They're shorter and definitely lighter fare, but the other series I always pick up as soon as they are released are the Starship's Mage books by Glynn Stewart (https://www.amazon.com/Starships-Mage-Glynn-Stewart-ebook/dp/B00QW6ZG14)
Stewart has a bunch of fairly boilerplate sci-fi series in terms of character and plot with excellent fleet combat scenes and a lot of creativity when it comes to coming up with different sets of technologies/features of the setting that enable, say, FTL travel, or prioritize fighter combat vs capital ship combat, and extrapolating out interesting uses for that technology that fit in-universe.
Starship's Mage is his series where the MacGuffin isn't some sort of special technology, but instead that 200 years from now a very illegal eugenics operation is undertaken to discover and activate latent genes that let its bearers use magic. FTL travel then becomes feeding the energy to perform a teleportation spell into a specialized rune matrix that causes an entire ship to jump 1 light-year instead of one person to jump 1 mile.
The series follows a young mage who joins a merchant ship as a jump mage but quickly realizes that his abilities in magic are far beyond that of normal mages and is eventually recruited by the government to become, in effect, a one-man peacekeeping force. In the background, a set of anti-mage systems are slowly moving towards open rebellion against the rest of the empire through the technological development of FTL travel and communications.
One nice thing is that the guy writes as fast as Brandon does. A new book every year in that series, and if you branch out to his other series, he puts out like 3-4 books a year on a rotating schedule.
Oh great! Lol no one I know has that subscription so I can never recommend books to them.
Well if thats the case I hope you dont mind if I slide another recommendation your way. Starship Mage by Glynn Stewart
Hmm, the premise is a little harder to explain without spoiling anything. But the gist is that in the future a Eugenics program results in magic being bred back into humanity. With magic the stars themselves became within humanities reach. Hundreds of years later mages are an integral part of humanity since they are the only means by which ships can travel between the stars. The main character is a mage. I dont want to say anything more for fear of spoiling anything. The first book might have a more spoiler free synopsis.
Try starship mage
The first book is an "omnibus" of all the chapters the author originally published online. so there's a lot of repetition (reexplaining things at the beginning of chapters), so don't let that bias you against the series.
It's the best sci-fi of its kind ("space opera") I've ever read. It's amazing. I wish they made an epic movie series of it - it could rival the lord of the rings / harry potter movies if done right.
I can't recommend it enough. It's so good.
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You can find more info on the books at glynnstewart.com, or check out Starship's Mage here: https://www.amazon.com/Starships-Mage-Glynn-Stewart-ebook/dp/B00QW6ZG14
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http://www.amazon.com/Starships-Mage-Omnibus-Book-ebook/dp/B00QW6ZG14
This FTL system needs to be in the game,
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