On the GURPS Traveller Free Forum, a gentleman by the screen-name of Qoltar was asking about context. I put it up in both places to get others to help me come up with some, but my reply is as follows:
As for context, well, it's kind of a vague IMTU thing, yeah, but it can easily be adapted to the OTU. All I'm really sure about is that, IMTU, humans were the Ancients and managed to get very far from Earth (this isn't quite the limit, but you can see it from here), and managed to have a civil war of some kind after a few thousand years and TTL 18 or so (I'd say they were about G3TL 13), and had figured out hyperdrive/warp drive by then - though naturally they had Jump Drives before that. About the only aliens in this region of space are goblins, which are more like a combination of GURPS Yrth goblins and D&D goblins. (There are several different versions of genetically altered humans, but on all worlds except Nazgaol they have either died out or, more often, interbred. On Nazgaol there are also some remnant populations of wild genetic experiments.)
The current polity, the Granise Coalition (or Koalition - it can be, and is, spelled both ways on different planets), is TTL 11/G3TL 9, and originally came about because of the three Class V ports signing a military pact and then a series of economic pacts several decades ago, and settling some worlds (most of the non-travel-zoned Class 1, 2 and 3 ports in blue, plus the lower-population Class IV ports, e.g. Tabitha hex 0709) and buying the rest with port upgrades, defense contracts and other economic incentives such as trade favors. Those that are not members either refused to sign or aren't seen as immediately viable for treaties. Special case: Larissa, hex 0103, has TTL 12/G3TL 10, and has been successfully holding off both economic, diplomatic and military advances by the Coalition. The Coalition has been focused more on internal trade and integration for the past decades, but is now gearing up for a new wave of exploration and colonization. And who knows? There may be more people, human and alien, out there! (So you have an excuse to make, and if you desire post, more subsectors for this.)
