's power cells are more dense, so the laser pistol is a thing there.  I think that Mongoose Traveller has a laser pistol as well (when the laptop croaked it took my pdf with it).

But making a pistol sized laser practical made all of the rifle sized weapons either lighter and smaller or gave them a lot more shots compared to the original material.  It's a decent example of expectation trade-off.  The stats of the man-portable lasers from LBB Traveller were designed with game balance in mind not physics (although they did back-track the physics).  GURPS had its own tech assumptions before they got the Traveller property and they hammered GDWs creation to fit.  Each is consistent with itself, so still crunchy.

Oddly, Star Wars has played a fairly decent game of being consistent with itself (mostly because Lucas had a vision of how things should look and being consistent with that vision trends towards internal consistency).  The writing hasn't always been great, but...