Read about wormholes and the prospects of getting a ship through one.  Most would be microscopic in size and completely intraversible  by any sort of matter and from what we theoretically know of them today, it's considered impossible to use them for travel.

Dimensional travel and the like have been around since the days of E.E. Doc Smith and Eric Frank Russel--their stories date back to the early 1900's and dimensionall/inter-universal travel travel is common enough to appear in all sort of works.  Buckaroo Banzai had dimensional travel...the television series Fringe and Sliders...the original Star Trek and Enterprise, Terminator, Judge Dredd comics and the Twilight Zone and Outer Limits.   You can find dozens of dozens of examples going back quite a ways...even, "Long ago--in another galaxy, far away..."

It's just another case of, "I prefer this, not that--therefore, this is.".

But they are culturally known, and most people will be perfectly willing to suspend disbelief on the matter.

I'll note that the Terminator series never had dimensional travel. They had time travel. Further, "long ago, in a galaxy far far away...." is far from "dimensional travel", or "time travel". It's a reference to the idea that the events therein described are occurring long before anything we currently know of.

Once again, I'll reiterate that the cultural permeation of dimensional/cross-universal travel is far less than the example of wormholes.

Furthermore, I'll also reiterate (again!) that I do not consider time travel or common 4D-travel to be "dimensional travel". "Dimensional travel" of the sort you describe is more akin to crossing universes. I also personally consider the idea that there are multiple universes to be complete bollocks, but meh, no one can prove it either way.

Actually, time travel is dimensional travel--but Terminator did the more strict sense of it when they created new future realities and ended up there--which the television series explored even further (that would be more inter-universal travel actually).

I don't think people have any harder time visualizing a ship phase cloaking or phase traveling in game than they do envisioning a ship phase shielded...or accepting "phase missiles" that pass through shields by...*cough*...phasing.

...unless they are die-hard SW fans and the phasing ship is from Star Trek and would get an edge with the ability. 

On the dimensional/multiverse stuff--lot of debate and grey areas but M-theory is looking really good with 11 dimensions.  It was anathema to most scientists for ten years until they hit a brick wall of contradictions and suddenly the humble 11th dimension--and all the universes that come with it were the only slipper that fit all the theories.  Now even Hawking and the powers-that-be are willing to look at it and it's acceptable again.

I had a lot harder time with mere string theories that had to be taken on faith in the face of glaring contradictions.

A phase drive that lets them...phase.

Lol--it's opinion and preference.

Your opinion about other universes was one strongly held through the eighties until the past couple of years by the majority of scientists--though in the early eighties, the idea of a multiverse was of great curiosity to most scientists.

As they looked at the ramifications and implications, it offended their sensibilities as well and they began to look for the other explanations since "that can't be right".  We ended up with two decades of ever-growing "string theory" which finally began to go from being the "most favored" explanation to one that began to collapse under the weight of it's own suppositions--until the math that allowed the multiverse was brought back in.  The four to five major string interpretations inconsistencies and contradictions are almost completely resolved by adding this math back in. It works better than any previous formulations, explains more and we have no other current theories with any credibility to explain more.

What was relegated to "fringe theory" for ten years became mainstream again.

It's also not at all impossible for these universes to interact and a developing theory would explain the big bang as a collision between two universes that created a new pocket between them that is our own universe.  More theory is looking to interaction between these overlapping universes to explain the missing energy in gravity and several other issues that have no other explanation at present.

This may have an impact on the nature of dark matter/energy (if it even exists) and may also be the only explanation for why pockets of empty space in our own universe--randomly scattered about --have the matter in this universe accelerating away from them in different directions as these pockets mysteriously expand.

So in light of all this, for a game, I don't find a "metaphasic cloak" an issue at all--or starships made of metal as dense as collapsed stars that can instantly accelerate in normal space to percentages of c.

You disdain Star Trek for muddying fact with pseudo-scientific nonsese but we're on the same slope here.

So, do the science or just tell the story.  I think all we can hope for with a game is the story.

Star Trek started out in the sixties when most fictional space stories were absurd pulp fiction pieces and "B" movies based on them. TV executives saw it as more of a cartoonish novelty than "science" fiction.  Most stories were "adventure tales" because that's what sold in the eyes of the executives and most writers were inspired by the earlier space opera type stories too. Star Trek had some real scifi geniuses contribute but the effects of the day and the limited studio budgets are what menaced the show with cancellation before the first season was done.  

So we grew up with a little science fiction, a lot of whiz-bang-golly-effects and unknown actors presenting scifi--which is all the networks were initially willing to invest.  What made Star trek endearing was Roddenberry's message of "a better future and good people" against the backdrop of school drills for nuclear attacks and global threat between a totalitarian ideology.

Star Wars came out in the 80's and it was George Lucas's tale he had worked on and thought over as a young adult.  He based a lot of the action on WWII combat which had made a lot of good money back in the day and he developed a lot of his own techniques to do effects himself.  The eighties were the decade of greed, recession and general social malaise and a good action film with never before seen special effects and that took on black and white good and evil was welcomed by a public that had more appreciation of technology since the moon landings and computers and the like.  But his story was pretty much what Cameron did in Avatar.  He had n idea since he had been a young man and always wanted to make a movie of it.  "Science" wasn't the strong point.

"2001" was one of the first pure science fiction films and then Blade Runner came and set the bar high on special effects.  gradually scifi got a little more sophisticated like with Alien--until the SyFy channel started making their horrible movies to show after wrestling.

So no one in TV  knew the tech or had the effects back in the sixties, in the 80's it was a sleeper hit out of left field and by then we had gotten use to a little cheese on our moons.

People get attached to things and don't want them to change, so old ways stay about.

That's a sloppy summary but its the time I grew up in--and I started at seven reading my stepfather's scifi library and everything the small town in Mississippi had in theirs--which was mostly 20's and 30's British and American scifi.

In this day i appreciate that so much scifi makes it to theaters or tv at all--while lamenting its short life span and the dumbed down films studios keep insisting on making.

My point in all the above was that this is Sins...not SW or ST or whatever and the mods are enjoyed by more when they provide enjoyable fun for everyone--and don't just dogmatically cater to someone's fiction preference.

You can make a mod with anything but it has to work as a game or the stuff in it really won't amount to much.

I think it's hard to catch a 10 light minute arc in the camera frame

With phasers, I believe it's because they are some kind of technobabble particle beam, and a science-fictional neutron beam would be limited to around 10,000 km range (I don't know why, but my source affirms this). I'll also note that ST:TOS has phasers used at multiple thousands of kilometers; only in TNG onwards did combat ranges become "spitting distance" and "eating the gun muzzle".

WRT SW turbolasers, like Kitkun notes, it's canon that a Venator can slam a target 10 light minutes away with turbolaser fire. Why they don't do that? Well, most of the battles we see onscreen in SW are one-off situations; for example, the situation in the opening scene of RoTS is the way it is because while the Republic would have the tactical advantage in occupying high orbit, a stray shot will slam into Coruscant (which has many hundreds of billions of inhabitants) with multi-teraton yield. So they've got to get into a melee to reduce collateral damage.......not that it did as much good as they'd hoped, with all the crashing hulks and wrecks.

I'll also note that SW canonically has significant amounts of EWAR going on in combat, and that will naturally limit the range you can engage a target at.

And now I move onto the slight misconceptions you've got about RL-styled space weaponry-

1. Obviously, a railgun's range is somewhat unlimited, but its practical range will still be limited to the range you can hit the target before the target moves out of the way. Or the range at which you get more hits than misses.

2. A laser that can kill a target across the solar system is more likely to be a beamed power station that decides to fry something naughty. Aside from that, a even across the solar system, you have light-lag (durr, but still), so you're never seeing the target, always seeing where the target was. And even a milligee acceleration will cover nearly 190 meters in the time it takes for a laser beam from across a solar system (~40 AU) to strike it, which ignores the sensor return the firing ship will have to get, and time for target acquisition.

So a ship with milligee-range acceleration will probably cover a good four hundred meters before the laser beam arrives where they were. Depending on the ship's size, that could be useless (500+ meters in [dimension]), or it could be a healthy margin (50 meters long/diameter).

Star Trek also had a lot of Age-of-Sail metaphor in TOS, though this was either lessened or gone by the time of TNG and onward.

I can't help but feel this is pointed at me, despite the fact that at every corner I have advocated for fun to be the basis of mod balance, and not 'canon'. Can I make it any clearer to you that while the numbers say the Federation gets turned into bug-paste by the Empire, that that would not be a fun mod to play.

While I do have a somewhat low opinion of technobabble, it can be well-done. I personally don't like it much, but when adding background sometimes it's either unavoidable or useful. In-story I somewhat dislike it, though if done well, you don't generally notice it. It's only when done poorly that technobabble is usually noticed.

In-universe sez EWAR, AFAIK.

Exactly my point.

Maybe now he'll listen?

*facepalm*

We need a facepalm-ing emoticon.

I would suggest making a back up of your user.settings file before using the dev.exe as it likes to utterly turn that file upside down. I learned that the hard way.