I love Traveller because of the ships!

[matrixcowboy]

Just wanted to get this off my chest. I am a late comer to Traveller. I am an old RPG gamer. Cut my teeth on AD&D 2nd, West End Games Star Wars, Shadowrun, and FASAs Robotech. Later on in life, I got back into RPGs, only to discover I could not stand what D&D (and its clones) have become. (gamist systems which seem better as computer game RPGs than table top ones.) I went into OSR, and rules light instead (DCC, Mothership) , and other systems which focused more on Sandbox play or systems with a unique setting. (Free League stuff).

But as much as I have tried other Sci-fi systems, (Stars Without Number, Coriolis, Mothership, Alien, M-Space, and even some Starfinder sourcebooks) The on thing which kept me going back to look at Traveller was the ship variety. I loved how many ships it had, with detailed deck plans, with sensible design options, and realistic roles for their existence.
I ended up getting the core 4 books, despite their high cost vs other publishers.
It ended up winning me over... but this took 1.5 years.... in which time I spent a lot more money on other systems.

What kept repelling me from Traveller was: (in order of level of repulsion)
1) High cost of books (overcome)
2) Setting with dogs and lions (overcome)
3) Ship designs that look like they came from the 1970s, and not in a good way... like very basic shapes like cylinders, and ships that looked like giant vacuum cleaners (Element Cruiser) - (overcome)
4) The silly jump = 1 week delay rule (why isn't it variable?) (overcome)

But the worse one, so bad that I felt impelled even though I have finally bought into the system and rules, that I felt I still needed to post about this (in the odd chance that it actually helps steer the publishers into a direction where the next generation won't have to spend almost 2 years avoiding the great game before finally giving into it)

WHY so many ships are colored so ridiculously. I mean seriously, so many ships have obnoxiously bright primary colors, geometric shapes, and geometric shapes like target crosshairs painted all over them. It looks like a Mondrian picture. This kind of stuff like make the ships so clownishly silly looking. Its almost as if the same colorblind designer was in charge of designing all ships in the whole imperium.
What reason is there to have color shapes painted over the ship?
Or dumb circle and crosshairs on its flanks? (the Solomani SA cruiser for instance)
Ships have no reason to be painted besides for style... and a lot of the style I see in the ship books are VERY questionable from a practical perspective.

I get that the ship pictures are of NEW ships and aren't of the 'lived in' ships you see in pictures like Star Wars or shots when they have been used... but really.
The EXCEPTION to this rules seems only to be in the Adventure Class Ships book and the new upcoming Traders and Gunships. The author there finally seems to have a sense about what colors real practical ships should look like.

 

[Arkathan]

Setting: you don't have to use the aliens for Charted Space or any of the polities. You can make your own setting, even if you use the map at the Traveller map website. I frequently port Star Wars aliens in, since I don't have to worry about getting the rules right on them.
Future Retro ships: Many of the ship designs came from the seventies and early eighties. Again, the rules are there to design your own, increasing the great variety of ships.
Jump times: several ways to handle this and not have to make new deck plans. You could use hyperdrive/warp rules and just say the jump plus fuel is the volume needed for those drives. You could use positive effect from the jump roll to shorten the time, making it variable. You can say the jump drive works like space transfer drives from Dune or Battletech.
Art: There has been a movement towards better art in the last few years. Seth Skorkowski mentioned similar issues in his Traveller intro videos.

Welcome, and remember that if you don't like something, change it. Just write it down so the players know the rules

 

[shirgall]

The best thing about Traveller game sessions is that the ship itself can become a character in the game. Designs can be customized a great deal but the pain job, well that has a lot to do with why the crew got together with that ship in the first place. Do you seek glory and fame? A recognizable ship gets you talked about.

A lot of the shapes on the hull of the ship are over panels that have been replaced or repaired or there is access to important equipment underneath.

Let's do an example, though. Pictured is the High'n'Dry, a Type S Scout/Courier from the adventure of the same name. It's 109 years old. It's been refitted a ton. It sat for months in a very dirty, smoky place. It's not garish but it's functional.

 

[G'Naakbusters]

WHY so many ships are colored so ridiculously. I mean seriously, so many ships have obnoxiously bright primary colors, geometric shapes, and geometric shapes like target crosshairs painted all over them. It looks like a Mondrian picture. This kind of stuff like make the ships so clownishly silly looking. Its almost as if the same colorblind designer was in charge of designing all ships in the whole imperium.

For the love of Grandfather, do not open Aliens of Charted Space Volume One on the pages with Vargr vessels. Taste was stolen by corsairs long ago in the Vargr Extents.

Maybe the Imperium has Vargr designers painting the ships, for that matter.

Or maybe different Imperial fleets like to decorate their ships with obvious visual cues regarding their allegiance. (I'm reminded of a bit in one of the old Star Wars rpgs about a rawmat shortage in parts of the Mid Rim causing several Star Destroyers to have hulls of a non-standard material that was pinkish is hue. So some poor Imperial commander had to fly around in a pink Star Destroyer).

Or dumb circle and crosshairs on its flanks? (the Solomani SA cruiser for instance)

Why, that's the Solomani Cross.

Tsk, no respect for your heritage. Why not go live on some Vilani corporate drone colony?

 

[Vormaerin]

As far as point 2 goes: They don't have dogs and lions, but you have to actually read the material to find that out. Which is obviously a bit much to expect of people who don't own the game yet. And certain eras of the artwork definitely reflect the artists not knowing the material and making the same mistake.

As far as the rest goes: That all seems like a matter of taste. I'm not an expert on the standard designs of real life interstellar space craft to compare, but they seem pretty reasonable to me. And the paint jobs? They have no practical implications at all on a space craft beyond "it took someone time to do that". You aren't relying on visual IDs at 50,000km Someone's paying millions for a ship, they can make it as garish as they want.

But the reality is that they look the way they do because the artists who actually drew it likes doing it that way. And, generally, it makes for fairly easy to use floor plans. Which are basically non-existent in most space RPGs.

The jump thing is a deliberate style choice. The original designers wanted an age of sail style lack of high speed communication. And they wanted to use relatively simple hex maps instead of 3D coordinate maps. Jump speed *does* actually vary. But it varies in distance, not time.

Traveller does have other technologies, such as stutterwarp, that travel so many light years per day or the like.

The popularity of Charted Space makes it easy to mistake from the outside, but Traveller is very definitely a toolkit for a wide range of different kinds of space opera modalities.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

But as much as I have tried other Sci-fi systems, (Stars Without Number, Coriolis, Mothership, Alien, M-Space, and even some Starfinder sourcebooks) The on thing which kept me going back to look at Traveller was the ship variety. I loved how many ships it had, with detailed deck plans, with sensible design options, and realistic roles for their existence.

The result of well-supported ship design systems. Anyone can make a ship that fits right in.

4) The silly jump = 1 week delay rule (why isn't it variable?) (overcome)

This is the genius of the Traveller system, it assures that you are alone out there. There's no calling the cavalry or rescue services, any problem is for you and you alone to handle, hence adventure...

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

Helps when the Travellers commit a crime and the warrants are always one jump behind them. Hurts when they are chasing the kidnappers who stay one jump ahead.

 

[Condottiere]

1. The default mechanics of the jump drive are fundamental to Traveller's setting of the Third Imperium.

2. I doubt it will be canonically changed, though room is available for nuance.

3. You could break down exactly what attracts you to the game, whether the setting, mechanics, or vehicles, and just keep that.

 

[To Tha Moon!]

Back in the early 80's, the ships were definitely the reason I got The Traveller Book.

 

[ottarrus]

To the OP:
Yeah, I love ships in Traveller too. And like everyone on the board, I have my ship design axes to grind.
The thing I love about Traveller ships is that ground level conception from day one has run the gamut of ship sizes and styles. Player characters get reasonably sized ships for a party of players to crew, only needing maybe one or two salaried NPCs to fill skill gaps. Navy ships look like Big. Ship. Navy. without needing a million crew members like a Death Star.
And there were clear homages to the big three franchises as Traveller was being designed. You got Annic Nova's nacelles a'la Star Trek, the Tigress is local Death Star equivalent, and the whole star fighter concept is straight out of BSG. It's nice to see a non-franchise game pay respects to the influences that got them where they are.
I agree with you about ships needing a worn-in look. Where I think it's most important is in military ships rather than player character ships, however. Military ships are crewed by people who know that this barge isn't 'home', it's an assignment. In two or four years there'll be another assignment. Because of that, there are considerably fewer eff's given about the ship you're assigned to. This is why the military is so fanatical about daily maintenance. Without it, ships that cost the Imperial Treasury billions of credits would fall apart in half their projected service life. If you go aboard a naval ship and you don't smell fresh paint somewhere, somebody hasn't started the next job yet

 

[nats]

I was brought up with Classic Traveller and the ships in those books look generally a lot more used than the illustrations we see in the new books. But of course they are also b&w so I guess I always imagined them as grey or white. I dont much like the new looking ships with bright colours. Just because one trip through an atmosphere would weather them down like the space shuttle on its return journey looked. And even ships only in space would get pelted by space dust etc. It's a personal preference mind. I always saw Traveller as gritty and realistic, not clean and new.

 

[actionman]

Just wanted to get this off my chest. I am a late comer to Traveller. I am an old RPG gamer. Cut my teeth on AD&D 2nd, West End Games Star Wars, Shadowrun, and FASAs Robotech. Later on in life, I got back into RPGs, only to discover I could not stand what D&D (and its clones) have become. (gamist systems which seem better as computer game RPGs than table top ones.) I went into OSR, and rules light instead (DCC, Mothership) , and other systems which focused more on Sandbox play or systems with a unique setting. (Free League stuff).

But as much as I have tried other Sci-fi systems, (Stars Without Number, Coriolis, Mothership, Alien, M-Space, and even some Starfinder sourcebooks) The on thing which kept me going back to look at Traveller was the ship variety. I loved how many ships it had, with detailed deck plans, with sensible design options, and realistic roles for their existence.
I ended up getting the core 4 books, despite their high cost vs other publishers.
It ended up winning me over... but this took 1.5 years.... in which time I spent a lot more money on other systems.

What kept repelling me from Traveller was: (in order of level of repulsion)
1) High cost of books (overcome)
2) Setting with dogs and lions (overcome)
3) Ship designs that look like they came from the 1970s, and not in a good way... like very basic shapes like cylinders, and ships that looked like giant vacuum cleaners (Element Cruiser) - (overcome)
4) The silly jump = 1 week delay rule (why isn't it variable?) (overcome)

But the worse one, so bad that I felt impelled even though I have finally bought into the system and rules, that I felt I still needed to post about this (in the odd chance that it actually helps steer the publishers into a direction where the next generation won't have to spend almost 2 years avoiding the great game before finally giving into it)

WHY so many ships are colored so ridiculously. I mean seriously, so many ships have obnoxiously bright primary colors, geometric shapes, and geometric shapes like target crosshairs painted all over them. It looks like a Mondrian picture. This kind of stuff like make the ships so clownishly silly looking. Its almost as if the same colorblind designer was in charge of designing all ships in the whole imperium.
What reason is there to have color shapes painted over the ship?
Or dumb circle and crosshairs on its flanks? (the Solomani SA cruiser for instance)
Ships have no reason to be painted besides for style... and a lot of the style I see in the ship books are VERY questionable from a practical perspective.

I get that the ship pictures are of NEW ships and aren't of the 'lived in' ships you see in pictures like Star Wars or shots when they have been used... but really.
The EXCEPTION to this rules seems only to be in the Adventure Class Ships book and the new upcoming Traders and Gunships. The author there finally seems to have a sense about what colors real practical ships should look like.

I agree. I loved the design sequences of Traveller. Everything, from star systems to starships to vehicles to gear. And I loved the character generation sequence, as frustrating as it was sometimes. It was a lifepath character generation system before there were lifepath character generation systems.

The 1 week per jump, the fuel requirements per jump, displacement tons for fuel storage per jump, is a necessity. If they change, Traveller's paradigm completely breaks down. This is from Traveller's wargame heritage.

Spoiler: Example

Example: Hydrogen gas can be stored at a greater density as metallic hydrogen or saturated into metallic hydrides than as liquid hydrogen.

Metallic hydrogen is 1 gram / cubic centimeter.
Liquid hydrogen is about 70 kg per cubic meter.

There are 1 million cubic centimeters in a cubic meter, so you'd get a million grams of metallic hydrogen in a cubic meter.

If my math is correct, that's 1000 kg of metallic hydrogen per cubic meter compared to 70kg of liquid hydrogen per cubic meter.

If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.

Even if metallic hydrogen was harder to store, more expensive, took longer to transfer from its metallic storage form to a usable form, every navy in Charted Space would jump at this technology.

But, as they wailed so piteously on the Traveller Mailing List, "...that wouldn't be Traaaaaaaaaaaaaa-veller!"

In this article https://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Jump_Drive it says the ship's power plant consumes the fuel in a burst to fill the capacitors which then feed the stored energy to the jump drive. This article also says jump tapes, so it could use an update.

Really? Why not charge the capacitors at the starport before leaving? Why not let the power plant charge the capacitors during travel to the jump point? Because it was a game mechanic from the very beginning, and it never had any reason or logic or plausibility beyond that.

But, despite it's faults, Traveller stands alone among all games as the best IMO design sequences in all of ttrpg gaming.