District 268 research station

[rinku]

CT = the 1977 booklet rules? As someone who's come back to Traveller after a 40 year gap, why is it we still treat those as the primary source, rather than using Mongoose as a clean reboot?

Because Mongoose themselves use that stuff as a starting point.

I was merely cutting through possible typo snowballing from Megatraveller, TNE, GURPS, MGT1e and MGT2e to have a look.

 

[rinku]

However, in this particular case the Mongoose material aligns perfectly with the CT material. The Mongoose map from the OP shows the same Upper case Greeek Eta at Junidy as the 1981 map did. If TravellerMap says otherwise for the same era, it's far more likely to be an error of TravellerMap.

And it would certainly NOT be astounding if someone misread a Greek letter and put in the wrong name.

Edit: including me. That OP map has an uppercase Gamma at Judice. Are Mongoose using a Gamma to mark all Research stations on that map instead of the actual station name? I know GDW used the Gamma as the example of a Research station's presence on the key, but the seven SM stations were shown with their actual symbol.

Map aside, the UWP listings should say if a station is present or not, in the notes.

 

[Vormaerin]

yeah, every single source but one has a research station on Judice. It looks like a pretty clear typo on that one map.

 

[Midas]

Basically, and there are a couple of people who will strongly disagree, but it's like law: precedent is authoratitive but the latest law from a competent legislative body overrides conflicting older ones.

So sources from the 70s are great if there's nothing since then to contradict them: one of the amazing things about Traveller is how much detail there is for the Official Traveller Universe. But if the 1977 version says you need x% of the ship for a given component, and Mongoose (who own the rights now) say it is y%, then you can say it is x, y or z but canon is y%.

You get people saying "argh why don't the writers read the old versions?!?" but in many cases it's safe to assume that they do (in the case of MJD, who gets that a lot, he probably wrote the previous version). Geir knows his shit. Paltrysum knows the fiction of huge areas of the game better than anyone after so long. They've just decided to revise it, which is fine by some but anathema to others.

Edit: there are versions of Traveller that are later than others, which conflict with them, and which everyone sane just agrees to ignore (heplar drives lawl).

My universe uses the '77 rules. I consider everything published since then as optional: This allows me to use GURPS or anything else if I find it interesting, or ignore it if doesn't fit what I want to referee.

To give a good example of your last sentence, there are four scenarios that deal with the Red Zoned planet Grant. Two are rescue missions that require the system to be almost deserted (one completely, one has a small scout station, basically a runabout tender - for idiots that can't figure out what "Red Zone" means). The other two are espionage missions with a full, actively xenophobic, fleet presence to work around to succeed in the mission. They're pretty much exclusive; you can have one of the rescue missions, then the events of Tripwire get the Navy involved, but in essence you have to choose why Grant is Red Zoned and ignore the other potential reasons.

 

[rinku]

My universe uses the '77 rules. I consider everything published since then as optional: This allows me to use GURPS or anything else if I find it interesting, or ignore it if doesn't fit what I want to referee.

To give a good example of your last sentence, there are four scenarios that deal with the Red Zoned planet Grant. Two are rescue missions that require the system to be almost deserted (one completely, one has a small scout station, basically a runabout tender - for idiots that can't figure out what "Red Zone" means). The other two are espionage missions with a full, actively xenophobic, fleet presence to work around to succeed in the mission. They're pretty much exclusive; you can have one of the rescue missions, then the events of Tripwire get the Navy involved, but in essence you have to choose why Grant is Red Zoned and ignore the other potential reasons.

Just to be clear... when you say "77 rules", does that include GDW stuff published after 1981? Or is it actually everything, including 1979 publications?

 

[Midas]

Just to be clear... when you say "77 rules", does that include GDW stuff published after 1981? Or is it actually everything, including 1979 publications?

I consider everything but the three LBBs and S3 (I think - the Spinward Marches gazetteer) to be optional.

 

[rinku]

SM is optional, really. Book 3 suffices.

 

[CordwainerFish]

SM is optional, really. Book 3 suffices.

And twenty lines of code in your language of choice. (BASIC may be the third worst language there is but for this application it would be traditional.)

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

(BASIC may be the third worst language there is but for this application it would be traditional.)

Would that be for traditional (line numbered interpreted) Basics or do you include the modern structured and compiled Basics?

 

[CordwainerFish]

Would that be for traditional (line numbered interpreted) Basics or do you include the modern structured and compiled Basics?

'Modern BASIC' is a contradiction in terms. It was obsolete before it was invented.

 

[rinku]

Yeah, first program I wrote - in 1981 - was a subsector generator, in some grade of BASIC on the school's DEC PDP9. Later I got me a C64 and rewrote it in Commodore Basic, as well as a character creation one. Those were stored on audio cassette, of course.

 

[rinku]

'Modern BASIC' is a contradiction in terms. It was obsolete before it was invented.

Sure. The modern period usually becomes the postmodern period around the 1960's anyway. It's a loaded term to start with.

 

[Endie]

'Modern BASIC' is a contradiction in terms. It was obsolete before it was invented.

A fashionable view, but wrong in dispassionate terms: it’s just not a great language for a range of specific use cases.

It wasn’t in any way obsolete in the pre-python days when semi-professionals and power users wanted to automate Office products, for instance. And while to people like me (using Java and then JavaScript over that period) it was fun to be disdainful, it clearly wasn’t obsolete since it was consistently top-ten usage in surveys for year after year. And if I wanted to automate something quickly in Excel tomorrow, God forbid, I’d probably use VBA (and let Claude sully itself ).

So obsolescent, sure, from the 90s. Outdated? Certainly. But at twenty years old in the 80s it was a vital part of a thriving home PC market and an amazing learning tool. And it wasn’t obsolete until the mid-2000s at the earliest. It just wasn’t for professionals.