| Inqui |
It came up again with the gate ritual in Galactic Magic, but is something that I observed for a long time.
Starfinder paints a fairly generic space opera setting with a slight fantasy twist.
Yet many of the items presented in various books would alter the setting in a very big ways so it would not look like how the lore and short stories present it.
As for why this disconnect exists is outside of the scope of the thread as I envision it.
Rather here are the list of things I found, with no claim that it is comprehensive.
Clear Spindle Aeon Stone
While of only small use for adventurers, hence its cheap price, it would be invaluable for "normal people" who live in the setting. Unless someone survives entirely on field rations one can expect that they spend at least 1 credit a day, the lowest amount of wealth in Starfinder, on food. In a year this is more than the cost of the stone. And even when you argue that despite it never mentioned in any book, people could cook cheaper and maybe live 3 days for a single credit, the stone would still pay itself back in 2 years.
With the stone representing such a big cost saving potential everyone who can would have one (and considering the prices of other mundane items, that circle of people would be very large). This in turn would affect the gastronomy industry as eating now becomes a luxury for a large number of people, only done for special occasions. So no more cheap fast food restaurants.
Tiara of Translocation
The tiara allows anyone to teleport to other planets in the same system or even galaxy wide. And while they are expensive for individuals, companies on the other hand would be able to afford them in bulk. And more importantly, the alternative for the tiara are starships. And while we do not have prices for them, building a starship, even a small one, wouldn't be cheap either and in my opinion not cheaper than the tiara. They also have maintenance cost and perform worse than the tiara, needing 1d6 says for intra system travel and possibly months to travel between systems.
In that time someone with the Tiara could perform many jumps, matching or even exceeding the passenger capacity of the starship. And with Null-Space Chambers/Kennels the tiara user can expand the number of passengers he can carry by multitudes.
Tiaras are all around simply better than starships for travelling and also transportation for small cargo which can be fit into a NS-Chamber. That means most travelling in Starfinder would be done by teleportation instead of starships.
There is only one problem with that, and that is the next item
Gate ritual
Even more efficient than the tiara are gates. A high level ritual which connects two gates with each other, no matter the distance. The gates are expensive, 2 million in total, but again, for companies this is manageable. And gates offer huge advantages over regular travel, both for the military and commercial purposes. So instead of using starships or teleporting with tiaras most people would simply purchase a ticket and step through a gate to reach a connected planet. And there is no reason why not all Veskarium planets and all planets in the Pact System would not be connected by gates by now, considering they have no downside.
You need high level characters to create them, but with billions of inhabitants they are not exactly rare. After all we have plenty of high level starships in the rulebooks which need high level characters too, and then there are species who are naturally high level like dragons who can build their dragoncorp around gates they create by themselves.
Gates also alter how the military works. You could have gate ships, meaning a gate connection between your mustering grounds and a spaceship, then land that spaceship on an enemy planet and you just have cut down your supply lines to 0 for an invasion force.
In fact that is the only real way to invade developed planets as the fleet to transport and supply a force which has even a fraction of a chance against the millions of soldiers a developed planet can muster (+ its industrial capacity in form of combat robots) has to be gigantic. Without gateships the Veskariums attempt at invading Triaxus was extremely foolish and doomed from the start.
Serums of Healing/Hypopens
Those two items make most of the hospitals superfluous. Any physical injury can be healed by applying enough serums of healing which are very cheap. Hypopens are more expensive and an argument can be made that it is in the long run cheaper to create regular medication, but when you are in a clutch you do not need hospitals to diagnose and cure diseases, you just need enough hypopens. And hospitals are expensive. The equipment, the personnel which need to receive a lot of training, etc.
The only real time you need them if you have a disease with such a high DC that it can't be cured by hypopen. And even then, bringing in a mystic with spellcasting might replace a entire hospital.