Alternate Traveller Universe (ATU):

[Bygoneyrs]

I have been playing Traveller since the first originial box set came our way back when (30 yrs now). I have GM'd many ATUs over the years and one of my most enjoyable ones was set in the Verge subsector on a world the was seeded by the Ancients.

I designed the world using some of the races from Edger R.'s races from Barsoom. You see the primary homeworld of the Red Race of sudo humans that laid egg pods lived on the primary world in the system. Then on two different moons around a gas giant were two other races, the 4 armed Green Insect like Tharks, and on the other moon was the 4 armed Apemen. Each world shared many of the same plants and animals, and in the distant past there were members of all three different races on each world. Each world had a dominate race, and that race killed off the other two on their own specific world.

So these three races all had paralle level tech developement levels and started to leave their own world and explore their solar system. They had many issues and fought small wars amonst one another but eventually managed to put asside their differences and form a united government called the; T'Aleen Confederation.

At game start for the players, the three races worked together...thus the PCs could be of any of these three races. The T'Aleen had just discovered star drive tech (sleeper births were used to make the long trips between solar systems), and they were sending out Scouting missions in all directions to explore. BTW there was NO Imperium in this ATU, just other races and empires to encounter. The game lasted for 5+ yrs and was a blast, and we used Traveller rules just not the Traveller Universe.

Penn

 

[AKAramis]

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?

There were 4 levels of D&D 3.x/D20/OGL
1) Genuine D&D 3.x by WotC
2) Licensed D&D (AEG and Kenzer & Co both did this)
3) D20 STL, where products ranged from directly compatible (Scarred Lands bestiaries) to mostly character-incompatible (T20, Bab5).
4) OGL materials ranging from direct add-ons (BOEF) to very different systems (Such as C&C)

The TSRD will create at least the 3 of these, and there is negotiation for all 4.

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

Because Traveller world generation is pretty much identical in all canon editions (which excludes GT and HeroTrav)... and is pretty much the sole defining element of compatibility.

And starship design, combat mechanics, and character generation expansions are exceedingly common houserules subjects.

 

[pasuuli]

My ATU was two subsectors in size. One subsector has a few powerful human worlds, which have divided up the rest of the worlds and is beginning to colonize them. The other subsector is incognita. The subsectors have a long history, largely unknown by the humans, and there are a number of worlds inhabited by aliens, none of which are well understood, not seeming to pose any threat to humaniti or its aspirations.

The setting has politics ('diplomatic' missions, mercenaries, letters of marque), trade (smuggling, patrols, blockade running), and mysteries (exploration, intrigue, aliens).

 

[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.

Having thought about this for a while may I suggest the following.

the fuel for a ship is Dton x0.05 x Jump which gives you 1/2 the current fuel so you have a reserve of another jump in a standard design. you could use it for an emergency jump but then you have nothing left if you end up in a gas/waterless system.

This would mean that all ships have a safety jump, which would make passengers more happy as well as the insurance/bank. as the ship is less likely to be lost.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

What I used was that the 10% per jump assumed UNREFINED FUEL. Use of refined fuel gave you 5% per Jump (or 1/2 the fuel cost). Onboard purifiers do NOT create Refined Fuel, they turn water or whatever into Unrefined Fuel. Only Class A and B starports can make Refined Fuel.

When asked by a player what the difference was, I said that Refined Fuel has special additives to make it burn more efficiently (Now shut up player or I will inflict a wandering monster on your butt! OH, sorry wrong game.)

NOW, after watching the new BSG, I would say that TYLIUM is an example of an additive that makes Hydrogen fuse better and makes Jump more efficient.

Naval Architects must assume Unrefined Fuel is being used in all ship designs for safety reasons. BTW, I then said that Unrefined fuel did not increase your chances for a mis-jump, only Unprocessed (Raw) fuel.

Nothing changes in the designs and you can now take more money from the players by justifying the costs of Refined Fuel.

It worked for me and my group for years.

 

[simonh]

the fuel for a ship is Dton x0.05 x Jump which gives you 1/2 the current fuel so you have a reserve of another jump in a standard design. you could use it for an emergency jump but then you have nothing left if you end up in a gas/waterless system.

That would help with the practical problems of such high jump fuel requirements quite nicely, but from a hard science point of view it doesn't address the fact that using huge volumes of hydrogen so quickly in a fusion reactor makes no sense at all. A fraction of the kinds of volumes of hydrogen Traveller starships use for jumps would be enough to heat the entire ship's mass as hot as the surface of a star. From a hard science points of view requiring much smaller fuel volumes but also requiring extensive liquid cooling addresses both the problem of scientific plausibility, the cooling problem and retains compatibility with existing designs.

Admittedly the scientific plausibility problem isn't actually a problem for most people, All SF games and settings are full of worse offences against plausibility, but it's a hobby horse of mine.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Jame Rowe]

Some people on COTI have been working on a ProtoTraveller universe. This, I would like to play.