One of the wild design decisions I made with Sixty Years in Space is that it's rules compatible with the board game it is based on. Not only in the sense that it uses the same terms and units (in both senses) as High Frontier, but in that it could get to your turn in the board game and you say "hold up", assemble a group of players to form your crew, sit down and play the roleplaying game from the game state on the board and after a year of in-game time, the outcomes will be compatible with having played your year-long turn in the board game. That is, the odds of prospecting a site will be the same, building a factory has the same requirements, printing space craft components will take as long and so on.
That's all well and good, but I based the Sixty Years in Space on the 3rd edition of the board game, and during the intervening 12 years, a 4th edition got released, High Frontier 4All.
And it significantly changes some core concepts: specifically Space Politics (but also promotions, Bernals, spacecraft components, colonists etc).
Space Politics is a core part of the Sixty Years in Space game: it touches almost every aspect of procedural generation which means it's woven amongst all the rules. I've always had it in my head that I'll end up making a High Frontier 4All version of Sixty Years in Space, but I've never gotten around to it because of the effort required to maintain what amounts to two separate editions.
Fast forward to today: I'm now working on a lite version of Sixty Years in Space called Epic Hazard Operations. When I say lite, it's still going to be completely rules compatible with Sixty Years in Space. What's lite about it is the theme. It's set in the era (the Exoglobalisation era) that makes sense to have combat and space dungeons and professionals exfiltrating technologies from other colonies. It'll still have you building factories and colonies and moving about the solar system: but you'll be doing it with much simpler rules (freighter movement) because you'll be playing as a minor faction stuck on a "dustside" on the edge of space -- and the building is done by dedicated players called exoarchitects who sort of act like game masters except you can have lots of them. And it'll have a much more traditional class and/or life path system that you'll use to create your crew.
Because I can never do just one thing, Epic Hazard Operations will also be an expansion for Sixty Years in Space, subtitled A Facility with Words, which you already possibly own and which will contribute a significant chunk of to Epic Hazard Operations rules. I'll be doing the same PWIW release of the remainder which will form part of a new supplement, All Terras are My Own.
And I think I'm in a position where I've solved most of the compatibility problems between the two games. The 4th edition version of Space Politics are going to correspond to the faction doctrines. I've already solved how I'm going to make promotions compatible; anchoring Bernals was an idea I'd already borrowed from the 4th edition and so it's a more straight forward addition; colonists never really worked in Sixty Years in Space the way they worked in the 3rd edition so they're not going to change at all; and some of the new stuff in the 4th edition (like delegates) are going in relatively seamlessly.
ETA for the first release is around September, which will include update 5 for the remaining rules.
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