Alternate Traveller Universe (ATU):

[pasuuli]

I'd love to see the following books get adapted to a Traveller Campaign Setting:

[...]

The Academy Universe of Priscilla Hutchins by Jack McDevitt (Great setting for a humanocentric Space Archaeology setting)

[...]

Seconded. A nice gritty setting.

 

[Flynn]

Imagine, if you will, the Matador series by Steve Perry, rendered as an ATU.

That would be cool,
Flynn

 

[Jame Rowe]

I'm going to think of a setting, loosely based off of GURPS Space Atlases 1-3 (don't have 4) and use they hyperdrive rules in the MGT book.

Some day, at least.

 

[Infojunky]

I has always thought that Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist setting would be extremely gameable.

 

[Captain Brann]

On thing I've never liked about Traveller is the huge fuel requirements for Jump Drives - It makes little to no sense technologicaly (Mega Traveller tried to fudge it semi-successfully), and also means almost every ship ever designed is forced to scrounge around for sources of fule. Several times as a player and Ref I've hit situations where the players have ended up in a system with no apparent means of refueling and had to improvise. Realisticaly, ships getting stranded through lack of a fuel supply would happen all the time.

The problem is you can't change this easily becasue then all the published ship designs become useless. However I finally have a fix, which is a variation on the MegaTraveller solution.

Jump Drives are fusion powered, but the fusion drive burns much, much faster and hotter than normal Power Plants. This isn't a problem so much in terms of fuel usage, the real problem is cooling. They burn so fast and so hot, passive cooling systems can't cope. The only practical method is liquid cooling. 90% of the 'Jump Fuel' space required by a Jump Drive is in fact liquid coolant, usualy water. The space required for fuel per full-rated jump is actualy 0.5% of hull size per jump number, so standard designs actually allow for two jumps, rather than one. They can get out of emergency missjumps and situations where no fuel is available, but don't have an unlimited number of jumps available.

e.g. A 100DT ship with Jump3 uses 30 DT of it's hull for fuel under classic traveler rules. In this variant actualy only 3DT of this are fuel and the rest is coolant that is recycled between jumps. Jump 3 requires 0.5% of the hull per jump or 1.5 DT in this case, so 3DT of fuelmeans the ship can manage two jumps of 3 Parsecs.

Coolant does need to be replaced, typicaly about once every 10 jumps or so.

Thoughts?

Simon Hibbs

Seems to make sense to me, no normal ship would travel without fuel reserves, which in this case would be enough for a jump of at least 1.

 

[-Daniel-]

On thing I've never liked about Traveller is the huge fuel requirements for Jump Drives - It makes little to no sense technologicaly (Mega Traveller tried to fudge it semi-successfully), and also means almost every ship ever designed is forced to scrounge around for sources of fule. Several times as a player and Ref I've hit situations where the players have ended up in a system with no apparent means of refueling and had to improvise. Realisticaly, ships getting stranded through lack of a fuel supply would happen all the time.

The problem is you can't change this easily becasue then all the published ship designs become useless. However I finally have a fix, which is a variation on the MegaTraveller solution.

Jump Drives are fusion powered, but the fusion drive burns much, much faster and hotter than normal Power Plants. This isn't a problem so much in terms of fuel usage, the real problem is cooling. They burn so fast and so hot, passive cooling systems can't cope. The only practical method is liquid cooling. 90% of the 'Jump Fuel' space required by a Jump Drive is in fact liquid coolant, usualy water. The space required for fuel per full-rated jump is actualy 0.5% of hull size per jump number, so standard designs actually allow for two jumps, rather than one. They can get out of emergency missjumps and situations where no fuel is available, but don't have an unlimited number of jumps available.

e.g. A 100DT ship with Jump3 uses 30 DT of it's hull for fuel under classic traveler rules. In this variant actualy only 3DT of this are fuel and the rest is coolant that is recycled between jumps. Jump 3 requires 0.5% of the hull per jump or 1.5 DT in this case, so 3DT of fuelmeans the ship can manage two jumps of 3 Parsecs.

Coolant does need to be replaced, typicaly about once every 10 jumps or so.

Thoughts?

Simon Hibbs

Seems to make sense to me, no normal ship would travel without fuel reserves, which in this case would be enough for a jump of at least 1.

I always thought, who uses ships that do not have fuel scoops or a ships boat that has fuel scoops? If I am going to jump to places that will not have fuel stations then I had better use a ship that either has scoops or has a small craft that does. Makes sense to me.

Daniel

 

[Infojunky]

I always thought, who uses ships that do not have fuel scoops or a ships boat that has fuel scoops? If I am going to jump to places that will not have fuel stations then I had better use a ship that either has scoops or has a small craft that does. Makes sense to me.

The funny thing with this is Most of the games I have played in we never used the fuel scoops, even in systems where we were just passing through.

 

[simonh]

I always thought, who uses ships that do not have fuel scoops or a ships boat that has fuel scoops? If I am going to jump to places that will not have fuel stations then I had better use a ship that either has scoops or has a small craft that does. Makes sense to me.

Daniel

It does, but it's not going to be enough in many situations. What if your fuel scoops are damaged, you suffer a fuel leak, the filtration system has a fault, etc, etc. You could easily be stranded for months by even minor incidents. The classic designs include almost no allowance for accidents and with the high fuel requirement for jumps it's prohibitive to include significant spare fuel capacity.

Actually I thought about incorporating this into a campaign. There must be hundreds of scavenger ships scouring systems off the main routes for stranded ships in order to claim salvage rewards.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Infojunky]

It does, but it's not going to be enough in many situations. What if your fuel scoops are damaged, you suffer a fuel leak, the filtration system has a fault, etc, etc. You could easily be stranded for months by even minor incidents.

I don't know with the relative speed of even the slowest ship, and the absolute ease of reducing any number of substances hydrogen and other stuff, I don't see this as a problem.

Now if the fuel weren't Hydrogen, then you might have a problem.

 

[-Daniel-]

I always thought, who uses ships that do not have fuel scoops or a ships boat that has fuel scoops? If I am going to jump to places that will not have fuel stations then I had better use a ship that either has scoops or has a small craft that does. Makes sense to me.

Daniel

It does, but it's not going to be enough in many situations. What if your fuel scoops are damaged, you suffer a fuel leak, the filtration system has a fault, etc, etc. You could easily be stranded for months by even minor incidents. The classic designs include almost no allowance for accidents and with the high fuel requirement for jumps it's prohibitive to include significant spare fuel capacity.

I guess this is a moment where the kind of game you want to play comes into the picture. Any system, even back-ups can fail. In my TU I am not looking to screw the players by having their ships break down on a regular basis or strand them without a gas giant as they do have the star maps. So it is not a major worry for me. The ship has fuel gathering ability, there is a local Gas Giant, all is well. We move on to the adventure I have set out for the group.

But if you like to play out a game where they must record the hours of maintenance they do, play out the ship operations process, and break downs can occur quit a lot if the right hours are not put in, then the fuel systems can be a wonderful place to get them.

Daniel

 

[Leo Knight]

Hi, new member here. I started playing Traveller back in 1977 with the first edition. I played regularly for several years, then lost interest. I lost all my Traveller materials several years ago during a move, and am now rebuilding.

I made a few ATUs. My first started with good old Regina Subsector from the Kinunir adventure. I had a Star Wars-ish Imperium/ Empire, but I thought the core worlds were off the left edge of the map, since that's where the jump routes went. I sketched a large scale map of the Imperium based on the map of Oz. Regina was in the East, and Oz was the core worlds. I had all sorts of crazy gonzo stuff. I started with a zoo ship (this was way before the safari ship came out) with a big critter I named a Grendel (long before Pournelle's 'Legacy of Heorot'). The trick was the critter was sentient, and in pain. A telepathic character sensed this, and they became buddies, a la Androcles and the Lion. Its home was Kinorb, also home to the anagathic tree krakens. This started all sorts of plotlines: bored nobles hunting Grendels for sport, alien invaders (stolen from Piers Anthony's 'Cluster'), the Emperor wanting tree krakens, etc.

I decided the Imperium was decadent and cruel. Mercenary had just come out, and they had an intriguing weapon: the meson gun, which destroyed everything in a burst radius. I decided this must be a disintegration weapon, like the positronic ray in 'Barbarella' (only the classics!). I created a mini Death Star called a monitor. It was made of ten 5000ton ships which jumped independently, but linked to form a massive meson gun to bombard planetary targets (stolen from 'Dune'). When rebellion inevitably began, the scouts, who had always been the red-headed stepchildren of the Empire, joined the resistance. I gave them a nifty trick, the "controlled misjump", which allowed them to travel up to 36 parsecs at a jump.

That campaign crashed and burned when in game and out of game rivalries got mixed together. I started a "next generation" universe, with the psionic Jedi running the place. They turned out to be thought crime prosecuting dictators. Yep, way before Zhodani!

Sometime later, I started a new ATU using an alternate star system generator from an early issue of 'White Dwarf', which created an inordinate number of black holes and neutron stars. It also gave me my favorite starting locale, Ringer's World: A-101300-G. Yes, tech level 16. I had just seen an episode of 'Doctor Who' where Gallifrey was powered by a tamed black hole. I decided Ringer's World was a modern freeport built, unkowingly, over one of a series of Ancient outposts, linked by Black hole powered teleport gates, long before 'Stargate'. Damn writers keep stealing my material :wink: . A mystery cult had built up around the Ancient site. A cultist would choose a portal. Some led to black holes or neutron stars, but others led to still functioning Ancient sites. The ecstatic rush being teleported made the cultists believe they had a mystical encounter. I remember another plot hook involving scientists chartering the characters vessel to study a nearby supernova. Needless to say, this was not hard SF.

My last ATU was the League of Planets, an intentional analogue to the League of Nations. I found a list of stars within 5 parsecs of the Sun, and converted the right ascension and distance to the hex grid, ignoring 'altitude'. If more than one system fell in a hex, I used the most interesting one. I wanted to use real star names, Altair, Procyon, 70 Ophiuchi. My three central systems were Sol, Alpha Centauri, which I kept changing each time I ran because I was never satisfied with it, and Barnard's Star, home of one of four waterworlds, Panthalassa:
A-A8A955-C. Down rimward of Sirius and Procyon was a four system cluster, centered on the Dante system. The Danteans had conquered their little mini empire while the League stood by and watched, a la Italy conquering Ethiopia. I ran the 'Sky Raiders' trilogy in this setting.

Unfortunately, although my players seemed to enjoy themselves, most didn't like the lack of a experience/advancement system like in D&D. They wanted to level up and get magic. I tried several times to graft an experience system onto the game, but I wasn't happy with the results. Advancement seemed too fast. It finally devolved into one shots and short mini campaigns. I hope this isn't too long winded, but I'm jazzed to run Traveller again![/url]

 

[simonh]

But if you like to play out a game where they must record the hours of maintenance they do, play out the ship operations process, and break downs can occur quit a lot if the right hours are not put in, then the fuel systems can be a wonderful place to get them.
Daniel

I used to run a lot of exploratory games back in the day, a la Leviathan, so the fuel problem was a big headache. Yes you can refine hydrogen from lots of stuff, but you have to have the right equipment for the stuff that happens to be available and for awkward materials it's going to take a _lot_ of time.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Golan2072]

My last ATU was the League of Planets, an intentional analogue to the League of Nations. I found a list of stars within 5 parsecs of the Sun, and converted the right ascension and distance to the hex grid, ignoring 'altitude'. If more than one system fell in a hex, I used the most interesting one.

How did you plot the start locations on the map? By computer or manually with a protractor?

 

[Leo Knight]

My last ATU was the League of Planets, an intentional analogue to the League of Nations. I found a list of stars within 5 parsecs of the Sun, and converted the right ascension and distance to the hex grid, ignoring 'altitude'. If more than one system fell in a hex, I used the most interesting one.

How did you plot the start locations on the map? By computer or manually with a protractor?

Manually. I started with distance. 0.5 -1.5 parsecs was 1 hex out (Alpha Centauri), 1.5 -2 parsecs waas 2 hexes out (Barnard's Star, Wolf 359), etc. Then at each distance, I divided the right ascenscion by the number of hexes in that ring. IIRC, the galactic core is in the constellatiopn Sagittarius, so Barnard's Star and 70 Ophiuchi lined up directly coreward. At the 1 parsec ring, each hex was 4 hours RA, at 2 parsecs 2 hours, etc.

 

[simonh]

Sometime later, I started a new ATU using an alternate star system generator from an early issue of 'White Dwarf', which created an inordinate number of black holes and neutron stars.

Interestingly, independently publishign somethign like that wouldn't be allowed under the Mongoose Traveller third party license. It specificaly disallows publication of alternate rules for world generation, commercialy at least. That drastically reduces your freedom to publish alternate universes for Traveller.

I suppose the Traveller world description system is a hallmark of the game, but no more so than the starship design system.

Simon Hibbs

 

[aspqrz]

Sometime later, I started a new ATU using an alternate star system generator from an early issue of 'White Dwarf', which created an inordinate number of black holes and neutron stars.

Interestingly, independently publishign somethign like that wouldn't be allowed under the Mongoose Traveller third party license. It specificaly disallows publication of alternate rules for world generation, commercialy at least. That drastically reduces your freedom to publish alternate universes for Traveller.

Well, yes and no.

The Traveller SRD, when it is released (when? must be "real soon now") is released under the Open Games License (OGL) which means you can actually use it to create your own game world, even down to variant character and world creation systems ... neither of which material from the TMB will be in the SRD, so a stand alone game based on the SRD would have to do that ...

What you can't do is then use the Traveller logo and claim compatability with the TMB.

So, if I create a rpg based on the Traveller SRD and call it, say, "Space Opera", then I could have a world creation system of my own and a character creation system of my own.

Why, those systems could be functionally identical to the ones described in the TMB ... as long as I don't use the exact same wording to describe them ... and that would be perfectly fine ... because I'm not using the Traveller Logo or claiming compatability.

Of course, within the parameters I have indicated, "Space Opera" would be, effectively, identical to Traveller in most respects, and could be used by Traveller referees with no problems whatsoever ... but I couldn't use the Traveller Logo or, directly anyway, claim compatability with Traveller.

There has been an extensive series of discussions of the meaning of various aspects of the OGL regarding DnD on the ePublisher private forum on RPGNow and the above reflects some of the key aspects of what has been said over the years (in different contexts, usually with reference to D20 or D20 modern, but still pertinent).

Phil

Author, Space Opera (FGU); RBB #1 (FASA); Road to Armageddon;
Farm, Forge and Steam; Orbis Mundi; Displaced (PGD)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Email: aspqrz@pacific.net.au

 

[simonh]

Of course, within the parameters I have indicated, "Space Opera" would be, effectively, identical to Traveller in most respects, and could be used by Traveller referees with no problems whatsoever ... but I couldn't use the Traveller Logo or, directly anyway, claim compatability with Traveller.

Thus cancelling out the main reason for using it in the first place.

With D&D/D20 there was a clear distinction between the game system and a specific individual game. What will non-Traveller games based on the OGL be called - 2D6 system games?

It just seems an odd requirement to me. The license allows variant starship designand combat systems for example, but not world generation. I just don't see why one and not the other. Not realy a problem, I'm just curious.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Leo Knight]

Sometime later, I started a new ATU using an alternate star system generator from an early issue of 'White Dwarf', which created an inordinate number of black holes and neutron stars.

Interestingly, independently publishign somethign like that wouldn't be allowed under the Mongoose Traveller third party license. It specificaly disallows publication of alternate rules for world generation, commercialy at least. That drastically reduces your freedom to publish alternate universes for Traveller.

I suppose the Traveller world description system is a hallmark of the game, but no more so than the starship design system.

Simon Hibbs

The article was an addition to the standard Traveller world generation in Book 3, adding only star types to the mix. It didn't actually mess with the core "main world" mechanic. Would this be allowed?

 

[Golan2072]

How did you plot the start locations on the map? By computer or manually with a protractor?

Manually. I started with distance. 0.5 -1.5 parsecs was 1 hex out (Alpha Centauri), 1.5 -2 parsecs waas 2 hexes out (Barnard's Star, Wolf 359), etc. Then at each distance, I divided the right ascenscion by the number of hexes in that ring. IIRC, the galactic core is in the constellatiopn Sagittarius, so Barnard's Star and 70 Ophiuchi lined up directly coreward. At the 1 parsec ring, each hex was 4 hours RA, at 2 parsecs 2 hours, etc.

Thanks! I was looking for something along these lines for long and you've given me a system which seems quite good and quite intuitive and without the need for much complexity in drawing.

 

[aspqrz]

Of course, within the parameters I have indicated, "Space Opera" would be, effectively, identical to Traveller in most respects, and could be used by Traveller referees with no problems whatsoever ... but I couldn't use the Traveller Logo or, directly anyway, claim compatability with Traveller.

It just seems an odd requirement to me. The license allows variant starship designand combat systems for example, but not world generation. I just don't see why one and not the other. Not realy a problem, I'm just curious.

Makes sense to me.

The OGL has been around long enough for most long time gamers to know that d20 OGL = D&D no matter what the legalities actually say. OGL games designers are now counting on this. In fact, the requirement by Hasbro that anyone who wants to release 4th Edn compatible stuff and use the desirable D&D logo based on the new SRD specifically abandon all 3.5 compatible materials and cease to sell and distribute them has caused some consternation ... since, as a number of small companies have noted that, these days, OGL = D&D in almost everyone's minds.

Traveller SRD (whenever it is released, and, remember, there ARE other game systems that have been released under the OGL as well as d20!) will be, initially, completely unknown. So Mongoose is right to insist that the key elements of the Traveller game system ... system and character creation ... remain off limits if you want to use their logo license.

A year or so down the track?

Everyone will know that Mongoose Traveller SRD/OGL stuff is, really, Traveller by another name, no matter what the wording actually says.

But, of course, what they "know" and what is actually the legal situation will be quite different ... and Mongoose Traveller will have establised its own secure identity by then, which, I guess, is the point.

That's my estimate of the reasoning, anyway ... and its worth what free opinions usually are :lol:

Phil

Author, Space Opera (FGU); RBB #1 (FASA); Road to Armageddon;
Farm, Forge and Steam; Orbis Mundi; Displaced (PGD)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Email: aspqrz@pacific.net.au