Quote:In a lot of instances Fenspace works on the principle of that if you promise you won't examine it too closely, we'll try not to be too blatant about it.
Pretty much this.
There's a huge glut of Cool Stuff in the world that we want to slide into the setting and play with as we see fit. Some of it's prepackaged media stuff, some of it's stuff we've come up with ourselves. Now, if we were doing a *realistic* world - or something as close to realistic as would fit within the bounds of "nigh-magical substance allows for mass space travel/colonization" - then Fenspace would *at best* consist of people clogging up Earth orbit and cislunar space, with a few (very small) outliers on Mars and maybe the Belt feeding the colony rush. It'd be kind of like Gundam, only with flying cars instead of giant robots.
But that's not the story we really want to tell. We want Grand Swashbuckling Adventures(tm) in the greater solar system & beyond, and we can't really *have* that in 2015 unless we stretch plausibility out to the elastic maximum. So we get crystal cities drifting in the Venusian skies, and the topless towers of Helium, and the great dome of the Bottle City, and herds of goats chewing on terraformed grass while Jupiter hangs in the sky above big and orange, and on and on.
You're absolutely right that this requires infrastructure, tools to build the tools and so on. So where do they come from? Don't examine this too closely, but if you absolutely *must* then we'll say... it's robots. Handwaved assembly lines, like the ones on How It's Made only they don't need human operators. That's as good a dodge as any.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
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