206
Bodied
(hexbear.net)
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Rules
You're probably right that's where they got it from, though I think it's kept deliberately vague there because they didn't care about the war itself and it was just a way to justify it being a western in space.
Perhaps part of it is that the writers at Bethesda thought they had to provide sufficient backstory because players would be interested. The colony war in Starfield is supposedly a peer-to-peer war of two stellar nations started over the dumbest shit imaginable: there was a law saying no nation could officially control more than 3 star systems. Also the cowboys won.
That's honestly a very funny way to justify why there are only 6 cities in the game when humanity has supposedly explored like 200+ systems (many of which are habitable). Like its not that we are lazy or went way overboard with the procedurally generated planets, it's becuase of space law.
There is exactly 1 other non-procedural inhabited planet that I have found so far, and it's fucking Paradiso, a beach resort that occupies, if I had to guess, less than 20km^2^, and with no security.
Also every fucking planet has some human habitation, so despite a pitiful zone of control you're never actually out beyond the frontier, you're never exploring.