Also, think of future tech as being regulated by government to the point where tech advances can't be made. Governments produce nothing. They depend on outside companies to build things. But they want to over-regulate how companies advance their tech. It may take 50 years to advance flatscreen tech instead of 5 years.
Hard limit for radio is obvious: frequency bits per second for simplex, 2x that for dual-side-band; or 4x frequency if amplitude modulating for 4 state dual sidebands; past 4 state, distance fade becomes too major.
With hard connect, one can use parallel transmission at far higher frequencies for far less energy AND mass cost. for example, 1000base-t is a gigabit per second over 8 wires; 802.11G averages 1megabit per second for the same distance limit.
I would expect a data connect to be petabits per second optical arrays; 100+ fiberchanels in a connector. Comparable speed via radio is going to be dumping a huge spread of frequencies and take huge volumes of antennae and trasnsmitters.
With hard connect, one can use parallel transmission at far higher frequencies for far less energy AND mass cost. for example, 1000base-t is a gigabit per second over 8 wires; 802.11G averages 1megabit per second for the same distance limit.
I would expect a data connect to be petabits per second optical arrays; 100+ fiberchanels in a connector. Comparable speed via radio is going to be dumping a huge spread of frequencies and take huge volumes of antennae and trasnsmitters.
FreeTrav
SOC-14 1K
John, please consider elaborating on this, as though you were writing a magazine article for people who hadn't thrashed the idea out in a public forum - because that's exactly what I'd like you to do: convert it into a magazine article for Freelance Traveller. Write me privately (editor@freelancetraveller.com) if you want to discuss this further.
FreeTrav
SOC-14 1K
Bill, a good counterpoint to John's posting at the top of this branch. As I asked John, so will I ask you: Please elaborate on this as though you were proposing it to people who haven't thrashed it out in a public forum. If I get articles from both you and John, I can print them in the same issue of the magazine, which will certainly make for an interesting issue!
John Snead
SOC-6
Perhaps it takes a while to jump TLs, but in the Imperium, we have an abundance of TL12-TL15 worlds, and most of the Imperial population lives on such worlds. So, there's a bunch of high tech out there, with electronics tech that is clearly well in advance of our own (holographic interfaces, robots and computers capable of understanding normal speech...). So, we can assume that they have devices well in advance of our own consumer electronics. Throw in antigravity (making getting too and from orbit trivially cheap, and you can guarantee that even the smallest colony world that isn't desparately poor or deliberately low tech will have comm sats, weather sats, and GPS sats. This is a guarantee for every TL9+ world in the Imperium, and many non Red Zone lower tech worlds will have this, simply because a free trader with a hold full of such satellites could make a good living selling them to TL 5-TL8 worlds. So, like Africa today, I can see smartphone with GPS and suchlike being widely usable across the Imperium.
When you use a credit card, it runs on the old hard iron mainframes from like the 70s, nano or transhuman or whatever hm?
For the 3rd Imperium, there's a big faction enamored with the flashy high-tech stuff, but there are aspects to the setting that relate to some of the stuff you talk about...
Humans (us) were late comers to the interstellar scene. The Vilani's got there first, 1000s of years before us. They are VERY culturally conservative. They actually took (and still take...) harsh measures to maintain a monopoly on interstellar jump drives and technology. The humans solomani came on the scene and had higher tech, faster jump, spread widely and took over everything, but only at the "top" level. Where Solomani Naval Lieutenants had control of what, systems, subsectors? And then it all broke down, Big Time. Called the Long Night. The Universe is still recovering actually.
The X-Boat network is TL13, that's the best the 3rd Imperium can muster as a presence for communication Imperium-wide. An average world isn't hardly able to build spacecraft let alone starships. A fair number of adventures involve your ship crashing or you getting stranded on these low tech worlds, or getting mixed up somehow with the peoples thereof. Worlds are big, easy to forget when viewing the big tapestry of the stars.
I figure a lot ofthe technology that is out there and avilable is more likely mass produced on a very few worlds. That computer you're using is a 30 year old job made by SuSAG on their regional subsidiary that came over on the ol' 10kt tradeliner as part of their Imperial development contract lol.
Aside from the relatively few island worlds of high tech and high population, it's pretty big and sparse out there, the biggest frontier there is!
Then the Imperial navy comes along to scrape a world clean with nukes as they're wont to do (sigh).
For the 3rd Imperium, there's a big faction enamored with the flashy high-tech stuff, but there are aspects to the setting that relate to some of the stuff you talk about...
Humans (us) were late comers to the interstellar scene. The Vilani's got there first, 1000s of years before us. They are VERY culturally conservative. They actually took (and still take...) harsh measures to maintain a monopoly on interstellar jump drives and technology. The humans solomani came on the scene and had higher tech, faster jump, spread widely and took over everything, but only at the "top" level. Where Solomani Naval Lieutenants had control of what, systems, subsectors? And then it all broke down, Big Time. Called the Long Night. The Universe is still recovering actually.
The X-Boat network is TL13, that's the best the 3rd Imperium can muster as a presence for communication Imperium-wide. An average world isn't hardly able to build spacecraft let alone starships. A fair number of adventures involve your ship crashing or you getting stranded on these low tech worlds, or getting mixed up somehow with the peoples thereof. Worlds are big, easy to forget when viewing the big tapestry of the stars.
I figure a lot ofthe technology that is out there and avilable is more likely mass produced on a very few worlds. That computer you're using is a 30 year old job made by SuSAG on their regional subsidiary that came over on the ol' 10kt tradeliner as part of their Imperial development contract lol.
Aside from the relatively few island worlds of high tech and high population, it's pretty big and sparse out there, the biggest frontier there is!
Then the Imperial navy comes along to scrape a world clean with nukes as they're wont to do (sigh).
And like Africa today, not everyone has a smartphone or a phone or electricity even. So not in great use locally on some worlds.
John,
Traveller has already touched upon everything you mentioned.
According to the 1983 module Tarsus, people on that backwater world use personal satellite phones for a variety of purposes including communications, data processing, and even voting.
Seeing as this particular issue was addressed over twenty five years ago, would you like to suggest some other technological aspect that allegedly needs "updating" or "rethinking"?
Regards,
Bill
Imperial space recovered about 1100 years ago, actually. Or before that, some might argue. Terrans, for instance, never lost star travel, even if they did stop trading long distance for a while.
Be that as it may, the Vilani do what they want on worlds with predominantly Vilani populations (and quite a few of them want to be TL15). On worlds where they're not in the majority, the non-Vilani do what they want (and some of them are content to be TL 6 or 7 or 8 or 9...etc.)
Not really. The Imperial Navy has jump-6 couriers. Various canonical statements to the contrary notwithstanding, it simply does not make sense that the Imperial Bureaucracy wouldn't use them to convey their reports and orders. Though no doubt they continue to sende duplicates by X-boat.
The X-boat network is a bit of a puzzle. An explanation I've come up with is that when jump-5 was invented, the IN kept a stranglehold on it for as long as they possibly could. 30 years maybe? Long enough for the Imperial Bureaucracy to switch from using the X-boats to convey reports and orders to using "NavyNet" anyway. So when jump-5 was finally declassified (due to pressure from the civilian sector), there was no incentive to upgrade the X-boats, which became increasingly redundant and fell prey to various boondoggles. Exactly the same happened with jump-6.
When it was built, back in the 700s, the X-boats were touted as the fastest means of communication and the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is still so touted. But it's no longer true.
Depends on how you define 'average'. The average TL of the Imperium is said to be 12.
Hans
Last edited:
John Snead
SOC-6
Absolutely. I'd expect the wealthy and upper middle class on a TL 6 world to be using TL 10 or 11 smartphones linked into the GPS satellite net, and perhaps to the TL 11 internet servers someone sold to that world. Average middle class people on the same TL 6 world likely end up with TL 8 dumb cell phones (likely very cheaply manufactured on a TL 10+ world), and working class and poor people have nothing at all. I'd expect lots of high tech to filter down to the TL 8 & lower worlds, but obviously income would be a major factor in who had what. I'd expect the upper class on a TL 6 world to have many of the benefits found to middle class members of TL 12 worlds, including air rafts, advanced medicine, and consumer electronics. Meanwhile, poor & working class people on the same TL 6 may end up with better vaccines & antibiotics that some public health charity gave the world, but likely not much else.
John Snead
SOC-6
Were these devices described as ubiquitous or as speciality items for military and emergency service personnel and perhaps the wealthy?
Also, my point wasn't just about TL 10 worlds like Tarsus, but also the TL 5-8 worlds, where I can't imagine that free traders wouldn't have sold every non-Red Zone world that wasn't inhabited by either technophobes or people who were edge-of-starvation-level poor, a full range of comm, GPS, and weather satellites and regular shipments of trunkfuls of TL 11 smartphones (which would likely be on the order of the best smartphones available today, but with processor speeds and memories of modern desktops, and perhaps a few more bells and whistles, like night vision on the camera and real-time language translation to known languages for both text and speech). I'd expect every well off (upper middle class on up) citizen of such worlds (something like the top 10-20% of the population) to have such a device if they wanted it. Also, I'd imagine that at TL 11 or so, manufacturing a durable low end cellphone, like a modern non-smartphone, would be exceptionally cheap and fast, and so traders could sell even more of these things to the entire middle class of such worlds at a good markup.
So, much of this tech would be ubiquitous throughout the Imperium, including low tech worlds. The low tech poor won't have them, and the low tech working class may not, but everyone else will.
Then, you add in the fact that we have the first generation of augmented reality devices in use right now (see: http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/). I'd expect a whole lot more of at TL 10+. So, at TL 11+, you point the camera on your display glasses or hand computer at a sign in Aslan or some known Imperial language, and it's automatically translated to the language you set as the default. You point the camera at a plant or animal in that's in library data (and I'd expect pretty much anything you're likely to encounter on any world that been in the Imperium more than a century or two to be in library data) and you get a brief description of the plant or animal (presumably accompanied by any dire warnings that may exist), and a link to click for more detailed information. On many (perhaps most) TL 10+ worlds, most or all people will also have links, so that when you point the camera at them (and if the camera is on a pair of display glasses, this essentially means you look at them) you'll get the local equivalent of the public portion of their Facebook profile. That, and all this is at least as easy to use and at least as familiar to characters from TL10+ worlds as ipods & cellphones are to middle class Americans under 30.
What I haven't seen in Traveller is much in the way of discussion of how TL 10+ technology (and especially TL 12+ technology) affects daily life. The world we live in is different thant that of the 70s, 80s, or even the 90s. I now reflexively look up information anywhere I have a wifi connection (using my ipod touch) and people who pay for data plans on their phones can do this essentially everywhere. This also changes how adventures are run. Look at modern-day adventure shows like Burn Notice on USA (a truly excellent show) - you see the affects of ubiquitous data and communication on adventure plots. You don't see any of these sorts of effects in almost any video or written SF from the mid 90s or earlier.
Last edited:
In use by the general population.
Yes, a TL5 world could have bought a system like that. Or some advanced medicine. Or some nifty weapons for their elite troops. Or some grav vehicles for the elite. Or this and that other bit of off-world technology. But they won't have been able to afford it all (If they could afford to buy everything, they'd be functionally of the higher TL). So what they actually have depends on internal politics. A sattelite network is very vulnerable to hostile action. Does the world have local dissidents? A rival neighbor? There could be any number of reasons why a world would prefer to spend its money on something else.
Hans
Last edited:
I can see there being a bunch of technofreaks on these mid TL worlds busily buying up whatever newest gadet they could get their hands on and backengineering their pants off. I can also see them putting out some cheap knockoff imitations for the local and foreign low tech markets. This is probably quite legal in the Imperium, and may even be encouraged.
John,
Are they ubiquitous? Well, they vote with them.
Nonetheless, your point was made a quarter of a century ago in a published product and has been regularly assumed by the Hobby ever since the real world example of the amazing penetration of cell phone usage among the poor in otherwise impoverished and low-tech regions of the world like Nigeria, Mexico, or Bangladesh in the 1990s.
The setting materials cannot mention everything. There cannot be a table, a look-up, or a piece of text to cover ever little aspect of daily life in the OTU setting. Because of this, Traveller has long depended on people using real world examples and common sense to fill in the blanks.
The example normally brought up in threads of this type is that of shoe salesmen. There are no mentions of shoe salesmen in canon, but it doesn't then follow that shoe salesmen do not exist in the 57th Century. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
So again, would you like to suggest some other technological aspect of the setting that allegedly needs "updating" or "rethinking"?
Regards,
Bill
That TL 12 average is jump 3, so XBoats at J4 is top-of-the-line stylie. But it is IMTU kind of thing, as I like having those extra J5/6 as super high tech. I've never bought into the whole "the navy has it's own J6 courier net Imperium-wide" thing, more they're for point-to-point between fleet elements, and the Admirals would rather have an extra Azhanti than a buncha lil couriers. Plus S09 fighting ships Imperial ships J4 standard fleet operations, I'd see them using the XBoat lane kind of thing in all honesty.
Then again the whole Xboat thing is whacked in some weird ways, and i kinda like that, trying to explain away the XBoats themselves, or what the extra hidden 29 tons is in the XBoat tender, and how neat it is at 800t instead of 1kt with the H drives it runs at J2...
the whole TL thing is what's in use, not manufacturing capability, so a TL6 world is using gas cars *not* air/rafts, that's just it. Local manufacture capability heck maybe steam trains. In pocket empires there was a good bit about it's the average TL, so you might have some air/rafts by the starport say, but horse wagons in the hinterlands.
I was mostly trying to point out that there are a fair number of worlds where things are not high tech at all, and like where most of the double adventures had one "out there" tromping halfway cross a world or fighting the bugs with what tech the world has, *not* just flying over or nuking em from orbit. And these low tech worlds are the best tech at hand, after thousands of years of existence in 1st second and/or third Imperium. Guess they haven't the wherewithal to license patents from the megacorps or something?
Then again the whole Xboat thing is whacked in some weird ways, and i kinda like that, trying to explain away the XBoats themselves, or what the extra hidden 29 tons is in the XBoat tender, and how neat it is at 800t instead of 1kt with the H drives it runs at J2...
the whole TL thing is what's in use, not manufacturing capability, so a TL6 world is using gas cars *not* air/rafts, that's just it. Local manufacture capability heck maybe steam trains. In pocket empires there was a good bit about it's the average TL, so you might have some air/rafts by the starport say, but horse wagons in the hinterlands.
I was mostly trying to point out that there are a fair number of worlds where things are not high tech at all, and like where most of the double adventures had one "out there" tromping halfway cross a world or fighting the bugs with what tech the world has, *not* just flying over or nuking em from orbit. And these low tech worlds are the best tech at hand, after thousands of years of existence in 1st second and/or third Imperium. Guess they haven't the wherewithal to license patents from the megacorps or something?
The XBoat is originally a Bk2 1st ed design:
100 Hull
015 JD B
004 Model 4
020 Bridge
008 staterooms x2
040 J4 fuel
=== ====================
087
13 tons left...
A viable Bk2 1E design:
100 Hull
015 JD B
004 PP A
004 Model 4
020 Bridge
004 staterooms x4
040 J4 fuel
010 P1 Fuel
=== ====================
097 tons
The X-Boat can not be built under CT BK2 2nd ed
100 Hull
015 JD B
004 Model 4
020 Bridge
008 staterooms x2
040 J4 fuel
=== ====================
087
13 tons left...
A viable Bk2 1E design:
100 Hull
015 JD B
004 PP A
004 Model 4
020 Bridge
004 staterooms x4
040 J4 fuel
010 P1 Fuel
=== ====================
097 tons
The X-Boat can not be built under CT BK2 2nd ed
I see the X-boat routes as being similar to the railway networks. The X-boat network would have been an era defining project at the time. It would have been in built to last. Because of the scale, and the need to keep every inch of "track" functioning, the way stations themselves would be very basic. The priority on renewal would go on the "rolling-stock" i.e. the x-boats. The next priority would be to keep the tenders and their facilities up to spec. Last on the list would be communications gear, the whole point of being on a route as far as any star system is concerned.
Maybe this last is the key to the endurance of the x-boat network. Systems on the route will pay that bit more just to ensure that their world is well served for communications. It is maintained because it actually generates revenue for the Imperium.
BTW I expect their are a few Sout Service J6 couriers too, if the Emperor has any sense.
Last edited:
No, TL15 is top-of-the-line in 1105. TL13 was top-of-the-line 400 years ago. Not any more.
You can do what you like in your own TU, of course.
Point to point between fleet elements automatically and inevitably adds up to a network of sorts. If the Sector Admiral at Mora sends a courier to Regina, why wouldn't Archduke Norris at Mora want his correspondence with Countess Josephine at Regina to get there in 32 days with the courier rather than in 13 weeks by X-boat? And if the sector admiral is smart, he'll send his courier to Rhylanor and order the admiral there to forward his orders to Regina. Which allows Norris to send his messages to Duke Leonard there in 16 days instead of eight weeks.
A cruiser is not much use if you can't get it moved to the place where you need it. An admiral probably would prefer one Azhanti to 134 couriers, but he might prefer a Ghalalk (50,000T Armored cruiser) and 24 couriers to either, and I'm positive he'd rather have eight Azhantis, eight Sloans, six Chrysanthemums, and 12 couriers than nine Azhantis.
No doubt the IN will also have some couriers with lower jump numbers for close work, but for long distance messages there's no substitute for jump-6 couriers.
That's true enough. But whatever 90% of the population uses, there's going to be a few imports. What those imports are will differ from world to world, even worlds with the same tech level.
Hans
But that's exactly what they're not. There are no rails in space. An X-boat route is simply two X-boat tenders within four parsecs of each other and a shedule that says the service intends to send an X-boat from one to the other next Tuday. Which is why a number of doglegs in the canonical X-boat routes make no sense whatsoever. From Resen (Spinward Marches 2323) to Ivendo, for example, is one jump, not four. Rhylanor to Celepina and Rhylanor to Risek and Celepina to Risek are all one jump, not two. Aramis to inthe? Two jumps, not five. Etc. etc.
And if one day the Scouts decided that a particular X-boat node has become redundant, all they would have to do is have a big freighter move the X-boat tender from where it's no longer needed to where it's needed. That, and print out a new shedule.
X-boat routes are nothing like railways.
But that really isn't relevant to the point I'm trying to make. The long and the short of it is that for any distance over eight parsecs, one jump-6 courier every week beats an X-boat every six hours. For distances like between Capital and the borders, one courier every month will beat the X-boats like a drum.
I sincerely doubt the economics would work out. I think it's maintained because there are people who make money because it's maintained. Like the X-boat manufacturers. And also because the X-boat Service isn't going to reccommend its own demise.
Hans
Last edited:
The information is transmitted via radio to another X-boat, already waiting to jump. The docking is just for refueling and swapping pilots.
