I tend to prefer a hard SF edge to my Traveller (or, at least, a hard SF veneer over the space opera heart of the game) and I hope that's shown in the previous adventures I've done.
I find it hard to write a scenario without doing all the things like calculating orbit distances and travel times etc, because (1) they really add to the flavour and (2) someone out there will get annoyed if I don't. I also like to think through the effects of some stuff on how it would be different;
In Delta 3 is Down, you may notice that there are details on fires in zero G etc, as I wanted that flavour for descriptions. In Cold Dark Grave, I spent a lot of time considering what boarding a ship that had been abandoned for years would be like, and the difficulties of moving around in such.
This Fear of Gods has similar touches, but was heavily influenced by some Andre Norton stories and Clarke's work, especially "Rendezvous with Rama" (my personal favourite). It also came out of some thoughts on Loren's sidebar on nanotechnology in GURPS Traveller, and recent reading of a lot of modern SF (eg Reynolds, Asher, Stross, MacLeod). The final influence was a Challenge article on the Abyss Rift back from the MegaTraveller era.
I wanted a scenario where the players wouldn't have the meta-game knowledge of how everything worked, and would have some real challenges to overcome. Hopefully, the playtests that Neil McGurk and I have run have showed this. However, much like Delta 3 and Cold Dark Grave, it is hard on characters. The scenario doesn't reveal 'the secret of the Abyss Rift' or anything like that, but it does provide a chance to discover something new and ancient at the same time...
