Traveller General: Minor races? Why not Zoidberg?

CT Books 1-3 small ship 'verse is pretty non-3I. Add in Citizens of the (heh) Imperium and you've got a nice set of rules where 5000dT is a megafreighter. Go with CT '77 Book 2 and you have looser drive/power plant requirements as well, which helps vary things up a bit. Ship's Boats with a 5-rated computer make for nice flashy expensive fighters, for fleets with more money than sense.

I tend to use small empires with relatively highly-populated core worlds and small colonies everywhere. Militarily this makes invasions... kind of hard, as in "draft your entire star nation's merchant fleet to carry troops" if you're invading a core world. That's why I like smaller colonies. Of course, once they get to a certain size they can start building up enough local forces to deter raiding and aggression.

Is traveler complicated?

Some editions are pretty simple, although may have slightly more complex elements. Other editions are over-complicated messes. Then there's Traveller5...

Classic & Mongoose (core only) are pretty simple and straightforward. GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars (for GURPS 4e) is simple if you already do GURPS, but an acquired taste.

Some of the optional subsystems like ship design tend to be more complicated than the main rules.

Hey, Traveller General. Have you ever used Book 2's vector-based space combat? How did it go?

Is it true you can solo play Traveller?
If yes, how?

Should be easy enough in Classic Traveller, although you'll probably be more running the stereotypical space trading business - just use the tables as written and things should run mostly fine without much necessary input.

Just don't expect much in the way of story or, well, anything beyond combat or space trading.

It's like running OD&D solo with the random dungeon generator/Outdoor Survival map, or playing chess against yourself - you can totally do it, and it can be fun if you've got nothing else going, but it's generally not as interesting as playing with a referee.

Looks like there's some in the archive but I haven't read any of them.

Fate of the Kinunir is pretty good. I'm looking for the TNE novels, but haven't had any luck.
I've got some poor copies of the early Dumarest books, and Poul Anderson's Flandry of Terra books, which were both influential, I'll try to put those up later today.

There's also a couple of solo modules around. Scout's Honor for Classic. (Uses Snapshot for combat and High Guard for space combat rather than the core LBB rules for that)
Into the Star for Mongoose, set in the third party Clement Sector universe.
I think there's one more, but can't recall.
Tack on a GM emulator to solve that issue.

It was decent. Burned thru a lot of scratch paper.

Kinda annoyed they didn't go full 3d, although I understand why.

It was clearly meant to be played as a tabletop wargame, or something along those lines, so full 3d vectors would have been a bit impractical unless you had some crazy suspended string setup going on.

Now, if you were to remake it into a videogame...

The vector combat was inspired by a Doc Smith-themed wargame called Triplanetary. Triplanetary also gave us the Mercenary ship's shape. See the right hand side.

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New stuff up in the Archives, I added Triplanetary and OD&D to the new Related folder, as they were inspirations for CT.

Under Books I also added some influential SF -- some of Poul Anderson's Flandry of Terra books and E.C. Tubb's Dumarest books, as well as a copy Eric Frank Russell's classic SF espionage book, Wasp, which is fairly Traveller-esque.
Better or more complete sets of the first two are welcome if any of you folks have them.

>Jean Michel Jarre
Thanks, user. I'm reading Agent of the Imperium right now and it's great so far.

I hope Marc Miller continues to write, because I'd like to read more by him now.

I've done a couple space combats with it, we ended up using vector based combat for our Mongoose campaign. We used the rules form High Guard that are pretty much identical. Lots of fun, never got too complicated.

We had 1 thrust = 1 cm of vector, and players just keep track of their current vector number (essentially their speed in cm) The miniature or marker shows which way their vessel is facing, and at the start of their turn we just work out how many cm they will move, any changes from thrust, and they write down their new vector if there are any changes.

We outgrew the range band system once the PCs had 3 vessels and we wanted something a bit more tangible. I can imagine boarding would be a bitch with vectors - which is perfect because it would be a bitch in real life unless the enemy vessel had no control over their speed or direction change (read: their maneuver drives were inoperable)

Hello, fellow Travellers! I've been flipping through High Guard v2, and bumped into ships that have multiple jump drives installed. What's the point? Is it just redundancy in case on the drives is damaged or destroyed?

Which edition? Probably redundancy - a backup J1 can be good if you're going somewhere you might need to get out of under your own power.

I assumeyou mean Mongoose High Guard 2e. Only the Annic Nova has more than one jump drive, and it is considered a strange design anyway.

You may be confusing ships that have had their jump drives reduced in size multiple times for having multiple jump drives. Something like "Jump-4, Reduced Tonnage x2" is not 2 jump drives. It is one drive that has had its size reduced by 20% (10% per Reduced Tonnage).

Monggose 2e, you are correct. I was reading HG some more, and noticed that fuel consumption is not dependant on the distance of the jump, rather on the size of the drive.

"10% of the total tonnage of the ship, multiplied by the maximum jump score of the drive"

So, if you have free tonnage and money, having 2 drives of different sizes will help you save fuel on jumps.
Or am I misreading something?

That is only to ensure that you have enough fuel to get the maximum performance out of your jump drive. When jumping, you only use fuel depending on the actual distance jumped. Look at some of the example ships (like the Far Trader on 166). Two numbers for how much fuel is consumed - one number for Jump 1, and another for Jump 2.

Sorry, the far trader is on page 166 or the core rulebook. High Guard doesn't seem to list fuel consumption in its example ships.

It seems Mongoose Traveller 2e never actually explicitly states you only use fuel for the actual distance jumped. The example ships in the core rulebook show this, however, as does a line in the core rulebook about jump travel (page 148):

"A jump carries the vessel a number of parsecs equal to the jump number. Jumps of less than one parsec (less than three light years, or one hex) are possible, and count as jump-1 for the purposes of Astrogation checks and fuel expenditure. Regardless of how far the ship jumps, it always stays in jump space for roughly one week (148 + 6D hours)."

This is something that's varied between editions, IIRC. Sometimes, you have a J3 and 30% of your volume as fuel but you only want to jump one parsec? Still drains the tank. Other editions let you do it for 10%, and so on. I think some editions had a little component that let you do this, but without it you had the full fuel consumption.

I've always just said fuck it, 10% per parsec.

I think '77 CT is the only one that does the "always uses all the fuel, no matter the jump" thing? Maybe? CT moved over to letting you underclock the drive in the '81 edition, at least.

Which is, well, I understand why the original might have been that way - it forces you to dock in the spaceport and interact with the locals rather than just jumping through, or skim from a gas giant and risk malfunctions ('77 didn't have skimming fuel from water yet).
I don't know if that fits very well with the way the TI was later portrayed, though, so I also get why they changed it.

A suggestion for the books folder, since IIRC it was cited as an influence: Jack Vance's Demon Princes series.

>Jack Vance's Demon Princes series.
Absolutely, and some of his later stuff. Ports of Call? He has a lot of picaresque stuff that's gold for Traveller.

The Moon Moth is one of his short stories, and works exceptionally well as Traveller inspiration of the weird cultural shit + murder mystery type.

I always liked The Miracle-Workers. It has psionics, an air/raft, and a weird isolated setting.

I've made a 300 dT Bounty Hunter on lease from a megacorp for my group to crew. And after calculation everything, I was a bit shocked by the final prices.
Did I go overboard?

Well, I look at it this way. An engineer in Traveller makes 4000 Cr. a month. That's 48000 a year. A real-life avionics engineer makes a little over 80k USD a year, averaged out. So that's about a factor of two, if you're sloppy. So, really, your ship represents about 90 million dollars worth, for us Earthlings. Which is... surprisingly economical, considering what a spaceship does. NASA would cream themselves for those rates for what you get. So no- it's not really surprising at all.

It -is- still hella expensive for an individual, though, yeah.

Is this built using MGT2 rules?

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Well, the big cost there is, of course, the stealth coating. You can save a bit here and there, however. The advanced fire control program is a bit overkill with just 3 hardpoints, but Mongoose was silly and didn't include the basic programs in High Guard 2e, so you have to rummage around Core 2e for them. You can save quite a lot of BW that way and thus buy a cheaper computer too.

Also, note that you don't necessarily have to carve out docking space for your vehicles, in particular.

If you're alright with being a bit more limited in where you can go do bounty hunting, skipping the fuel scoop and streamlining would save you 16MCr. You'd have to actually stick to places with starports and actually pay for gas, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that that'd still cost less than 16MCr.

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--Eye placement give both binocular vision for hunting, and a decent side view.
--Tail useful as a front weapon, scorpion-style, and as a rear/side defense
--Nostrils above eyes; suggests creature is at least semi-aquatic.
--I have no idea about those foreleg spurs. I cant imagine them doing anything other than getting caught on brush, or stuck in an opponent and painfully ripped off.

Probably overthinking a one-off the artist just thought looked cool, but oh well.

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One edition required installing a jump governor if you wanted to expend only the fuel needed for the distance jumped. Without it, you'd always drain the tanks.

I believe this was in one of the CT add-ons. Not sure though.

>NCC-84

So how would you run a Star Trek setting in Traveller, assuming you could even do warp drive without breaking the setting?

Eliminate the Scouts, and add a "Science" branch to the Navy?

Conversely, make Scouts a slightly more pseudo-formal military/humanitarian organization. That being said, hyperdrives in Mongoose High Guard 2e would be fairly suitable, though you'd have to tweak warp rates to match canon. That being said, the acceleration provided by gravitic drives is way, way too low compared to ST Impulse drives. That could be problematic to fix unless you just multiply everything by 1,000x or more.

I would look into an old system called Starships and Spacemen for doing Star Trek. Of all the Trek RPGs I've seen, I think I like it the best. (Well, Lasers and Feelings might edge it out, but S&S is serious)

>So how would you run a Star Trek setting in Traveller, assuming you could even do warp drive without breaking the setting?
Ditch the Traveller setting, to begin with. Higher "J-drives" mean more better warp, but really you've moving from place to place based on plot, so it might be partially faster and partially better at sustained travel, or something.

Throw the party in a decent-sized cruiser. Kinunir's good for this - J4, M4, 80-odd crew & redshirts. Tell them to boldly go and start rolling up random systems bordering the existing federation worlds. You need a decent chunk of crew and nameless NPCs to get the Trek feel, although you can do it in something smaller.

Really, I'd just take Trek Impulse and Warp speeds and put them on a scale of 1 to 6.

Why hasn't anyone written up something about tech levels 20+?
I feel like it would be pretty cool to play a super high tech game

Is there a blank map for an entire sector?

Not that I'm aware of. It's kind of a lot to do all at once, most people who did custom settings should probably stick to one or two subsectors to start with.
That said if anybody knows of a premade sector-wide grid for mapping, I'll add it to the archive. OTOH, you could probably just use any suitably big hex grid sheet

>tech levels 20+?
Because the instant you write about something like that it becomes immediately out-of-date and old-fashioned. Even 1e Mongoose Traveller was hopelessly out of date with trying to match hard drive disk space with tech levels in its robotics book. This box with electronic bits that I'm using to write this message is apparently TL12 according to that book. Where's my Gauss rifles and 3-parsec Jump Drives, then?

Biggest template I've ever seen had 4 subsectors = 1/4 sector. And the hexes were smaller to fit it on one page.

You can find a few at gttp://zho.berka.com/maps/

, I mean.

The Huge Sector Map (Printable) is probably what you want. About half way down the page or so.

>put them on a scale of 1 to 6
Let's see. Warp drive's pretty easy to work out in Mongoose 2e. Use the High Technology chapter in 2e High Guard and use hyperdrives as ST Warp Drives since they are closer to that than standard Traveller J-drives. However, the hyperdrives in that chapter are too fast (they were clearly written with Star Wars in mind).

(Also, sidenote, warp factor has almost no bearing on average 'speed'; warp factor 3 has been depicted to have been anywhere from 27c to up to 487c in canon and a TOS episode has a ship going warp factor 6 also going slower than a TMP ship going at warp factor 0.5, so this is probably a doomed experiment)

It takes, roughly, a ship at warp factor 3 to travel a parsec in about 3 days (ENT 3x19), which is 24x longer than a ship with a hyperdrive potential of 3. If we use that as a baseline, then it's easy to rule that the hyperdrive potential is the number of parsecs covered in a day (rather than an hour, as RAW). You'd need some finagling when you get to the Warp 9 to 9.975 range, but happily, the table in High Guard doesn't go that high.

Impulse is another story, however. Conversely with how Star Wars is portrayed (stupidly fast FTL, very slow STL), Star Trek has ridiculously fast STL (indeed, canonically Impulse engines were fast enough for interstellar travel, warp drive or no). A fast ship (like the Voyager) has a full impulse rate that is limited (due to time-dilation effects) to 1/4c (74k km/s), which is caulking speed. And they have good acceleration: the Ambassador can get up to 10km/s^2 and the Bajoran impulse fighters up to 15,600m/s^2, which is up in Star Wars/Culture territory. Either way, that is, at the very least, 10^4 to 10^5 greater magnitude than the gravitic drives we get in Traveller. So I suppose you can just multiply everything, but that's a pretty sizable difference over our paltry 6g thrust engines.

err, and by 10^4 I meant 10^3. Because maths.

goddamn maths. I should have slept instead of writing that bollocks. Please ignore all the math in this post. Warp Factor 3 is 24x slower than hyperdrive potential of 1, but 72x slower than hyperdrive potential 3. But warp factor's wonky and it's all over the place, especially with TOS and the animated series. Changing it to parsec/day would be close (ish, depending on what references we use) and make it nice and easy, if a bit wrong.

>discover the old Traveller Mailing List landgrab

>planet writeups by TML users
>each one full of great stuff

>most of it 404s

it's an unpleasant feel

>Jack Vance
The "Planet of Adventure" books are also influential, and Space Gamer actually had an article on converting it to CT.

You can replicate the Trek mission in standard Traveller using all of its own material. You are out at the edge of the map instead of near the middle, but the whole "where no Man has gone before" thing is certainly possible.

That's true. Foreven sector is a good option, or you can go farther out to Spinward, rimward of the Zhodani there's a lot of little-known space. Rimward of the Solomani Rim is a pretty big expanse, too.

I've seen it done in a small ship with a Diplomat/Noble as "Mission Leader", and a half-dozen specialists from every service.

I'm not sure how it would scale up to a 400+ crew research cruiser, though. Scout vessel, with a Navy/Marine detachment, or a Navy vessel with Scout and Diplomat advisors?

There's also this, in Agent of the Imperium:

>This Talon was
>eight years out on a twenty-year mission coreward of the Imperial
>borders, generally to chart new systems, contact new cultures, and
>increase the empire’s knowledge of uncharted space. We were 800
>parsecs, a little over twenty sector-lengths, beyond the border. Few, if
>any, ships ventured this far for any reason.

>As we left the bridge, the captain spoke
>proudly of this ship: a 40,000 ton cruiser of the newest design.

>“We left the Empire in 426. We’ve been away for eight years;
>we don’t expect to be back for another twelve. We’re dedicating es-
>sentially all of our service careers to this one mission: to scout out
>threats to the empire in this direction.
>“We’re a community: a mix of compatible sophonts and genders;
>a proportion of dedicated pairs; even provision for youth education.
>We have a small population of children: the oldest just turned seven.”

>Why not Zoidberg?
Because you won't have the same writers he did. The shtick gets old very quickly.

Uh. Okay?

Never tie a character to one gimmick if you intend to play that character for very long. Have at least two gimmicks. Preferably more than that.

Zoidberg boiled down by a typical RPG player is going to be either one of his gimmicks repeated until the others shoot him, or a walking quote spouter. Until the others shoot him.

You're a very weird dude, to take a throwaway one-liner joke as if it were a serious suggestion that people actually insert a wacky squid-man character into their gritty sci-fi noir criminals game.
Turn off the computer, you don't really need to solve problems that nobody is having.

Because at that point it's probably a good idea to write a new game entirely that's built for ultratech.

No one? You lucky bastard.