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Diversity
Ultimately, our job here is to create a universe with enough diversity and personality that it will seamlessly host all styles and levels of creativity. The Black Admiral universe has the scope to accommodate everything from hard science fiction to adventure yarns to  tales of creepy horror, intrigue, or romance. We would love to see works not only in the traditional vain but also from less traditional specialties like children's fiction, CGI animation and art, pulp and comic. 

Continuity and a Well-Earned Suspension of Disbelief
We need to develop decent sounding science that is reasonable for the background setting without unduly limiting story ideas.  We need to develop realistically detailed races and a rich political background which will breathe life and depth into stories. A well-developed sense of history and politics promotes the feeling of a real world and involves readers in something bigger than a single, fleeting story.  Consistancy in background brings readers back to familiar territory and means that authors don't have a familiar background which doesn't have to be over-explained to fit the context of a stand-alone story. 

To this end, we offer free consulting with authors on continuity and technical subjects so they can just write and we will help ensure the canon remains consistent. This is not to say that potential authors should be scared off by the possibility of limits and constraints, as the universe is huge and it only makes sense that there would be variation in technology, terminology, and the knowledge and opinions of the character. Some discontinuity is realistic and encouraged.

A Sense of Wonder and a Sense of Isolation
The Black Admiral universe has lots of room to explore the ways in which technology takes us places, yet drives us apart in the same action. It has empowered races to spread throughout the universe, colonizing and exploiting many worlds. Yet, by the very distances involved, every world is isolated and responsible for its own destiny. In many cases, on ends up with hostiles as closer neighbours than friends. 

Black Admiral should also explore the growth of technology and not get caught up in the usual Science Fiction timeline, where the North American government fills shiny ships with the US Cavalry and sends them off to build universal democracy while fighting bumpy-headed aliens. Black Admiral is basically a story of city-states, of people trying to hold together a society and flourish in the face of a huge, cold universe where chaos and attaxia claw at the edges of order. So many works of science fiction see the progress of technology as faster computers and transparent metal. Really, though, if you look at the way technology progresses, it tends to make huge jumps based on the fact we realize we've been wrong all along. Einstein kicked Newton's ass. Now a new breed of scientists are saying that we may be 4-dimensional beings in an 11-dimensional universe. . Scientist continually discover impossible lifeforms living in crazy places like volcanic vents. Really, science fiction has apparetnly lost a lot of the imagination that allowed people like Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov to drive science, rather than respond to it. Do a search on what research is being done at DARPA or on nanotechnology (how cool is UFog???) and compare it to the banality of modern science fiction. All science, no fiction... it is non-threatening and takes no chances. Black Admiral should have a sense that there's more to science than science, that the univers inheriantly carries with it a sense of mystery and enormity and is populated by masses that go about their business not quite knowing how they got where they are...