What if Franciscan Friar William of Ockham, known for bringing us Occam's Razor, had applied his tools to minimizing the distance between science fiction space opera and science as we know it?
Harry Turtledove had a leg up on a possible answer in his story 'The Road not Taken", where most of the races in the galaxy discover gravitics and, as it doesn't lead to anything except travel technology, stunted technological growth in other areas. Most of the races that is except human, but I won't spoil the story further.
At least one fringe of science has drawn a connection between gravitics and FTL travel, the followers of Burhard Heim's theories, in the Heim-Dröscher hyperdrive. Of course as weird as quantum physics has turned out to be, there may be other possible connections - or then again it might be all a load of excrement. However, for purposes of space opera, the gravitics-hyperdrive connection is made to Occam's order, one theory to bridge the gap, one piece - albeit large - of handwavium. This is rather handy since it allows us to engage in that category of science fiction known as 'hard science fiction with one exception'.
Does this mean we can reclassify Traveller as hard rather than soft? Eh, no not really. Unfortunately there are too many other pieces of handwavium thrown in. However, we might be able to use something very much like Traveller (minus a few bits and plus some others) and allow the handwavium of gravitics Heim style to give us the fundamental piece I call the 'wilderness scenario'*.
*The wilderness scenario is that fundamental part of soap opera science fiction where our protagonist jumps in his spaceship, takes off from one planet, out into space, into hyperspace, back out into space around another star, and lands on another planet. Then, without supporting infrastructure more complex than can be easily carried aboard to collect and refine fuel, turns right around and goes back to the starting planet.
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