No, I don't want the Federation. Some of the words I said I was looking for in themes could apply in various ways (some not too well) to ST, but there are a large number of other variations that could be much better than ST and much less unlikely.

The Federation were/are meddlesome, they were/are hypocrites (IDIC but their morality was pretty much Terran Western Christian values more or less, they did away with money (like that could ever occur), and they tended towards internal corruption and skullduggery. Their flavour of optimism was and is, most critically, blind and not pragmatic in any significant way.

I also didn't want the Russian Communist Party of the 80s (CT's book 6 with the Party, also works for National Socialists in Space). Not liking a few variations hardly constrains the variations I could like weak 1960s visions seen on TV. If I was to want parts of my Solomani Rim to be anything, it'd be Firefly or The Expanse minus the nanotechnology related aspects, although they were a notch or two darker than I'd have found most palatable.

Exploration is something every polity will do and the Terrans had a lot of real estate out back they only every explored in fits and starts. The focus always seemed to be on hostility to outsiders and to the Imperium. They made the Terrans the 'Bad Guys' and they got to wear the trappings thereof.

Optimism is looking towards actions other than war to solve problems and having a form of government that is less single-perspective than the Solomani Party government. It is looking more at how to grow and develop versus how to conquer and I never got that vibe from alien module 6 or the later updates.

Trading is part of Traveller but it seems to me it's odd that the Imperium is focused on trade more than the Solomani given the conservatism of Vilani in most ways and the adventurous, upstart nature of the Terrans. To me, they'd be more likely to form trading blocs and to do a lot of trading far more than the glacial, rules-bound, and fairly egocentric Vilani.

Negotiating means you don't necessarily result to the fleets to solve border disputes. And given the reality of how fractious the Solomani are portrayed as with old powers and newer ones and cultural groups that don't want to integrate into the great single party... there seems like there would be a lot of push back to Solomani Confederation autocratic behaviour and monolithic rule and that would necessitate more negotiation and more acceptance of more input and freedom from the various major cultural regions in the Solomani Sphere.

Beyond that, after the Vilani took Earth and other old colonies and power centers, I have a doubt the Solomani Party would ever have stayed in power. It's not often that leaders of empires lose their major power centers and their capital and get to keep their heads, let alone jobs.

All that said, I'm not looking for Gene's fairytale world. I'm looking for pragmatic optimism married to large amounts of trade (benefits both parties usually) and a government system that might be more Republic or Representative Democracy or a loose Confederation of medium sized powers that doesn't act like a monolithic centrally driven oligarchy. 

If you like the National Socialist/Communist Party flavour of the Solomani, it's yours to savour. If you would have preferred the way things evolved to CoE, that's okay too. Or perhaps you've picked a flavour you like which differs (aka interpreted as) from what may exist in CT if that's your chosen era. That's all fine. I just would have preferred what I got out of Early Solomani stuff had continued to be the direction GDW went in preference to most of what came later, just as some folk on this list prefer the CT era pre-Imperium or early Imperium when only some sparse info was known about the Imperium so it could be viewed in a variety of versions.

TomB