The Premises of Traveller: 1. "Jump takes a week/No ansibles"

[CordwainerFish]

And/or the toys the PCs found are unreliable/almost out of fuel/the instruction booklet is missing etc.
(Anyone read John W. Campbell's essay "No Copying Allowed"? He makes a good case that reverse engineering stuff from a higher TL is all but impossible, using the example of 1920s scientists somehow getting their hands on a 1948 missile.)

 

[Nelphine]

Re: #5 standardization

I disagree here. In a universe where it takes a long time to jump (due to point #1), everyone who can travel needs to know they can rely on someone else to repair their ship. This will enforce standardization through necessity. In 3I, the focus on trade brings this further - you cant do trade if you cant talk to each other, both by speech or equivalent, but also communication via technology like computers. This will enforce standardization through profit (and so will apply to any setting with trade as described in the core rules, even if its not Charted Space). This then gets taken even farther when megacorps are involved. One of them will sell iphon - er, comm devices - to every world cheaper than anything local can, and so that megacorps (or group of megacorps) will inadvertently enforce standardization through convenience.

Obviously, for each level of standardization, it will only apply to some things, and it will only apply after a sufficient period of time has passed.

Standardization by necessity will affect the least things, but will occur very quickly after disparate worlds meet.
Standardization for profit will occur in a medium amount of time, but affect a medium amount of things.
Inadvertent standardization by convenience will take the longest time (requiring megacorps to exist for each given product), but will eventually affect the most things.

In a setting like 3I, thousands of years have passed - there are megacorps for many many products, and so standardization will be very widespread.

 

[JustEastOfTheEdge]

I think you have missed the main point of Traveller being a science-FICTION role-playing game. Very little of it makes sense once you dive down into it, especially in the light of our post-1977 science.
You might as well write a thesis on why The Force is not a thing, or why the Teletubbies are unlikely to have evolved.

 

[Sigtrygg]

No, my copy of the 77 rules are in paper (not PDF) and in a container that for various convoluted reasons would take me at least fifteen minutes to open. They're right under the drawer with the completely-properly-registered-and-stored firearms , a tiny crossbow, and a slingshot.

But your statement is likely fair, since Traders and Gunboats came out in 1980. And my original of that one disappeared sometime in the early 80s ( I think I know who took it, but it would never stand up in court...) so I had to buy it off a dealer (um, of books and stuff) a few years back...

My comment was meant to be a little tongue in cheek, your work is excellent.

Just get the FFE CT disc - then you can search it too

 

[Sigtrygg]

Don't the Ancients show that ansibles are possible within the universe but humans and most other species have not reached the TL for them?

I guess that is a bit of a semantic argument because any game at that kind of TL is not going to be Traveller as we know it.

MWM has many times said there is no ansible or any other type of FTL communication in the OTU.

The Author of the MgT Secret of the Ancients slipped in an Ancients ansible and got away with it. So now yet another difference exists between game universes.

 

[Vormaerin]

Just like Leviathan had "Jump torpedoes" that had to be explicitly nixxed subsequently. Sometimes stuff slips past the editors.

 

[Sigtrygg]

When Leviathan was written jump capable message torpedoes were in LBB:2.

I still do not know why they were removed from the rules - remove them from the setting by all means but why remove them from the rules?

 

[Spirit of 1977]

When Leviathan was written jump capable message torpedoes were in LBB:2.

I still do not know why they were removed from the rules - remove them from the setting by all means but why remove them from the rules?

Interesting point. Particularly once you have robotic rules, the difference between a robotic x-boat and a torpedo is tonnage.

Of course:

Spoiler: Some deep lore

The reason x-boats have pilots is that they carry a lot more than just data...

 

[Vormaerin]

When Leviathan was written jump capable message torpedoes were in LBB:2.

I still do not know why they were removed from the rules - remove them from the setting by all means but why remove them from the rules?

Yeah, that is the sort of thing that should be in the rules. Part and parcel of the Rules = Setting issues that have plagued Traveller, I suppose.

 

[Spirit of 1977]

Yeah, that is the sort of thing that should be in the rules. Part and parcel of the Rules = Setting issues that have plagued Traveller, I suppose.

Tough to resolve, though. At some point, you risk the rules being "Science Fiction," which is too unwieldy. This is why I think of jump drive as being intrinsic to Traveller's rules, and I would have thought a Traveller setting would be jump travel up to TL 15 or so. But clearly that view is changing, and it does blur setting and rules.

 

[Vormaerin]

Sure, you could just make Charted Space: The RPG. But that seems kind of limiting. I'm with Geir on this one, the core of Traveller to me is the character creation system and the straightforward 2d6+ Skill mechanics.

The core of Charted Space is jump drives and no FTL communications. And I enjoy that a lot. But I've used Traveller for a lot of other kinds of games.

 

[Vormaerin]

You just have setting specific ship building books (High Guard vs Aerospace Engineer's vs Anderson & Felix, etc) at worst. Mindjammer and 2300 just had a chapter on the tweaks to Chargen for the setting specific stuff.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Interesting point. Particularly once you have robotic rules, the difference between a robotic x-boat and a torpedo is tonnage.

Of course:

Spoiler: Some deep lore

The reason x-boats have pilots is that they carry a lot more than just data...

And yet it states in S7 that xboats can function without a crew...

 

[Condottiere]

You can have a hundred tonne jump torpedo.

As long as you stick someone intelligent and conscious in there.

 

[Sigtrygg]

In LBB1 77 it was a jump capable 50kg missile.

 

[Vormaerin]

I'd forgotten about that. I didn't actually *use* the 77 rules very long, because I got the Deluxe Box Set before I got a lot of games in with the original rules.

 

[WHULorigan]

When Leviathan was written jump capable message torpedoes were in LBB:2.

I still do not know why they were removed from the rules - remove them from the setting by all means but why remove them from the rules?

Yeah, that is the sort of thing that should be in the rules. Part and parcel of the Rules = Setting issues that have plagued Traveller, I suppose.

Probably because by the time CT 2nd ed. (1981) rolled out (when JTorps were decanonized), the Rules = OTU Setting was already establishing itself.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

In 1977 rules there is a way to read the rules that gets you to the understanding that a ship without a maneuver drive doesn't need a power plant. Hence the xboat and massive jump drive.

Yes, I call it "arguably legal" in LBB2'77.

Unless you read this:

LBB2'77, p11:
_ _ The Engineering Section: Each starship is fitted with a power plant (to provide internal power and power for the maneuver drive), a maneuver drive (for interplanetary travel), and a jump drive (for interstellar jumps). Each is essential to the definition of a starship.

to closely or to literally.

 

[tytalan]

X-Boats are not inevitable. Ships carrying the news on a regular base are. But the X-Boat is an example of a ship that only existed because of an old RULES set and has been forced into every SETTING incarnation of the 3I setting even so they stopped making sense around the times of MegaTraveller.

You can remove the X-Boat from the OTU and replace it with a J4/M1 100dt, TL13 craft easily (You need TL13 for the J-Drive). I recently posted a HG 2e/2022 design that needs no special tweaks to work. Such a ship will not change the setting in any relevant way. The job of the X-Tender will change to "flying fuel station" but that is all

still a X-Boat you just gave it a M-Drive to remove the need for a tender. Actually if you do that a station would make more sense than the tenders. The core of the X-Boat is not its lack of M-Drive it’s the pony express style of handing off the information to the next.

 

[WHULorigan]

This is the big one, the premise that determines so much of the rest of Traveller. To be explicit:

2) There are no ansibles, subspace radio, or any other way for energy to travel faster than light speed. Sending a message means sticking it in a starship and jumping.

Don't the Ancients show that ansibles are possible within the universe but humans and most other species have not reached the TL for them?

I guess that is a bit of a semantic argument because any game at that kind of TL is not going to be Traveller as we know it.

MWM has many times said there is no ansible or any other type of FTL communication in the OTU.

The Author of the MgT Secret of the Ancients slipped in an Ancients ansible and got away with it. So now yet another difference exists between game universes.

I think the FTL limited has been retconned to 'no signals faster than a ship could jump' to let the Empress Wave slip by on a technicality, even if I suspect it was originally just an accidental conflation of parsecs and light-years that an editor might have caught...

I personally think the idea of the Ultra-High-TL ansible is a good idea for the sake of a believable TL progression (just well beyond TL15). It also has the advantage of ensuring that the "look-and-feel" of an Ultra-Tech society does look much different from the OTU universe that we are familiar with, and not just the "same old thing" with a few more gadgets (just like a 21st Century Military/Navy & Society looks very different from a 13th Century Military/Navy & Society). But then this is a thing for relic technology and/or stories of precursor civilizations (or for brief one-off interactions with a distant but still extant Ultra-TL race who hopefully does not want to be overly bothered with "ants" like you as long as you do not bother them).

But having said that, "ansible" can mean different things.

It can mean:

1. Near instantaneous communication system over interstellar distances with no appreciable lag-time (i.e. we can speak "face-to-face");
2. Interstellar FTL Communication with a manageable lag-time (i.e. minutes/hours/days - like current in-system communications);
3. Interstellar FTL Communication with a long lag time (i.e. weeks/months - but still better than lightspeed).

Each of the above could further be coupled with other limitations that impinge on its usefulness as well.

For example, in Larry Niven's Known Space Universe, FTL-Communication is accomplished by hyperwave, but hyperwave will not cross a hyperspace-singularity (and from the perspective of hyperspace, an entire star-system gravity-well typically appears as such a singularity). Thus, it is necessary to send a transmission via EM-Radio signal to a hyperwave relay station at the edge of a star-system which will encode it and then retransmit it via hyperwave to be picked up by a similar station at the edge of another star system until it reaches a station in the destination system that can transmit the signal via EM-Radio to an in-system receiver. (Alternately, a starship can also carry a hyperwave transceiver and send and pick-up signals directly as long as they are outside a hyperspace singularity). The speed of hyperwave itself in the Known Space Universe is for all practical purposes instantaneous relative to the astrographic size of Known Space.

In an IMTU Traveller setting, one could modify this idea somewhat for use as well without necessarily breaking the core presuppositions of the setting as long as one is careful to consider the ramifications. As an example, let's suppose one wanted to build a "HyperComm Radio" using some type of "Jump-tech" principles for their IMTU setting. Let's give it the following properties:

1. The wave-packets of the HyperComm signal are much longer wavelength than the "signal" of something the size of a vessel, and therefore much more susceptible to distortion, so they require a much more undistorted spacetime for transmission (i.e. they can only be cleanly transmitted beyond 100,000 diameters from a gravity well without significant signal distortion and degradation);
2. Unlike a large mass (like a vessel) going thru Jump space with a highly defined position vector, a HyperComm signal is broadcast * (not narrow/beamcast), and will effectively propagate in all directions from its transmitter;
3. The speed of the transmission could potentially be either:
   1. Maximum speed for the Order of the Hyperspace used (e.g. 6-or-9+ pc/week for Jump; 90+ pc/week for Hop; 900+ pc/week for Skip; etc.); or
   2. Encoded in the same way that regular jumps are encoded (i.e. J-1, J-2, J-3, etc.) based on current TL.
4. The HyperComm transmission would arrive "everywhere" within the transmission range at the end of the 1-week (±10% [or ±30% (?)] ) transmission time.

* (EDIT: Another possibility is that the transmission could be narrowcast, but the shape/width of the "transmission cone" is based on the "Jump-rating" of the HyperComm transmitter - i.e. you need to build a transmission cone by counting out a number of hexes no greater than the "Jump-rating" of the HyperComm system. ​

The advantage to this would be that a ship could put out a "distress call" if it mis-jumped into an empty hex or were otherwise disabled (if the GM decided that the HyperComm transmitter was small enough to be carried by a vessel), or could send a message back to a home base with a lag time comparable to Courrier transmission rates, and still potentially have to encode it to be successively retransmitted to get to a final destination.

The disadvantage would be that anyone within range and the ability to crack encoding could potentially intercept transmissions, including a dedicated ship hovering in a Kuiper Belt or outside an Oort cloud at several light-days or light weeks distance (or even in an empty interstellar hex) monitoring and downloading communications traffic. So if you want to make sure your communications are delivered securely (as well as any small high-priority parcels), you still might have need of a Courrier or Packet Ship (or X-Boat) system.