The setting should be similar to all of the above, but more specific and unique, specifically:
Aestetic design and architecture are highly detailed, elegant but with right angles, stout and powerful. Think in the direction of ancient Rome or grece.
Culture is mostly victorian, but with some considerably progressive traits; most notably having an attitude towards information similar to the most radical proponents for things like open source, torrenting, wikileaks, etc. IRL with no concept of intellectual property, and having a political system of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy Warfare is at the tech level of late WWI, with a few exceptions.
technology is based mostly of hydraulics and optics. So high tech looks like lots of shiny mirrors and crystals bending light and tends to leak thick transparent fluid when damaged.
information tech is at the level of 1970ies or so.
other tech is at the functional level of 1990ies unless specified otherwise, but this is due to magic. Theoretical understanding and tech that does not have access to magic is at early industrial levels.
Magic exits, but can not be used unaided by humans. It shows up in the form of magical creatures, as an element of technology, and in certain gadgets can be "built" from only magic "matter" and thus thrown unaided. The last ones have a short lifespan and need huge bulky machines to make, and are extremely expensive. Magic also requires rare and dangerous minerals to produce and in general resemble electricity a lot economically and infrastructure wise.
Because FTL travel, antigravity, and hyperaxelerating algae tanks in the absence of light are easy given large amounts of magic, large flying ships are common, and interstellar space travel is equivalent in difficulty to making a nuclear submarine (wich is possible with 1990s tech, thus they can do it).
Edit: someone mentioned religion.
The most widespread religion actually worships evolution. A bit like New Age, but darker, they tend to constantly revise their beliefs incorporating the latest scientific findings, except it's not actually the findings but horribly twisted misunderstandings of them. They are called the Children of Ution, and their deity ution is described as an incomprehensible schisophernic not-mind splized into the very fabric of logic, with immense creative power that shaped all life and society from raw dead nothingness, schizophrenic creating different parts of the world to oppose each other with no plans or overall goals, indifferent and cruel beyond human comprehension caring for nothing but that you maximize your inclusive genetic fitness, with in some places is actually a strikingly accurate description of evolution. But then they do stuff that makes no sense like trying to pray to it and trying to cull the "inferior" despite that actually decreasing their own personal fitness
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Topic: Pride, Power, and Planes: input driven story (attempt two) (Read 1958 times)