Early Mentions of the 3I

[tbeard1999]

I'm trying to determine when the earliest mentions of the Third Imperium appeared in Traveller products. So far, Mercenary (1978) is the leading candidate:

Traveller assumes a remote centralized government (referred to in this volume as
the Imperium), possessed of great industrial and technological might, but unable,
due to the sheer distances and travel times involved, to exert total control at all
levels everywhere within its star-spanning realm

There's little else about the Imperium in Mercenary other than this:

On the frontiers, extensive home rule provisions allow planetary populations to choose their own forms of government, raise and maintain armed forces for local security, pass and enforce laws governing local conduct, and regulate (within limits) commerce. Defense of the
frontier is mostly provided by local indigenous forces, stiffened by scattered lmperial naval bases manned by small but extremely sophisticated forces. Conflicting local interests often settle thier differences by force of arms, with lmperial forces looking quietly the other way, unable to effectively intervene as a police force in any but the most wide-spread of conflicts without jeopardizing thier primary mission of the defense of the realm. Only when local conflicts threaten either the security or the economy of the area do lmperial forces take an active hand, and then it is with speed and overwhelming force.

High Guard, 1st ed., (1979) implied the existence of recognizable Third Imperium structures, such as the Imperial Navy. It also referred to "subsector navies" which later morphed into colonial fleets.

Of course, the Imperium "arrived" with Supplement 3, The Spinward Marches (1979). Issue 1 (published June 1979) of the JTAS mentions several worlds in the Spinwards Marches, but no mention is made of Supplement 3, so I assume that Supplement 3 came later in the year (but that's just speculation on my part).

So...is anyone aware of any earlier mentions of the Imperium (other than the board game) by GDW or its principles?

 

[vraymond]

The Dungeoneer, Vol. III, No. 1, Issue #9

Here are some quotes from an "Untitled Article on Traveller: Dealing with the Concepts of Empires" by Marc W Miller, pp. 21-22, The Dungeoneer, Vol. III, No. 1, Issue #9, Jan.-Feb. 1979:

"As you read through Traveller, and especially as you play through adventures in Traveller, the idea of some form of central governmental authority soon forms in the background. No society existing on the interstellar scale could really exist unless there wwere, somewhere, some type of interstellar body which exerted some force for order, however slightly. The question is, what exactly is the nature of interstellar government?"

Marc goes on to talk about various fictional interstellar governments, and then presents three possible governmental types for Traveller:

• The Federation: "The smallest of these governments is the Federation...[e]ffectively, the size of such a federation would be limited to the radius of a single jump."
• The Empire: "It could encompass up to 9000 stars, perhaps with well-defined jump routes (especially those of Jump-1 for free traders) binding the area together with trade....Mercenary (Book 4 of Traveller, just published) is a booklet of rules set in an especially large empire."
• The Imperium: "a truly vast empire with size actually beyond effective communication. Spanning perhaps an eighth of the galaxy, it would be difficult for a single individual to even travel from one end of the Imperium to the other in a single lifetime."

It's an interesting article, and I spent some time awhile ago asking if people remembered seeing it, until I stumbled across it again myself.