Interstellar Communications in Traveller

[Vormaerin]

They are last week's trash for the Ancients.

 

[WHULorigan]

The Third Imperium TL isn't there yet in the current timeline, true. Doesn't mean stuff isn't being experimented with somewhere.

I am not arguing about some secret isolated high-tech group somewhere. Or about some other star-spanning confederation in some other arm of the galaxy. I am talking about the known polities that exist in 1105 or thereabouts in Charted Space. There could be Leap, Bound, or Vault Drive cultures on the other side of the galaxy or in the Globular Cluster's of the Galactic Halo, or even in the Magellanic Clouds.

Or even ultratech cultures who have discovered inertialess drives for that matter.

 

[Condottiere]

It seems self delusionary that Traveller character generation and game mechanics are generic enough for one size fits all genres.

Class system in Dungeons And Dragons, Big DADdy, works for fantasy, because fantasy is inherently over the top, and character growth is entwined with personal power accumulation.

Traveller's tends to be a snapshot at midlife crisis.

 

[Terry Mixon]

Canon's a term only relevant to Mongoose authors. The original canon on Hop drives is that they don't get deployed to a significant degree for another 8 centuries, but that "fact" is pretty much irrelevant to any actual game at the table. And may not be true any more. Absolutely someone is working on better jump drives, whether that's J7 or H1 or warp engines.

The issue of canonicity of the epic campaigns is mostly that they are obviously not designed to exist together. But if Mongoose wants to fix that or declare some canon and others not, they can. That declaration would still only be relevant to authors publishing official material.

I was thinking about canon as a term and how this applies (or doesn't) to things like Singularity. The way Mongoose is going, they have made this snapshot of what is happening in 1105, so the events of Singularity are canon. They likely won't be following up on the developments in it or the consequences, so a GM is free to do as they please and ignore what they want. Even so, the prototype Hop Drive is there in published material for 1105, so the consequences can be wrangled about by the likes of us. That makes the existence of prototype Hop Drive ships is canon, to my thinking.

 

[Vormaerin]

Sure, it's published material. You'll probably just never see a hop drive again. Just like Personal Energy Shields are canon and no one in even a single published book actually has one.

But, yes, if someone at Mongoose wants to write future adventures around the adventures of TL16 ships and their autonomous AIs or sentients downloaded into robots, then they have precedent. Same with Ancients battleships appearing to vaporize Imperial Navy squadrons.

It would be a nuisance if someone else wrote an "official" adventure about that research facility and they weren't working on prototype hop drives, because then you have contradictory canon.

I don't think it should matter to anyone not working for Mongoose what the canon is, other than wanting to know what's written before you decide what you are actually going to do. YMMV.

 

[WHULorigan]

Cross-post from Phoenix Project Refits thread:

As an aside, something else to consider:

In T5 (which first introduced most of these technologies - MgT is just porting it to their game mechanics) there are certain technologies that fall under the category of "paradigm shifts", meaning that a culture does not necessarily just discover them because they reach the appropriate TL. Many cultures, if not most NEVER discover them, in many cases well past the introductory TL.

Three that are explicitly mentioned in the T5 technology section (TL 0-33) are:

1. Jump Drive(s)
2. Fusion Plus
3. Realty Manipulation

A culture may reach TL18, for example , and never invent Jump or Hop (but may hit TL 20 and invent Skip, and then Jump and Hop might seem obvious).

 

[rinku]

It might be worth drawing a distinction between TL17 prototypes and TL16 prototypes here, too.

MANY worlds in the Imperium are TL15, and that's an established, mature general ceiling. SOME worlds are in early TL16.

Logically, it's much less likely that any of the TL16 worlds are anywhere near as able to produce TL17 prototypes as the TL15 ones are to produce TL16 ones. In the former case, they're pushing the bounds of known science and technology with possibly a little help and inspiration from artifacts. Limits are expected, over and above what might be presented in HG22.

In the latter case, it's more a matter of the local TL15 (or lower) production base retooling to implement advances that have been developed elsewhere. A TL16 "protoype" built at Mora may be a case of importing critical TL16 components from Vincennes and using TL15 parts and systems where they can.

Isolated (but not out-of communication) worlds might still have access to higher tech schematics and descriptions of the science and technology.