Traveller General--FGMP Edition

Traveller is a classic science fiction system first released in 1977. In its original release it was a general purpose SF system, but a setting was soon developed called The Third Imperium, based on classic space opera tropes of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with a slight noir tint.
Though it can support a wide range of game types, the classic campaign involves a group of retired veterans tooling around in a spaceship, taking whatever jobs they can find in a desperate bid to stay in business, a la Firefly or Cowboy Bebop.

Previously on Traveller General: //mega.nz/#F!lM0SDILI!ji20XD0i5GTIUzke3iv07Q


Galactic Maps:
travellermap.com/
utzig.com/traveller/iai.shtml

Resources:
1d4chan.org/wiki/Traveller
zho.berka.com/
travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/
wiki.travellerrpg.com/Main_Page
freelancetraveller.com/index.html

Music to Explosive Decompression to:
>Old Timey Space music
youtube.com/watch?v=w34fSnJNP-4&list=RD02FH8lvwXx_Y8
youtube.com/watch?v=w0cbkOm9p1k
youtube.com/watch?v=MDXfQTD_rgQ
youtube.com/watch?v=FH8lvwXx_Y8
>Slough Feg
youtube.com/watch?v=ZM7DJqiYonw&list=PL8DEC72A8939762D4
>Goldsmith - Alien Soundtrack
youtube.com/watch?v=3lAsqdFJbRc&list=PLpbcquz0Wk__J5MKi66-kr2MqEjG54_6s
>Herrmann - The Day the Earth Stood Still
youtube.com/watch?v=3ULhiVqeF5U
>Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene
youtube.com/watch?v=nz1cEO01LLc
>Tangerine Dream - Hyberborea
youtube.com/watch?v=9LOZbdsuWSg
>Brian Bennett - Voyage
youtube.com/watch?v=1ZioqPPugEI

Do you have a favorite weapon, or type of weapon anons?

>Do you have a favorite weapon, or type of weapon anons?

The "humble" shotgun. Light & cheap with cheap ammo. Has a really low DEX penalty of 4 and a relatively low DEX advantage of 9. Good at short & medium ranges. Good against jack armor, not penalized too much against mesh. 4D6 damage.

Mega's addition of different loads made the shotgun even more attractive IMHO.

the obligatory gif related

Shotgun, revolver and a sledgehammer for when people come into your engine room unannounced.

Tie-up between a Snub Revolver (all the looks of a revolver with all the versatility of a shotgun) or a CT Assault Rocket Launcher (its a pseudo-bolter, common)

do gauss guns get variant ammo, or is that strictly a third party ruling?

Great gif! Thanks for posting it.

I was playing Traveller and loving shotties a few years before Bruce made them cool in "The Evil Dead" though.

>CT Assault Rocket Launcher

LAG? Or RAM grenade?

Neither. In JTAS 17 they detail the Assault Rocket Launcher as being an alternate to the ACR at TL10. Its a Gyrojet gun/Bolter-Lite.
Although now i want to homebrew rocket assisted LAG/Autocannon rounds

Ooooo... nice!

There is a vehicle system, sort of, in CT. It's just tucked away in the Double Adventure, Mission to Mithril/Across the Bright Face. It's specifically built for the ATV, but swapping it to another sort of vehicle would require little more than making a couple of d6 tables for damage locations, and you're done.

Any good sources for campaign enemies out there? Im getting tired of statting every single anklebiter my players come across.

>Any good sources for campaign enemies out there? I'm getting tired of statting every single anklebiter my players come across.

All the CT adventures have "mooks" of various types listed in them.

CT has "76 Patrons" and MgT "760 Patrons". A NPC's patron can easily be your PC's enemy.

CT also has "1001 Characters". Like the patrons books above, those can easily be re-skinned as opponents.

I rarely detail NPCs to anywhere near the level of PCs. It simply isn't necessary. I can assign them quick stats for combat when/if combat ever occurs. They have whatever skills/levels they need, but not until they need to use them IN FRONT of the PCs. Ditto careers, money, equipment, psionics, etc. I give the NPC what they need when they actually need it and then make a note on a 3x5 card. Until then, they're little more than a name and appearance.

The CT sources will also work for MT and to some extent MGT. A bit more work would be needed to use them for TNE, T4, or T5, but they would be a start.

T20 has "76 Gunmen", and boy was I happy to see that when it came out. If you think CT/MT/MGT characters take a while, T20 has a rude shock in store for you.

GURPS is GURPS.

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NPCs and enemies rarely need anything other than a description and a motivation. All the rest can by winged when or if it's ever needed.

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bumping

Favorite weapon? triple pulse beam turret. What? That's valid, right?

Anyone know of a MgT1/CE compatible tool/ruleset that generates full realistic star systems, not just main planets? I think it would help make the 'world' feel bigger if there was more to do than visit one planet and refuel at the local gas giant when jumping into a system.

>Favorite weapon? triple pulse beam turret. What? That's valid, right?

If it isn't valid it should be because it's a great choice!

The trouble with all of Traveller's sysgens is that actual exoplanet discoveries have not only made them obsolete but have also made the many theories astronomers use obsolete.

There's no "one good theory" anymore and too many odd worlds in odd orbits around stars that weren't supposed to have planets in the 1st place. And that doesn't even touch on the existence of all the planets no suspected to be "drifting" through interstellar space.

GT had what was considered in the 90s to be the best system. It's horribly obsolete now. Solo for CE has a minimal system that produces "hot Jupiters" and a few other of the fairly recently detected oddities. It doesn't create an entire system, just survey targets.

If you're not interested in accuracy, Traveller has had systems for "expanding" worldgen to include entire systems since Classic's Book 6.

Reality keeps out-weirding the game,

>Reality keeps out-weirding the game,


What's that saying? Fiction has to make sense and reality doesn't?

Yeah, that was one of the things I was figuring out. Current estimates mean that there's _way_ more stars than one per Pc^3 or Pc^2, and those have on average 1.6 planets each (as mentioned, that doesn't account for 'rogue planets')

I'm just looking to see if there's any rules/generators out there that generate interesting, playable sectors/subsectors/systems that also fall within a reasonable degree of 'normalcy' for the galaxy as we know it.

there's near stars

A more densely "populated" star map with more realistic systems would make for a wonderful setting. With all the stellar systems, rouge planets, and whatnot in each parsec acting as fuel sources, jump1 ships can go anywhere albeit at the cost of more time.

If you also limit the number of habitable worlds to a more realistic number while adding the "3 Generation" infrastructure rule of thumb for habitats in uninhabitable systems, you can end up with a handful of inhabited systems surrounded by a huge "outback" of marginal systems, uninhabited systems, rogue planets, and other nasty places where the PCs can get into all sorts of trouble.

True, though having a lower stellar occurrence gives you a bit of topography to work with and helps differentiate your space game *just a little* from a fantasy hex crawl.

>though having a lower stellar occurrence gives you a bit of topography to work with

Very true. Topography guides adventure, provides borders, sets up shipping routes, etc.

While hex crawls can be fun, a crawl which consists of "Week 1, Nothing, Refuel", "Week 2, Nothing, Refuel", Week 3, Nothing, Refuel", etc. ,etc. ,etc. will have the players slitting their own throats.

There was a guy earlier this year at COTI running a pick up game of people new to Traveller who basically did just that. IIRC, they wanted a campaign about salvaging ships. He spent the first 3 or 4 sessions having them travel to where they could begin salvaging, so everyone dropped out due to boredom.

>He spent the first 3 or 4 sessions having them travel to where they could begin
Real-Time Traveller is rarely a good idea.

>Week 1, Nothing, Refuel
If that's the narrative it should take about as long to game as it does to say.

If the PCs stop in a system during a long transit to listen to the radio traffic, you can try to hook them into an actual session.

anybody ever adapt a culture to a planet?

I want my planet of space irishmen

>Do you have a favorite weapon, or type of weapon anons?
Shotgun, Sandcaster.

Depending on your ref, sandcasters may be effective local defence weapons when your ship's on the ground.

It's doable, and within canonical bounds to boot. During the heyday of the old Ramshackle empire, aka the Second Imperium, there was a rash of exoduses (exodi? exodices? ah forget it) to the newly discovered spinward edge of the map. It was way off and sparsely populated, and lots of groups from victorious Terra did the Wagon Train to the Stars bit to go set up their own planet just how they'd like it, often based on cultural or religious motives. A lot of these died out, and most of them were lost or forgotten in the ensuing chaos and poor record keeping, but some of them are still around well after the long night.
A planet of folks who thought Earth's Ireland had watered down its cultural heritage and wanted to go off somewhere and be as Irish as humanly possible could certainly fit right in somewhere.

So what do you guys think about RKVs? Should be pretty easy to do with magic gravitiv drives. Get a cheap drive, some fuel tanks, a computer and an armoured cone and you have yourself a planet killer or at least a really big boom. Even if it just manages 1g, it's enough to get to high relativistic speeds in a few months. Actually, why isn't there any mention of this in the books (that I've read)? I'd reckon every potato navy would be all over that

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For most of your melee needs and tin can (battledress) opening desires: the explosive stiletto will work wonders. It ignores half armor and if you manage to deal damage it deals damage once more, all while ignoring armor.

For ranged combat, the accelerator rocket launcher is pure bliss.

RKV in traveller are not as interesting as you may think.
Rule wise even TL 15 ships are maintenance intensive and ned regular checkups. So having something flying around fpr months and then hoping that it will still hit it's really small target (relatively spoken) is unlikely.

Also i think it runs under the same thing as nukes for the emipre, you use it and they will bitchslap you back into the stone age, quite literally.

I'd also imagen that every planet worth it's salt has at least some spies that look out for just that and report it. Sure Jump drive takes a week, but that's still plenty of time to jump to your homeworld, report, calculate the RKV path, jump in it's path and stop it.

How do I simulate mechs in mgt2?

How would you stop something going half the speed of light? For that matter, how would you even intercept it? Though I admit, rkvs being on the same tier (illegal by imperial law) as nukes sounds reasonable

>If that's the narrative it should take about as long to game as it does to say.

Sadly it didn't. Going by his session reports, he had them spend the sessions basically doing nothing. There were a few rolls for this/that, they bought cargo at one stop, sold it at another, but he had them spend 3 or 4 sessions playing out a road trip instead of immediately have them start doing what they they wanted to do.

Welcome to Traveller. :(

>anybody ever adapt a culture to a planet?

Not really. It's the just a variation on the old lame "Raining on Mongo"/"Entire planet is a swamp" schtick.

Even planets with low but internally sustainable populations are going to have some variety. While there could be regions full of Plastic Paddies, Pseudo Scots, Faux French, and Phony Filipinos, cultures will drift, splinter, morph, etc. because that's what cultures do.

They're referred to as "near-c rocks" among Traveller fans and the debate swirling around them is older than the internet. You can spend years tossing pros & cons, tech specs, countermeasures, and all the rest back and forth while coming to no firm conclusion. In the end, it's your call as a referee.

In the 3I/OTU, the "best" answer is that such attacks are hard, but not impossible, to pull off and that their use is constrained by the concept of MAD.

Canonically, the Ancients used near-c planet busters. Their method involved teleportation. They'd set up two gates in orbit over the target and place a mass which than "fell" between them. The mass would fall into the bottom gate and be teleported to the top gate where it emerge to fall into the bottom gate again. Repeat the several millions times until the mass has enough velocity, turn off the bottom gate, the mass falls free, and scratch one planet.

The hex grid on subsector maps represents the crystal sph-- hexes. Any near-c rock would be going too fast to pass safely through the gaps and would impact on the crystal hex wall, being destroyed and having no further impact on the campaign.

slow rocks just pass through convenient gaps, even if unguided. it's weird like that.

Even using a sub-grid like this for one of the subsector hexes puts all of our known solar system in one sub-hex, and only a small part of it.

M-drive tech is a magic reactionless drive, it has a speed limit.

Furthermore, space wizards

Ah, a question near and dear to my heart. The least intrusive way is to just build them as regular small craft (your standard 18m-or-so tall mecha will be anywhere from ~20 to 40 dtons), and restricting for TL. For instance, UC Gundam would be around TL10 to 12, and with gravity drives restricted to non-small craft until the late UC0090s or so. And of course, no Jump drives. Small craft are, in general, better representations of mecha than the vehicle rules are.

For a bit more 'fiction-accurate' representation, you might make a few changes, for example:
1) a 'mecha' (perhaps AMBAC) hull type, which may be +20% cost, unstreamlined, but comes with 2+ manipulators
2) ignore the firm-point/hard-point restriction; if the ship has the power/space, it can add it. This allows for linking weapons to represent how many mecha are (deliberately) equipped with battleship-class weaponry.

There's plenty of other stuff, but that's going further down the rabbithole.

How would you do more "down to earht" sized mechs like Heavy Gera, VOTOMS or s1 Code gueas?

bumping

What version of Traveller should someone completely new to the systems and brand check out first?

For ATs or Knightmare Frames, it is probably better to use the Vehicles Handbook 2e if you're using MgT2e. There's enough options to adequately cover walkers and rollerblading mecha.

Although Mongoose as a company is kind of a shit, and their editing work is... not great, the Mongoose 2nd edition Traveller (what they call New Traveller) is probably the best place to start. All of the published books are in the Mega in the OP, so you can check them out there.

Honestly ? im no physicist, so i would try to shoot it with a lot of laser first.

If that fails there is still the spinal mount weapon every second large navy vessle has, which punches holes into small moons.

Also I'm assuming that you intercept the RKV at much lower speed than the final impact velocity.

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what's that? text too small for phoneposting to read

What is the speed limit? Since it's a magic reactionless drive that uses gravity, it should be able to go close to the speed of light, limited by how much energy you can pour into it to accelerate the ever increasing mass due to relativity.
Actually, there should be a formula to calculate that

Not him, but I seem to recall T4 put a limit on the M-drive's top speed.

Pull it to you and view at actual size. It is quite readable. Here's the rest.

The speed limit is arbitrary and based on whether or not you're going to ram something at near-c speeds. God did it.

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>What is the speed limit? Since it's a magic reactionless drive that uses gravity, it should be able to go close to the speed of light,

In a perfect vacuum, yes. In reality, even interstellar space is "dirty" and when you hit a grain of dust at 0.999999c, your RKV becomes an expanding ball of very hot gas.

>>Actually, there should be a formula to calculate that

It has been calculated, many many times as a matter of fact. Your "idea" and this "discussion" have been going on in Traveller for longer than the internet has been open to the public.

When Megatraveller folded Striker's armor ratings into ship design, a minimum hull thickness requirement became part of the process. Combining that minimum thickness with the most likely hull materials gave us a standard "damage resistance" which was used in turn to calculate a "top" normal space velocity of roughly 0.2c Go above that velocity and an impact with dust/gas molecules would damage a ship too much and/or too quickly.

Being a very-late-to-the-party fuckwit, you will now raise all the quibbles raised 30+ years ago after the 0.2c limit was calculated and begin arguing that a RKV's hull can be more armored, etc. etc., etc., etc. The truth of the matter is that everything you think of or suggest was thought of and suggested most likely before you were born.

In the end, the only answer is the one you've already been given and ignored: It's your call as a referee.

You want near-c rocks in your setting busting planets willy-nilly? Go ahead and use them IF you're able to apply the consequences in an intellectually honest manner.

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>80% helpful content

>10% snotty douchebag

Hey, you're getting better!

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and the other 10%?

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