No Jump Drive Traveller

[Mithras]

For years I've been tinkering with a solar system modification where grav drives did not exist and the human race flew around the solar system in fusion-drive rockets with spin habitats.

But I was thinking yesterday of flipping that. What would our solar system look like with Traveller grav-drive ships ... but no jump drive. It would essentially be a very constrained, compact ... almost resembling modern day Earth with (almost) instantaneous communications, and most places reachable within a week or so of travelling.

To create variety, it might be necessary to have some terraforming ongoing or even completed. Colonization would be very advanced, although I would not use the 5000 AD dateline, something a little bit closer to the 21st century I think.

Benefits? Like the old D&D modules where you get a base location/castle/city and an surrounding sandbox area suitable for exploration and adventure. The GM, even the players, can get a real grip on the small-scale setting, recurrent NPCs, recurrent ships, they can 'master' the setting as it were.

Drawbacks? My only reservation is the redundancy of free-traders and trade speculation. Its DHL in space, not buy low try to sell high....

 

[hdan]

If you assume that the moons of Jupiter and Saturn can become habitable with some fancy radiation shielding, then you can have a very nice "Aegean Sea in Space" type situation, where small ships ply the orbits of those planets, and each moon is its own nation.

The old "Jovian Chronicles" game explored that idea, though in a very GUNDAM-esque way.

Cowboy BeBop is another source of inspiration for a setting like that, and is more Travellerish in its flavor than Jovian Chronicles.

 

[Mithras]

I don't know much about those settings. I'll look into Jovian Chronicles.
The Saturnurnian system has tolerable radiation I seem to remember.

OR we can postulate that some side-effect of the invention grav drive is a radiation shield

Thinking about it, the setting would be more rewarding with a longer term colonization. At 3000AD you could do all kinds of things, and leave our modern history well behind in the dusty annals. Effectively creating a whole new interplanetary society, almost from scratch...

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Piers Anthony wrote a series of books about just such a situation. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of it (there were 5 books all together).

Each planet or moon was settled by people from a particular place on Earth. For example, Jupiter was settled by the Americas. The United States of North Jupiter was an analogy for the US. The Republic of the Red Spot was Mexico. The moons of Jupiter were Central America.

When I get home, I will see if I can find the titles of the books.

 

[BP]

Bio of a Space Tyrant series?

(6 books I think - not his best work IMHO - YMMV).

Actually the OPs 'verse sounds like a good Firefly setting (re: another topic currently active)

 

[Mithras]

I did consider Firefly, that could easily be mined for ideas ... fast travel and instant communications... I'm not having horses on Ganymede though.

Actually the OPs 'verse sounds like a good Firefly setting (re: another topic currently active)

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Bio of a Space Tyrant series?

(6 books I think - not his best work IMHO - YMMV).

Actually the OPs 'verse sounds like a good Firefly setting (re: another topic currently active)

Yep, that is the series I was thinking of. Agreed about the quality, but it does provide for an intersting background with justification for taking many of the current cultures of earth and spreading them into the solar system. That provides a somewhat familiar background to the players and the Referee.

 

[captainjack23]

I don't know much about those settings. I'll look into Jovian Chronicles.
The Saturnurnian system has tolerable radiation I seem to remember.

OR we can postulate that some side-effect of the invention grav drive is a radiation shield

Actually, I think that that effect is one of the neccessary and assumed side effects for the traveller grav drive (yes, I'm talking about canon.. :wink: ) -especially given the speeds it can produce and the lack of rad or micrometiorite shielding on most ships.

 

[Perturabo]

A sort of travelleresque setting without jump drive would be cowboy bebop. No FTL but they do have some sort of near lightspeed conduit system for the solar system.

 

[locarno24]

It sounds a lot like the settings shown in Firefly or Gundam, as noted. Also sort of reminiscent of the Steven Baxter series (at least before they started putting wormholes everywhere), and quite a lot of short stories.

Computer game wise, Haegemonia and Nexus also spring to mind. Starlancer as well (if you ignore the short-ranged jump engines)

Haegemonia in particular - and a lot of Arthur C Clarke short stories - is a good source to mine for ideas.

You get settled worlds - not necessarily terraformed, which start to grow in population. Living in a space colony is difficult, and even 'basic' tasks are skilled labour. Eventually you get a significant proportion of humans living off earth, and a far higher percentage of them are the 'best brains', leading to a lot of tensions, leading up to declaring independence.

Setting up colonies by nation allows lots of recognisable cultures, but allows you to throw in 'spacer' cultures which are in the process of evolving. Most planets might have colonies from one or more Earth Nation (although this might be one moon exclusively for each colony on something like Jupiter), giving you all sorts of 'border tensions'.

If the setting is at the tipping point of independence, you'll have lots of secessionist colonies looking for shipping divorced from earth nation control, lots of nationalist colonies looking for someone to 'get one over' on adjacent rivals (or secessionists), the first megacorporations not tied to earth starting to emerge... I'm sure they can find plenty of work.

Free traders can definitely make money. Speculation is less relevant in a 'what's the price going to be when we arrive' sense - because any planet is within a day's radio traffic (pretty much the absolute worst case, Neptune-to-Uranus at opposite sides of the sun, are only about seven light-hours (plus some relay time as you obviously don't have line-of-sight).

You can still buy low and try to sell high, though. Different colonies have different resources, different industrial abilities and different urgent needs. Hell, you can hold a two-way conference with anywhere on this planet with a £30 lump of plastic from your local supermarket, yet trading, investment, merchant shipping and so forth remains an extremely profitable black art.

With a 2-3G ship often needing weeks or even a month for very long voyages, predicting where and when demand with emerge for something you can't afford to hold in a stockpile remains as critical a skill as ever.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

You could also take the Firefly idea, but change it to your suiting.

Have the whole thing take place in a different solar system (one you design), possibly with multiple stars set hundreds of AU apart, each with their planets and moons...

How they got there was via an STL generation ship, so Earth is but a distant memory. Give them a few hundred years, or a thousand, and you could fill those solar systems as you like.

If you had a binary system with 2-3 actually habitable worlds and a couple more marginal worlds (like a slightly terraformed Mars), then a lot of outposts on moons and other worlds, you could have almost a subsector of different worlds to create.

 

[DFW]

Actually, I think that that effect is one of the neccessary and assumed side effects for the traveller grav drive (yes, I'm talking about canon.. :wink: ) -especially given the speeds it can produce and the lack of rad or micrometiorite shielding on most ships.

One fatal flaw in that theory is, a shield against micro-meteors that would be effective at interplanetary travel speeds would also cause missiles to bounce.
Inescapable physics.

 

[simonh]

You might also look at using grav drives as a possible propulsion ssytem for STL interstellar travel. In larry Niven's Known Space stories the Kzin use gravitic drives to colonise and conquer a decent tract of space.

Simon Hibbs

 

[captainjack23]

Actually, I think that that effect is one of the neccessary and assumed side effects for the traveller grav drive (yes, I'm talking about canon.. :wink: ) -especially given the speeds it can produce and the lack of rad or micrometiorite shielding on most ships.

One fatal flaw in that theory is, a shield against micro-meteors that would be effective at interplanetary travel speeds would also cause missiles to bounce.
Inescapable physics.

Still works for rads -well, except when it is a particle beam...or a nearby burst....perhaps if there some kind of .....mmmm......oh the heck with it. yeah. good point. hang on......<waves hands, emits unobtanium radiation> there. fixed. 8)

 

[DFW]

Still works for rads -well, except when it is a particle beam...or a nearby burst....perhaps if there some kind of .....mmmm......oh the heck with it. yeah. good point. hang on......<waves hands, emits unobtanium radiation> there. fixed. 8)

That's how we fix it as GMs

One point I just remembered. MT ship design required 40 points of hull armour for interplanetary & star ships for micro-meteor & rad protection.

 

[Perturabo]

Actually, I think that that effect is one of the neccessary and assumed side effects for the traveller grav drive (yes, I'm talking about canon.. :wink: ) -especially given the speeds it can produce and the lack of rad or micrometiorite shielding on most ships.

One fatal flaw in that theory is, a shield against micro-meteors that would be effective at interplanetary travel speeds would also cause missiles to bounce.
Inescapable physics.

Not necessarily. An advanced missile might have propulsion and course correction abilities not found on typical space flotsam and be able to counter the deflection effect.

 

[Chronus]

But I was thinking yesterday of flipping that. What would our solar system look like with Traveller grav-drive ships ... but no jump drive. It would essentially be a very constrained, compact ... almost resembling modern day Earth with (almost) instantaneous communications, and most places reachable within a week or so of travelling.

To create variety, it might be necessary to have some terraforming ongoing or even completed. Colonization would be very advanced, although I would not use the 5000 AD dateline, something a little bit closer to the 21st century I think.

So, I take it you haven't looked at Beltstrike yet (or wasn't impressed)?

Excellent adventure/campaign, IMOHO.