[Puke]

i have not been reading the entire thread, but here is an idea for you guys.

there is no reason that you have to have a sun in every system, except for stelar manip. there is also no reason to only have one, or to have it in the center. perhaps a sun could be a source of mana, and you could make extensive use of solar resource generaton (crystal tech) to harvest mana from the mana-wells. that way you would get more of it depending on how many there are, and you could tie it in to ships/wizards supply pool as well, if they have solar pannel type abilities to regenerate mana from available local sources.