@LB - Nice wiki entry as a background for Assassins - credibly "Oolitish".
I wanted to ask a question about this bit:
Colonised in 2576, Quandixe was one of the first planets to be settled following the discovery of what was thought at the time to be a wormhole leading to another Galaxy. Although later research demonstrated that the 8 Galaxies are in fact merely different sectors of the Milky Way, this did not stop adventurous types keen to start a new life on far away worlds.
Has this been established? Specifically: "the 8 Galaxies are in fact merely different sectors of the Milky Way". The reason I ask is that when I was in my teens and playing this first time round - I thought it very silly that each galaxy had only 256 systems/planets in it (even sillier that each system had only one world) as I was quite in to Astronomy at the time. What I decided was this: That Galcop was all controlling - as Earth was never mentioned it was either hidden or the 8 "galaxies" were outside the Earth "sector" - I decided based on corporate trends at the time that the eight galaxies were in fact 8 areas own by a subset of galcop which had started life as a super-corporation on Earth (Imagine if all the car companies become one supercompany (almost like that in the US - GM and Ford are the only two actual companies although yanks still buy Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Mercuries etc), then all the pharmaceutical companies, all the oil companies, all the electronics companies...)
I also decided that the Galactic Hyperdive was no such thing. It was actually a one shot overload of the normal Witchspace drive - the 5000Cr was actually the fee you paid Galcop (unknown to the user) for leaving one area of control and entering another subset of the overarching super corp. An expensive punishment if you like for no longer living under the control of the particular organisation you were born under.
I also summised that the Galactic map was more akin to the London Underground Map - the systems (like the stations) aren't really laid out like that but it's there for your simplified understanding - I also figured therefore there could be gaps in the system map that were hidden from me the common trader - after all Raxxla had to be somewhere...
Finally, I decided that the reason each system only had one planet is that it didn't! Each system only had one planet you could visit - one planet that Galcop had allowed to be visited - your nav computers and viewscreens (built by them after all (everything is somewhere connected to them)) simply blanked out and steered you around anything that was of no interest (to them - not necessarily to you!).
[Funnily enough this actual fits in with the current expansion of Oolite with new moons/planets and the like - Galcop has deemed them either no longer a risk or that they are profitable if they are visited. They're not suddenly appearing - they've always been there!]
So, it makes me smile that my suspension-of-belief-mechanism of my teenage years fits in quite nicely (potentially) with what's going on with Oolite now.