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

[Condottiere]

You have to define what part would remain consistent.

I had a lot of fun with Mage, since you had to figure out effects that could be both coincidental, and within the laws of physics.

 

[Vormaerin]

It's the age old story. Keeping Traveller (the rules) as a thing distinct from the settings it is played in. GDW was not good at distinguishing Traveller from Charted Space.

Traveller lets you play anything from near future space to The Culture without too much difficulty. The problem is that thile they put "these are the assumptions" for 2300 or Mindjammer or whatever, they don't do so for Charted Space. They just rely on people knowing that warp drive and ion cannons are not part of Charted Space. And that eventually breaks down in little ways over time.

 

[FreeTrav]

Hmmm, discs with a Imperial ship on one side and a Zhodani ship on the other, use that to fight the 5FW, whoever flips the most ships wins.

That would be the Battle of Zhothello, then?

 

[rinku]

The problem is the exotic stuff that has no place in the Third Imperium setting has already started making its way into said setting thanks to author's not knowing that some of the tech is "forbidden".

"Forbidden"... or just crazy high tech? Once you start to get into deep Ancients territory, they physics book may as well go out the window, and that's been around since the original Secrets (with hints in the leadup).

Most science fiction sticks with One True Way to Break Physics, or One Big Lie (usually its FTL), but I don't have much of a problem seeding much of the exotic tech, with caution. Classic Traveller has both regular Jump Drive and whatever portal thing Grandfather uses. You probably wouldn't use Jump Drive if Hyperspace Drives exist, and if Star Trek shields were possible they'd be in common use, but most of it can exist together. Hop and Skip drives are practically Canon.

 

[rinku]

It's the age old story. Keeping Traveller (the rules) as a thing distinct from the settings it is played in. GDW was not good at distinguishing Traveller from Charted Space.

Traveller lets you play anything from near future space to The Culture without too much difficulty. The problem is that thile they put "these are the assumptions" for 2300 or Mindjammer or whatever, they don't do so for Charted Space. They just rely on people knowing that warp drive and ion cannons are not part of Charted Space. And that eventually breaks down in little ways over time.

*Cough*
Mongoose put Ion Cannons in the regular weapon list, not the Exotic one. Railguns too.
As far as I can see those ARE part of Mongoose 3I, just like personal scale Stunners. And I have no problem with either.

 

[Vormaerin]

Pretty sure they were put in a supplement first then later someone just added them to the rules update, but I could be wrong about that.

My point is that the rulebook should not be the definition of what is intended for Charted Space. Charted Space should have it own list, the way all the other settings do. Then you can put more stuff in the rule book and make Traveller easier to use for other playstyles.

You can put whatever you want into your campaign. But a lot of the problems people have with designing ships or making fleet combat work come from this kind of "cool idea that would be neat to have in the rules" being automatically added to Charted Space, which isn't designed for it.

The whole "Empty Space" ruleset (s) is really freaking cool....but also completely breaks the history of Charted Space, which relies rather heavily on the Rifts for geopolitics. When they should be fully mapped with trails blazed with those rules (or with various technologies like ramscoops and the mongoose version of collectors being readily available). Spacefarers have been on both sides of the rifts for thousands of years.

These are things that SHOULD be in the game's rules. But are not a thing that Charted Space is designed to handle. Personal energy shields, ion weapons, no such thing as empty space, etc are things not reflected in the setting. Like why didn't Strephon have a high power invisible energy shield to avoid being assassinated?

Traveller would be in a better place if the rules the rules. And each setting was it's own thing. Then you wouldn't need to have special sections in the rulebook for "things that don't apply to one of our settings".

 

[AndrewW]

Pretty sure they were put in a supplement first then later someone just added them to the rules update, but I could be wrong about that.

Ion cannons initially appeared in the 2nd edition High Guard.

 

[Sigtrygg]

"Forbidden"... or just crazy high tech?

Not crazy high tech, forbidden. The cartoon physics that it is based on doesn't exist in the Third Imperium.
No hyperdrive, no warp drive, no stutterwarp, no tachyon weapons, no magic energy screens oops the Third Imperium author broke that one...

Once you start to get into deep Ancients territory, they physics book may as well go out the window, and that's been around since the original Secrets (with hints in the leadup).

High tech is a completely different thing to banned tech - see above list. The author of the Secret of the Ancients got away with something that should have been spotted by the secret squirrel squad and removed - no ansibles, no FTL comms, ever.

Most science fiction sticks with One True Way to Break Physics, or One Big Lie (usually its FTL), but I don't have much of a problem seeding much of the exotic tech, with caution.

The Third Imperium gets away with much because it has a different suspenders snapping tech appearing as TLs advance - gravitics, inertia compensation, jump, damper/meson, black globe, hop...

Classic Traveller has both regular Jump Drive and whatever portal thing Grandfather uses.

Nope.
Grandfather's portal technology has nothing to do with FTL travel.
Portal tech allows access to pocket universes, a ship in grandfather's three system pocket universe still has to use its jump drive to move from system to system.

You probably wouldn't use Jump Drive if Hyperspace Drives exist, and if Star Trek shields were possible they'd be in common use, but most of it can exist together. Hop and Skip drives are practically Canon.

Hop is canon - see Galaxiad which is a canon era.

You can build a setting that has loads of different technologies that do similar things - see the Culture. The Third Imperium used to have rules.

 

[Condottiere]

Weapon systems availability tends to shape how you can, and will, fight.

 

[WHULorigan]

*Cough*
Mongoose put Ion Cannons in the regular weapon list, not the Exotic one. Railguns too.
As far as I can see those ARE part of Mongoose 3I, just like personal scale Stunners. And I have no problem with either.

But Ion Cannons were most certainly NOT a part of the Charted Space Setting (although if reskinned and slightly reimagined, say as EMP Projectors or Electronic Scramblers, they could be).

Ion Cannons come straight from Star Wars tech. And as such, they are fine. But they should be in a section for Star Wars Tech, or Alt Tech, or in a Star Wars Sourcebook. Not just left out in the generic tech section, because "Ion Weapons" do not work in the manner described in the Real World; they work that way in the Star Wars Universe. The Charted Space Universe has sometimes been called "Hard Space Opera" because it at least tries to nod to real world science (or some believable, suspend your disbelief extrapolation of it).

The problem is that if Mongoose wants to pick up the ball that GDW dropped early on for Traveller as a "Generic Sci-Fi Role Playing Game", which I am fully in support of despite loving the Charted Space setting, then they need to make a clear decision in their approach to publication and rigidly stick with it.

Either:

1. Make the Traveller Core Rule Book and its Supplements about Charted Space (and ONLY have Charted Space material in it), and place anything else in an "Alternate Traveller Universe (ATU)" section, and publish their other Settings with disclaimers in the front of the Book as to what is EXPLICITLY EXCLUDED and IS NOT used from the Core Book Setting, OR
2. Make the Core Rule Book ENTIRELY GENERIC and include in it only the Basic Tropes that are commonly found across many Sci-Fi Settings, and then have every Published Setting that they support (INCLUDING the Charted Space setting sourcebooks) detail up front what systems from the Core Book are NOT used, if any, while clearly detailing the setting-specific ones that are.

The issue is one of respecting the setting. Nobody would want to see Phasers introduced in a Star Wars sourcebook, any more than they would want to see Dwarves with Springfield Rifles showing up in a Middle Earth Setting. What individual GMs want to do with the setting once they have it in their hands is entirely up to them, of course.

For Charted Space:

• Railguns and Stunners fit within the parameters of the Setting.
• Ion Cannons do not fit the setting, at least not as described.
• "Neutron-Lasers" do not fit the setting, at least not as described (or at least they need better "setting fluff").
• Tachyon weapons do not fit the setting, period.
• Personal Shields do not fit the setting at the TL noted in Third Imperium; (though I love the idea, it breaks the Setting because of the implications of usage (or mysterious lack thereof) in other contexts).

 

[rinku]

Different editions of Traveller have used different tech base rules. TNE for example overhauled M-Drives and weapons to be much harder... but ran up against actual physics that pretty much proved it didn't work as wanted and had to bend things with imaginary gravity manipulation tech.

Mongoose sensibly reverted that to how things worked in Classic, so we're back to space opera with a certain level of firmness, unless the Referee makes some deliberate choices. Space gun that shoots a beam that disrupts unshielded electronics, but only turns up at Stellar techs (TL12) works for me. Maybe that's a more realistic effect of a charged particle beam hitting a hull? I don't know, but I'm good to assume it may be possible with a thousand years of research. Or the right ions (which are just charged particles anyway). Nikola Tesla might have known.

 

[Vormaerin]

It's not that you can't justify anything you feel like having. The problem is of the line editor introducing technologies to the system that should have counters and don't. Or would change how combats are fought, but don't. Because the system is not designed to account for them. And there's no examples of said weapons in use in any adventure, fiction, etc within CHARTED SPACE. The same problem that personal energy shields have.

High Guard comments that pirates and customs cutters often have them. Except that they don't. And the lack of disabling weapons like tractor beams and ion cannons is a long standing trope of Charted Space that affects all kinds of expectations of gameplay.

It's not just ion cannons that have this issue. The point defense lasers have a version of this issue too. There's no design space for them to fit into, so the mechanics are a mess. Beam lasers are already the point defense weapons of Charted Space.

If merchants and smugglers have to worry about people disabling their ships with ion cannons "Because they are commonly used by pirates and customs ships", then the ships designed for smuggling and backwater trading should be designed to account for that possibility. Especially the expensive fancy ones. But they aren't. Because it isn't a thing in practice.

Again.. no one is talking about how people run their games. We are talking about how Mongoose presents the material and how different settings are maintained while using a common ruleset. GMs can change those core assumptions, but the publisher shouldn't. Not unless they are doing a full revamp of how things are presented given these new technologies.

 

[boggo2300]

But Ion Cannons were most certainly NOT a part of the Charted Space Setting (although if reskinned and slightly reimagined, say as EMP Projectors or Electronic Scramblers, they could be).

Ion Cannons come straight from Star Wars tech. And as such, they are fine. But they should be in a section for Star Wars Tech, or Alt Tech, or in a Star Wars Sourcebook. Not just left out in the generic tech section, because "Ion Weapons" do not work in the manner described in the Real World; they work that way in the Star Wars Universe. The Charted Space Universe has sometimes been called "Hard Space Opera" because it at least tries to nod to real world science (or some believable, suspend your disbelief extrapolation of it).

The problem is that if Mongoose wants to pick up the ball that GDW dropped early on for Traveller as a "Generic Sci-Fi Role Playing Game", which I am fully in support of despite loving the Charted Space setting, then they need to make a clear decision in their approach to publication and rigidly stick with it.

Either:

1. Make the Traveller Core Rule Book and its Supplements about Charted Space (and ONLY have Charted Space material in it), and place anything else in an "Alternate Traveller Universe (ATU)" section, and publish their other Settings with disclaimers in the front of the Book as to what is EXPLICITLY EXCLUDED and IS NOT used from the Core Book Setting, OR
2. Make the Core Rule Book ENTIRELY GENERIC and include in it only the Basic Tropes that are commonly found across many Sci-Fi Settings, and then have every Published Setting that they support (INCLUDING the Charted Space setting sourcebooks) detail up front what systems from the Core Book are NOT used, if any, while clearly detailing the setting-specific ones that are.

The issue is one of respecting the setting. Nobody would want to see Phasers Introduced in a Star Wars sourcebook, any more than they would want to see Dwarves with Springfield Rifles showing up in a Middle Earth Setting. What individual GMs want to do with the setting once they have it in their hands is entirely up to them, of course.

For Charted Space:

• Railguns and Stunners fit within the parameters of the Setting.
• Ion Cannons do not fit the setting, at least not as described.
• "Neutron-Lasers" do not fit the setting, at least not as described (or at least they need better "setting fluff").
• Tachyon weapons do not fit the setting, period.
• Personal Shields do not fit the setting at the TL noted in Third Imperium; (though I love the idea, it breaks the Setting because of the implications of usage (or mysterious lack thereof) in other contexts).

Ion Cannon actually pre-date star wars by more than 40 years

 

[WHULorigan]

Ion Cannon actually pre-date star wars by more than 40 years

Where and in what context were they introduced, and what was their supposed tactical effect?

 

[boggo2300]

Where and in what context were they introduced, and what was their supposed tactical effect?

1935 by John W Campbell in a story called Conquest of the Planets in Amazing stories
He called them Guns instead of Cannons (which is a more correct name) and they were apparently deadly rather than EMP generators (which isn't really surprising in 1935), though they were ship mounted,

The name had been used multiple times after that by multiple people, including Hal Clement, Jack Vance and Brian Aldiss (though they tended to make them man portable) before Empire Strikes Back, which to my knowledge is the first place to use the tem in Star Wars, it was a well established Sci-Fi weapon before it made it's way into Star Wars is my main point, and probably the REASON they ended up in Star Wars.

 

[WHULorigan]

1935 by John W Campbell in a story called Conquest of the Planets in Amazing stories
He called them Guns instead of Cannons (which is a more correct name) and they were apparently deadly rather than EMP generators (which isn't really surprising in 1935), though they were ship mounted,

The name had been used multiple times after that by multiple people, including Hal Clement, Jack Vance and Brian Aldiss (though they tended to make them man portable) before Empire Strikes Back, which to my knowledge is the first place to use the them in Star Wars, it was a well-established Sci-Fi weapon before it made its way into Star Wars is my main point, and probably the REASON they ended up in Star Wars.

Thanks for the reference.

Sure, the term "Ion Gun", et al, may certainly have been used as a weapon name of some sort before Star Wars. But even in your example it is being primarily envisioned as a type of direct attack particle accelerator gun of some sort, presumably (which is realistic, as we accelerate ions and smash them into material targets in research accelerators today).

There are a number of tropes in Traveller (and in the Charted Space setting in particular) that have their origin in the literature of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi. My issue above is not in using Ion Weapons as a type of attack beam (as a Particle Accelerator variant), but rather as a special form of disabling defense without a good rationale for its mode of operation or its historical provenance within the Charted Space setting.

To begin with, in vacuum an Ion Beam will turn into a fast-moving Ion Cloud which is easily dealt with by a simple Electric/Magnetic Field defense . . .

 

[Condottiere]

Space Sargasso Sea.

 

[Sty0pa]

Quantum entanglement does not allow for FTL communication, this has been debunked/explained many times over. And even if it did entanglement doesn't survive jump space

Yes, because literally everything in Traveller is based on actual physics. Brilliant answer.
/rollseyes.

 

[CordwainerFish]

Yes, because literally everything in Traveller is based on actual physics. Brilliant answer.
/rollseyes.

I do like to minimize the liberties I take with physics. (And when I must resort to bullshit I try to avoid the areas of mathematics that someone at the table knows better than I do.)

 

[Sigtrygg]

Yes, because literally everything in Traveller is based on actual physics. Brilliant answer.
/rollseyes.

The snark is strong in this one...
Traveller tries to maintain some real world physics, except when it doesn't. If you want to over rule real world physics with yet more science fantasy handwavium go for it, it is your game at your table.

But here in the real world quantum entanglement does not allow communication FTL.