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.
Fuck yeah I've been waiting for this general ever since I committed to running a 5-person game without having read the rulebooks about a week ago.
Riddle me this: in MGT2 world creation, hydrographics seems weird to me. It's defined as >Hydrographic percentage is obtained by rolling 2D-7 and adding the planet’s atmosphere, some atmospheres use the modifier listed below instead. >Size 0 or 1: Hydrographic 0 >Atmosphere 0, 1, A, B or C: DM-4
Size and Atmo rolls turn out to be mostly distributed like 2D (most common in the middle, like a bell curve). It's possible for Hydro rolls to be 10 (the limits on the table. If that happens, do I just push the roll to the min/max value? The distribution of rolls looks like this: should there really be that many 0-hydro worlds?
Have you read the box about harder sci-fi settings where most of the rolls give you an airless rock?
Landon Carter
>It's possible for Hydro rolls to be 10 (the limits on the table.
Of course, that's the intent. A size 0 system, aka a planetoid belt, isn't going to have an ocean.
>>If that happens, do I just push the roll to the min/max value?
That about your question for a second. How can you have a hydrographic rating BELOW 0% and over 100%? If the result is outside of the range, you "cap" it at either 0 or A.
>The distribution of rolls looks like this: should there really be that many 0-hydro worlds?
Yes. Worlds that are too small and lack atmospheres shouldn't be able to hold onto volatiles like water.
My question to you is why you're bothering to roll up worlds when tens of thousands have already been made for you at travellermap DOT com? Simply strip the names, x-boat routes, and gov't codes and you've got more map than you'll ever be able to use.
Jayden Ward
Yeah I guess I'm just being an autist. The travellermap is better and then I get the wiki pages too. Anyone have a favorite subsector that'd be good for a new game?
Hi folks, your friendly neighborhood Librarian here. It's time for me to do an update again (many thanks to the anons who sent PDFs to /DropOff) and now that I'm out of the other "achievements" that means making another account and redoing things.
However I thought I'd ask if anyone out there would like to help out so I don't have to jump through this hoop every 30 days from here on out. All you need is a throwaway email address and some device that you've not installed the Mega app on.
Send me an email at [email protected] and I'll send you an invite. Accept that and install Mega on something, and they give me 10 gigs for the next year. With that I can run things smoothly, at least until the Library passes 25 gigs in size -- but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Thanks!
Leo Ramirez
>Anyone have a favorite subsector that'd be good for a new game?
"Favorite" is entirely subjective. Do you want the 40 years of baggage that comes with the OTU/3I? Or do you want something you can make your own?
I'd grab something from the travmap site, strip out all the OTU stuff, and use it as the basis for MY sandbox. I wouldn't even think in terms of subsectors. I'd find some interesting world and see what it's jump4 or jump6 maps looked like.
I've uploaded a jump4 sample here. There are 24 worlds there representing years of adventures. Take a look at this blog post:
Besides training/education, what are some things to get up to during a week of Jump?
Evan Thomas
Minor repairs, passenger-related drama, fiddling with the weird alien device they picked up. There's always room for a good old cozy-style mystery, since everyone's locked in the ship for a week and can't leave. "The thief/murderer is someone on this ship!" and all that.
Blake Brown
Another user already mentioned repairs, maintenance, pax issues, "locked room" adventures, and the like. I'll add healing to the list. My groups generally use the time for planning, training, record keeping, and the like. It's "null" time usually although I'll occasionally throw a small problem or NPC encounter at them during it.
TNE introduced maintenance requirements for players who like gearhead stuff. You might find something to plunder there.
Very minor repairs. You should not touch: life support, power generators (usually fusion reactors), jump drive, manoeuvre drive, sensors, and anything else that leaves you in a mess if you happen to break it while trying to fix it.
With that one world being the exception, the main fits into two subsectors. High Civilization, backwaters, wretched hives, and forbidden treasures, all on one Main.
There was a thing from one of the earlier threads about some weird way of making sector maps. Something about cutting out all the marginal planets and making kind of a node map to and from the more habitable worlds. Does anyone remember what that's called or how to create them?
This is some inspiring as fuck artwork (yes I know a lot of it isn't actually traveller). Makes one want to play, though are groups playing this online even remotely common?
Also how feasible would things like fighter-pilots be? I know there's smaller ships that can be carried but the 'base' seems to be 100t multi-crews.
Ayden Scott
>Does anyone remember what that's called or how to create them?
There's no real name for the technique. People call them "Shirtsleeve" settings among other things.
The idea came from MT's "Survival Margin" (SM) in which systems were "devolved" due to effects from the Rebellion. As funds & trade withered away, those worlds which needed tech for people to live & breathe on them - as opposed to 'shirtsleeve" worlds where you can live "outside" - would see their population drop either by emigration or death. "SM" was speeding up what canon said happened during the Long Night and providing mechanisms for doing so. The difference is that where SM was doing in it a decade or so, the Long Night took a century or so.
Anyway, rather than using SM's mechanisms which were closely tied to the Rebellion and all it's effects, people re-purposed the T-norm and T-prime classifications from Classic's Adventure 4 and asked what if only those kind of worlds were colonized? You'd only see large populations on those worlds while everywhere else there would be tiny outposts, mining camps, etc. with a few 100 or 1000 people at most. You roll up a subsector or sector, stop after rolling Size, Atmo, and Hydro, identify T-prime/norm candidates, and only roll Pop, Gov, and Law for them.
At 100 tons and below you can get away with a single crewbeing. I would consider a nod to Star Wars and always have a reasonably smart robot along as well, just to pull a stupid PC's ass out of the fire if necessary.
Fighters are difficult to make truly dangerous vs capital ships, but can be nasty against mercantile convoys and smaller stuff.
Isaiah Gutierrez
>are groups playing this online even remotely common? I've seen a couple recruitment calls recently. The dense nature of Roll20, for example, means the first people setting up in a genre or system have to do a lot of work, but can buoy up later attempts.
...and applying the T-prime/norm requirements results in four out of 29 systems being populated in any real manner: Bendor, Marastan, Windsor, and Wurzburg. All the other systems are "empty", that is empty apart from whatever small, semi-permanent bases you want to place in them.
From what I'm reading (mongoose traveller 2) it seems it's not impossible to make a decent fighter, but you can't get a second weapon on there to have a semi-decent gun backed by missiles or something. They'll be knife-fighting if they want any chance of survival.
Guess I'll be keeping an eye out then. It does seem interesting and I'm quite sick of "naw man we'll play something like this in pathfinder"
David Anderson
>Makes one want to play, though are groups playing this online even remotely common?
There are active PbP games at COTI. One just wrapped up at COTI and another is shaping up.
>Also how feasible would things like fighter-pilots be?
Depends on the version, specifically the ship combat system being used. The word "fighter" carries a lot of baggage, mostly due to the legacy of Star Wars and many people's ignorance of vector movement. Part of the problem is that "fighters" in Traveller do not move like SW fighters and part of the problem is that "fighters" don't (usually) carry weapons which can quickly hurt ships.
In Classic, both of Book 2's systems, Mayday, and TTB work in a manner that allows fighters to be dangerous to small ships. Classic's Book 5 introduced more rules & equipment which further reduced the effectiveness of fighters in the upper tech levels. People complaining that fighter are useless in Traveller are really complaining that fighters are useless against warships at TL ~13 and above. MT, TNE, and T4 followed Classic's lead on this issue.
MgT added some things and changed some others so fighters were more effective in combat. Mongoose did that because they were hoping to pander to a potential customer base whose idea of sci-fi starts at Star Wars and doesn't go much further. The results were mixed and MgT ended up with various things which don't mesh well with all the other versions of the game.
Tl;DR - You can be a fighter pilot in Traveller. You won't be blowing up the Death Star, you'll only attack warships with 1000s of others, and you'll be most used against small merchant ships in a traffic cop role.
Asher Bell
Wouldn't you need equal or slightly better technology (to account for miniaturization) for a much smaller craft to be a threat in the first place? We can't exactly fit the railguns in a pod for F-16s yet after all!
Or do you mean that TL 13+ completely negated too much (I think that's when the really large ships get energy shield generators that mean anything below "bay" weapons start bouncing off)?
Lincoln Baker
I'm playing in one on Roll20 right now. It's been great so far.
Nicholas Lewis
>Wouldn't you need equal or slightly better technology (to account for miniaturization) for a much smaller craft to be a threat in the first place? We can't exactly fit the railguns in a pod for F-16s yet after all!
"Fighters" do not beat larger ships one-on-one. Before MgT's pandering, "fighters" in Traveller defeated defeated larger ships primarily through swarm tactics; i.e. death by a thousand cuts. The "fighter's would inflict enough fuel and/or weapon hits to make the larger ship useless.
>Or do you mean that TL 13+ completely negated too much (I think that's when the really large ships get energy shield generators that mean anything below "bay" weapons start bouncing off)?
1st, there are NO SHIELDS in Traveller. Put aside that Star Wars/Trek thinking and examine the game without those preconceptions. 2nd, as tech in Traveller progresses from TL9 to 15 and beyond, "fighters" lose out in several development "races".
The biggest "race" they lose is with power plant. Starting with Classic's Book 5, weapons and other equipment had specific power requirements which a vessel's power plant was sized to meet. As tech improves, better plants produce more power per dTon allotted. That widened the power "gap" between "fighters" and larger ships.
As tech improved, larger/better computer became available until they became too big for a "fighter" in both volume and power requirements.
As tech improved, weapons improved too. "Fighters" can only carry so many weapons so their weapon battery sizes plateaued while larger ships only got bigger/better weapon batteries sizes. (By "battery" I'm referring to a collection of similar weapons used together and not a Duracell.) (continued)
Ayden Watson
what are 'screens' then? I know they're specific to certain damage types but that's pretty significant defense layers.
Landon Morales
>>Continued
As tech improved, armor becomes cheaper and takes up less volume meaning larger ships can carry more armor.
As tech improves, nuclear dampers appear and become better. This especially hurts "fighters" because nuclear missiles are one of the best weapons they can carry.
Returning to power plants again, as tech improves larger ships can have more power for more acceleration and agility which makes them harder to hit in the first place.
So, "fighters" fall behind in several tech races as each new level is achieved.
Below ~TL13 or so, the computer gap isn't too big, nuclear dampers aren't that good, armor costs more and needs more volume, and ships don't have a lot of power left over for agility. That allows a lot of "fighters" to land a lot of nukes on a target which will spill a lot of fuel and knock out a lot of weapons. The ship in turn doesn't have enough weapons to shoot at ALL the "fighters", so only a few in the swarm are damaged/destroyed before the ship runs out of fuel and weapons.
Above ~TL13, the ship's agility and computer means the "fighter" may not be able to hit it at all or only a small percentage of the time. Then, when hits are made, the ship's dampers and armor may negate them.
Also factoring in all of this is the "fighter's" small relative weapon battery sizes. Hits made by those batteries are penalized on the damage tables UNLESS they're nuclear missiles - another reason why nukes are a "fighter's" best choice.
Now, Mongoose added a bunch of bullshit to a ship combat model which had worked well for 30+ years because they believed people wanted to blow up the Death Star. None of Mongoose's additions work really well, whether in MgT alone or with other versions. They're just poorly fitting kludges which pandered to a few preconceptions and add little if anything to the game itself.
Hudson Hernandez
See death by a thousand cuts is what I was asking/interested in. However I do wonder about a few of the points there: actually just one mostly - a lack of miniaturization as far as I can tell
>Power Plant Shouldn't improved TLs allow more compact reactors? The way you word it makes it sound like smaller ships (is this also an issue with a 100t scout for example?) just don't get to have the more efficient power-plants at all and so can't keep up with the increased requirements of newer equipment.
>Computers Well this is a pretty large one; how does increasing the TL make computers even larger/heavier? We don't just make better room-sized computers, we shrink them too so that something that slips in a shirt pocket is several thousand-fold the processing power that an entire room needed just fifty years ago. Surely you can fit something more powerful in a small craft at TL13 than you can at TL 9?
Battery sizes though makes sense; obviously a 40 ton craft can't carry 60 tons worth of weapons. As long as they aren't flat-out restricted off the technology itself that's certainly a problem they *should* have to deal with. It's very fun when a snub-fighter has a battleship cannon, but it's important to remember (well, natural selection will take care of it) that the battleship has like three multi-gun turrets of the thing and many more weapons to go along.
Samuel Watson
The simple fact is that the books that inspired Traveller didn't account for small fighters being meaningful. Useful ship combatants start around the model of a PT Boat or a B-17 and go up from there. To make useful individual fighters, you've got to go outside of Traveller.
My favorite compromise is in Jovian Chronicles. Fighter tactics in open space means getting a group of fighters together, three or four in a flight and accelerating away from the main force, then turn around and accelerate back at god's own speed towards the enemy. Your fighter is going to get hit, but you're going to hit them back just as hard. Just before you pass over them, you release just about every weapon you have, pounding the enemy ship with pieces of steel moving even faster than your ship and getting away before the defensive guns can reorient. Three or four passes kills most light capital ships, which is convenient because three or four passes is what you get before you have to land to rearm and refuel. It's essentially old cavalry charge tactics.
Of course, in atmosphere or around places with a horizon like a large moon, you get tactics similar to earthbound fighters.
You could do this in Traveller, I'm sure. But you'd need to make up your own houserules for all of this.
Nicholas Taylor
>I know they're specific to certain damage types but that's pretty significant defense layers.
Your own sentence answers your own question. Certain screens do certain things and no screen does everything as a "shield" does.
There are meson screens which only defend against hits by meson guns. They don't provide a "shield" against anything other type of weapon.
Another screen is the "black globe". In the game it's either a bleeding edge TL15 Imperial device of limited utility or a 300K year old Ancient relic which may not be reliable. (In canon, the 3I reverse engineered it's less useful globes from the Ancient globes it studied.)
Black globes defend against all weapons with a few provisos. First, the globe is either off, flickering, or on. If off, it does nothing naturally. If flickering, it intercepts a percentage of hits directly proportional to the flicker rate. If on, it intercepts all hits AND prevents you from shooting too. Second, the defense works both ways - it defends you and whomever you're shooting at. Third, the energy the globe intercepts must be stored until it can be safely dispersed. If it intercepts more energy than it can store, the ship is vaporized.
For example, the first canon design with a black globe is the Kinunir. It's storage capacity can handle ONE hit from a factor 9 nuclear missile battery. Any other hit from any other weapon after that and the ship explodes.
Ayden Rodriguez
>However I do wonder about a few of the points there: actually just one mostly - a lack of miniaturization as far as I can tell
You're wrong.
>>Shouldn't improved TLs allow more compact reactors?
It does. Everyone is able to get more power per dTon as tech improves. "Fighters" have only so much volume to work with so those improvements don't help them as much larger ships. For a given generation method, which is going to make more electricity? A plant aboard a F-16 or a plant aboard a carrier?
>>The way you word it makes it sound like smaller ships (is this also an issue with a 100t scout for example?) just don't get to have the more efficient power-plants at all and so can't keep up with the increased requirements of newer equipment.
That's not the way I worded it. Smaller ships get the new efficiencies too, they just can't carry as much power plant tonnage to get as much power as larger ships are getting.
>Well this is a pretty large one; how does increasing the TL make computers even larger/heavier?
I should have explained that "computers" refers to electronics rather than your laptop. You should also understand that Moore's Laws is already pressing against physical limits so the kinds of advances in computers we've seen in the last 50 years and the kind which you mistakenly assume are "endless" isn't going to happen.
Those "larger" and more power hungry "computers" include stuff like sensors, fire control, ECM, and the like. "Fighters" don't have the volume to carry it all and can't power it all either.
>Battery sizes though makes sense
The rest does too when you think about it.
Lincoln Lopez
HAH. I made it into a thread image because i forgot to and then out of spite refused to disable my name. Neat.
Ryder Cook
JC's great. I'd recommend it to the user asking about anything with small craft. Unlike, say, the Gundam universe, while recent budgets have been a bit friendlier to the big poster-friendly exo-armors, being in other things does not automatically make you an innocent bystander about to be slaughtered. Fighters in particular are like 2-3 size categories smaller; having no giant arms and legs means that armor's cheaper and lighter for the same amount of protection (there's simply less of you to plate) and your sensor cross-section is much lower. Lack of AMBAC does mean you chip at your reaction mass but there's no real reason you couldn't add canada-arm turrets or something to help with that.
One of the things fighters were really good for is that if you can somehow get in close enough to actually 'touch' a capital ship, your main engine on your mad hyperthrust scramble out of there is the biggest damn 'beam saber' available. Sadly, a dev had gotten butthurt over losing ships in the tactical game that way, and they halved the damage AND doubled the diffusion rate of engine-wash. Which gets kinda dumb when it's the exact same technology as a plasma-lance, only with so much more force and matter being chucked out that unlike the handheld lance (which is so weak it requires no appreciable use of remass as a counterthrust) it rockets you across the battlefield, and it now deals less damage.
Caleb Morales
>The simple fact is that the books that inspired Traveller didn't account for small fighters being meaningful.
"Fighters" rely on there being an interface of sorts between mediums, something which doesn't exist in space.
>>To make useful individual fighters, you've got to go outside of Traveller.
Or ignore physics. GDW went with vector movement and that doomed "fighters" as much as anything else.
>My favorite compromise is in Jovian Chronicles
That "tactic" relies on weapons only have certain limited ranges. Lasers in Traveller can be aimed in ranges up to light-seconds, so your Jovian Chronicle cavalry charge would end up like historical cavalry charges did when facing against machineguns.
>>But you'd need to make up your own houserules for all of this.
Not as many as you'd think as swarm tactics are effective up to TL ~13. You just need to factor in the casualties, casualties which could very well be your fighter jock PC.
Dylan Fisher
>One of the things fighters were really good for is that if you can somehow get in close enough to actually 'touch' a capital ship
Given Traveller's weapon ranges, that isn't going to happen outside of GM fiat.
Traveller lasers have ranges measure in light-seconds. You'll need to nerf that substantially to have your gundams work.
Nolan Green
To be fair, JC is a game about those big poster friendly mechs. Having them outdone by Lancers and lightning strikes is kind of a downer.
Before the guy sperging out about how fighters really work in Traveller continues, if you're going to jerk that whole paradigm from JC, I'd replace the mechs with corvettes a la pic related. They ultimately serve the same purpose of killing capital ships and dogfighting. Also works for coherent fleet concepts for system navies.
Well hold on here. Technically 'fighters' would just be very light vehicles. The reason for their popularity is the same as for PT boats, for drones, and for missiles: As things get bigger and more complex, the cost (in materials, maintenance, and life) skyrockets.
For all the improvements in offensive, defensive and utilities that the larger and larger crafts gain - and they do gain a lot - they're always vulnerable to something a fraction of their cost making all that investment and training disappear in a puff of smoke. What you're denying is things like atmospheric dogfights, which of course can't happen in space, but you're expanding that to the entire concept of "not having to be bigger than the other guy to put a hole in him". The whole point of 'fighters' and small patrol boats was/is that you can punch well above your mass when you strip out the waste-reclamation, the indefinite life-support, the barbershop, the cargo bays, the medical facilities, the crew quarters, the hallways and the captain's posh office. Of course you can't live in there for months and the engine needs to be serviced from the outside, but for the one thing you're built for it's great. You may only be lugging around one Meson barbute and a sandgun compared to the veritable arsenal you might actually call 'home', but ton for ton, crewman for crewman, you're a lot more bang for much less buck.
In regards to Jovian Chronicles, "Firing against known trajectory" what they call combat at light-second ranges or beyond (for things like lasers a continuous-burn mode is often used instead to stack up the heat since pulses will be more diffuse so far away); lightning-strikes as user up there described are just what you do when one or both sides are only going to be intersecting their trajectories for a second or two as they're on their way between planets - slowing down would probably end their fuel tanks after all.
Jonathan Morales
To be fair it doesn't really happen much in JC either. It's one of those chernobyl moments for the ship that eats it from an aux-craft's main engines. The ship has to fail way too many sensor checks, or if it notices has to blatantly ignore the threat, and if it blatantly ignores the threat it also has to keep its point-defense-system from automatically just zapping it - fighters melt only a tiny bit more slowly than massive cruise missiles when that sweeps them. If everything does go perfectly horribly wrong, however, there's a good chance the little bugger applying a fuckton of acceleration (who may fireball himself by doing that with his engines) will cut a hole clean through a ship section.
Brayden Brown
>What you're denying is things like atmospheric dogfights, which of course can't happen in space, but you're expanding that to the entire concept of "not having to be bigger than the other guy to put a hole in him".
You're failing to understand that the kind of "juene ecole" strategy you're talking about WORKS in Traveller below certain TLs. As tech progresses, the strategy's utility decreases until it's essentially worthless. "Fighters" WORK. They just don't work at TL15 and when they do work they work by taking casualties, something fighter jock PCs might not be happy with.
You're also failing to understand that there isn't a torpedo equivalent in Traveller. There's no relatively small package which can substantially damage a large ship. The only One Shot/One Kill weapon is the meson gun. By the time it's small enough for a fight to carry and power, larger ships have meson screens which it cannot penetrate.
>The whole point of 'fighters' and small patrol boats was/is that you can punch well above your mass.
That's thinking behind Traveller's SDB and battlerider concepts too. It's just that SDBs battleriders aren't smaller than 100 dTons.
>>"Firing against known trajectory" what they call combat at light-second ranges... (snip of otherwise good points which sadly ignore Traveller's tech assumptions.)
Traveller, like all games, has several technological assumptions which are central to it's rules and play. Those assumptions differ from other games and many aren't particularly realistic, but ship combat in Traveller is based firmly on them and you can't easily ignore them.
The game plays a certain way because of it's underlying assumptions. You need to understand those assumptions before making changes.
Except for Behind the Claw, and arguably Sword Worlds.
Luke Thomas
Tons of alternatives have been both created and used, but most of them are a PITA if you ask me. The FTL tech in Traveller was selected to make a ref's job easier and provide more room for adventure.
Jordan Morales
>but most of them are a PITA if you ask me What. >The FTL tech in Traveller was selected to make a ref's job easier and provide more room for adventure. Yeah but it goes against the simulationism of the whole game for me, because no proper interstellar societies would be possible with things being that slow. It's just stretching my suspension of disbelief in an area where it doesn't tolerate much.
Also, what are the alternatives?
Connor Hall
this is cool as shit. I love the wonky ship cross-sections. are there more?
Hunter Nelson
So, a player of mine rolled up a belter who left the service with a Seeker mining ship that has only 10 years left on its mortgage. So he's thinking about flipping the bird to the free trader rat race and going off to prospect in an asteroid belt. Has anyone here run a game with prospecting/mining? Anyone have a good system to provide an honest chance of a big jackpot? Or at least enough to swing the 160,000/mo mortgage on the Seeker? Looking at the prospecting flowchart in JTAS #3, it seems a little... shitty. I don't know. Anyone have any play experience of this stuff? Or the mining process in Mongoose? We're running a weird mashup of Classic, Mega and Mongoose with a ton of homebrew, so we're cool with taking shit from a variety of sources.
Evan Hughes
>Except for Behind the Claw, and arguably Sword Worlds.
I'm talking about the setting, not the splats.
BtC came close to wrecking the GT line. It was that bad. It was also one of the first splats released, so people started to think SJG was going to fuck up much like Mongoose would do years later. The GT line was lucky there were a couple of well received and regarded splats released right after BtC. Anyway, after the duo who wrote BtC produced another clunker in "Star Mercs", SJG decided not to use them again.
"Sword Worlds" problem was in using Hans Rancke as an author rather than a fact checker. He'd written a lot of fan materials on the topic over the years and basically wore down Drye and Prior until they just accepted many of his pet ideas to keep the project going.
>The FTL tech in Traveller was selected to make a ref's job easier and provide more room for adventure.
That's it exactly. The slow pace of communications & travel was deliberate so the PCs must handle things on their own rather than calling for help all the time.
Asher Martin
>Yeah but it goes against the simulationism of the whole game for me, because no proper interstellar societies would be possible with things being that slow.
You don't know much history, do you?
Dylan Young
The Belter box set from Classic has some rules. The JTAS flow chart is meant to be a system which provides adventure seeds and not a model for prospecting.
I had players who used their seeker to work as traders for miners/belters. They'd haul ores for people, deliver supplies, stuff like that. Occasionally they'd buy a claim, work it for a while, and sell it on.
Brandon Torres
The opposite is the problem. Historical empires could only ever extend as far as information could reach within a month at most.
Further than that and you either only have tiny colonies further out, or the empire starts to crumble under its own weight before it implodes. This is what happened to the Roman empire as the perfect example, and later the British. Due to it's size the governing body and the military couldn't concentrate on all places at once, and shifting focus took months, thus allowing secessionism to take hold and the central power to become weaker and weaker, prompting a downward spiral.
Someone tried explaining to me that it works in the standard Traveller lore, because there is basically no government, just a loose coalition of individual small fiefdoms and uncharted territories, with only trading agreements being signed. This however makes the border more an imaginary than a real one, and .... actually i think i understand the appeal of it somewhat. In other words never mind me i just convinced myself that i was wrong, and the traveller setting works.
I still want alternative FTL drives.
Kayden Robinson
>Historical empires could only ever extend as far as information could reach within a month at most.
Look up how long it took messages to reach India, Australia, and the US west coast before telegraph cables were laid and think again. Look up how long it took messages to travel from Rome to Britain, Spain, Egypt, Dacia, etc. and think again.
>>In other words never mind me i just convinced myself that i was wrong, and the traveller setting works.
Good to hear.
>>I still want alternative FTL drives.
TNE's "Fire, Fusion, & Steel". You'll find it in the Archive. Among many other possibilities in that splat, do psionically activated stargates sound interesting?
Alexander Thompson
>Look up how long it took messages to travel from Rome to Britain, Spain, Egypt, Dacia, etc. and think again. About a month.
>the US west coast The US got independence precisely because of this.
>how long it took messages to reach India It was never really a stable colony, and the british constantly had their military over there, and it was practically a separate administration with the EITC and in the 1700s the voyage still only took 4-6 months and the british colonial era was only possible, because local rulers specifically wanted the british to help them. As soon as that last thing changed, the military had to be constantly involved.
>Australia, A minor penal colony. As soon as it became anything else it also gained independence.
Tyler Anderson
>Among many other possibilities in that splat, do psionically activated stargates sound interesting? Too soft sci-fi for me, but that splat is something i'm checking out immediately hold on.
Matthew Allen
Also where is that splat i can't find it
Colton Young
The TNE folder?
Owen Howard
>The New Era Sorry, i'm not actually familiar with anything apart from the core book :| I got into traveller back when i thought single book could enable you to play the game. And i bought the core book.
Sebastian Thomas
Yep, mass load of 'zines coming soon to a snip link near you.
Nathan Jackson
>I still want alternative FTL drives. How about using something like the Warp Points they used in Starfire?
Kayden Fisher
hahhahAhahahAhahahhhha I suggested that a couple years ago. An argument ensued that was so savage and long that my name is currently in the thread image.
Jaxon Brown
>I got into traveller back when i thought single book could enable you to play the game.
Classic's TTB let you do that.
Mason Sullivan
Mongoose 1e almost demands you do that. Because the splats are so often bad
Colton King
You don't want to come out of jump too close to a gravity well without a working m drive. Neither do you want to come out of jump without immediately knowing whether you are deep in a gravity well, or an asteroid field, or in the path of a battle ship.
Christian Fisher
>Mongoose 1e almost demands you do that.
Very sad, but also very true.
Jordan Bailey
TTBs? I think mongoose 1e is what i bought. Literally my first rpg.
Xavier Torres
holy mother of bob i just liked the idea of using the ship classes from the original Starfire 1 book and scaling them up a wee bit i didn't know it was a *FLAMEWAR* level topic
Jacob Anderson
I asked my original question to see if someone had implemented that sort of thing for Traveller yet, since that was what originally sparked the flamewar back then- and the topic still continues to be the only thing i really don't like about it.
