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

rinku said:
Truth be told, interstellar range clairvoyance doesn't really break anything if it's linked into the Jump rules. That is, the Psion somehow uses Jumpspace to view what's happening one week ago at parsec distances. Possibly requiring some kind of active transmission from the distant location. And likely very limited in terms of bandwidth.

That is, you could deliver the information as fast using a ship, and deliver a LOT more of it, but the Psionic method would be more secure and likely have other advantages. You could even have it be longer ranged than Jump Drive at a given Tech Level, or require less expensive equipment.

On the other hand, a Jumpspace Psi broadcast might be like radio - any sufficiently able Psion might be able to hear it. Advantages and disadvantages there - messages can always be encrypted, though.

"This is Psi-radio Free Cronor, broadcasting to all our brave forces and allies in a three parsec distance..."
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Sure, this works fine. I have a different solution to jump-based psionics (jaunting), as I like that energy cannot be jumped, which is implied with jump psionics.
 
Energy isn't matter, it isn't even any kind of substance. It's a bookkeeping device. It's the time-flavored component of the energy-momentum 4-vector.
 
CordwainerFish said:
Energy isn't matter, it isn't even any kind of substance. It's a bookkeeping device. It's the time-flavored component of the energy-momentum 4-vector.
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So the question remains... does that present any barrier to information transmission through Jump Space? ;)
 
rinku said:
So the question remains... does that present any barrier to information transmission through Jump Space? ;)
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FTL absolutely destroys either causality or the principle of relativity, so it's comparing cheese to Wednesday. My advice, do not try to physically justify jump. You'll just annoy the player who knows more physics than you do.
 
Right. All FTL is magic.
But given the setting has that magic, it's fair to discuss aspects of it. Especially if it's involving the other type of magic (Psionics) that's part of Traveller.
Or maybe the other other type of magic (reactionless drives). It's probably all connected anyway. Unified Plot Device Theory... it all works through interactions with the quantum narrative field...
 
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CordwainerFish said:
FTL absolutely destroys either causality or the principle of relativity, so it's comparing cheese to Wednesday. My advice, do not try to physically justify jump. You'll just annoy the player who knows more physics than you do.
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Cororally the causality violation of jump drive and relativity is often over stated by people who think they understand more physics than they do :)
 
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CordwainerFish said:
Energy isn't matter, it isn't even any kind of substance. It's a bookkeeping device. It's the time-flavored component of the energy-momentum 4-vector.
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Energy and Mass are identical under Relativity. E=mc2. This was one of the revolutionary understandings of modern physics.
 
phavoc said:
3 - Nobility is not a requirement for control of an empire that has slow communication. Many empires in history were able to control empires similar to Traveller. Democracy wasn't a concept back then - having a basically hereditary ruling class was the defacto norm across the world. Depending on the empire you had essentially civilian administrators (governors) appointed by the central government who ruled in name of the empire and were defacto kings - and in some instances they let that idea go to their head and declared themselves kings.
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Nobility is not a requirement, but local control is. Nobility and feudalism just happen to be the historic methods used when centralized control is impossible.

phavoc said:
4 - A number of disagreements here have been posted on the other thread. Space travel in the future should not be considered "unpleasant". A more descriptive adjective(s) would be "time consuming", and "expensive" - though neither is out of reach of the average citizen. It just means you can't hop aboard a starship and travel to another star system as easily and cheaply as people travel today. As we see from many nations, especially in the industrialized world, people DO take long vacations, sometimes around the world, for weeks at a time. Millions of people do that every year on this planet. So it seems entirely reasonable and within the expected realm of possibility that regular space travel in comfortable / luxurious settings will be seen. Though don't expect the average citizen to travel from Core to Regina on a regular basis. Travel within the sub-sector should be considered a norm.
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Agent of the Imperium plays with the idea that most people are uncomfortable both with going through Jump space and in living long-term on worlds they were not born on. The gravity is wrong, the air is wrong, the smells are wrong, the people are wrong, the food is wrong, etc. etc. Interstellar travellers are therefore relatively rare.

phavoc said:
5 - Standardization is, and isn't, to be expected. Nobody is going to go through all the effort of inventing an integrated circuit and build it differently from world to world. Nor will people invent a 5mm screw on one world and a 5.5mm screw on another. Just like today you see standards across the board for many, many, many things.
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If worlds are sufficiently populated and "self-contained" economically they may well not see much advantage in caring that other worlds do things differently, just as the U.S. sticks with their own measurement system.
 
Of course many technologies in Traveller are fantasies: jumpspace, gravitics, anagathics, synaptic robot brains, psionics, and so on. But I think jumpspace is a clever fiction that integrates with reality rather well. Jump does not involve spacial travel, so the speed of light is never exceeded. Rather, jumpspace has different physical laws, and allows a ship to emerge in realspace much further than would be allowed in realspace. So no "real" physical laws are violated because activity is transferred to a space with different laws. You are free to think that is dumb.
 
You could make a case that the OTU's physics are those as understood in the 1950's... similar to how Space:1889's physics are those as understood in the late 19th C.
 
rinku said:
You could make a case that the OTU's physics are those as understood in the 1950's... similar to how Space:1889's physics are those as understood in the late 19th C.
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If that is the case you will lose almost all of the young generations who look at those understandings of the universe and can not understand them since they can not relate to the 1950s or even 1970s mindset anymore than we can understand the mindset of drilling into someone's skull to let the demons out. Most young people can not even fathom how We survived without smart phones.
 
Bold of you to assume many young people play Traveller ;)
Gen X and most of Gen Y understand. Even the Millennials remember a time without smartphones and how to operate a VHS player.
 
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