CT Only: My TC Universe

[kilemall]

Before I begin, I have a LOT of different rules, not just the Big Background, to create a very specific 'feel', which to me is integral to the campaign. But many could be construed as specific rulesets, such as the task rolls, the starship build and operations rules, etc.

Is it considered kosher to go over all that in here, or should I post those in the individual rule topics?

 

[McPerth]

In the IMTU forum is considered acceptable to talk about how do you adapt Traveller to your necessities, wether by changing the setting or the rules. After all that's the raison d'être of this forum, as long as it does not become a Traveller baiting.

Expect criticisms and comments about it, though...

 

[kilemall]

I can handle critiques, I come from the internet after all, and what's the point of posting if I don't get flaws or clarifications engaged?

What does Traveller baiting mean in the context of this forum's posting culture?

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

posting something that's clearly trying to provoke a negative reaction form the forum. I.E. trolling of some sort.

in particular, snide comments or put downs about certain points of the traveller setting (for example saying you don't like the aslan fluff is fine, but saying that anyone who likes the aslan fluff is tapped in the head is not)

 

[mike wightman]

What's a TC universe? :devil:

More seriously - post it and we will all steal the good bits

 

[salochin999]

Before I begin, I have a LOT of different rules, not just the Big Background, to create a very specific 'feel', which to me is integral to the campaign. But many could be construed as specific rulesets, such as the task rolls, the starship build and operations rules, etc.

Is it considered kosher to go over all that in here, or should I post those in the individual rule topics?

cool - always like to hear these and steal all the good bits

 

[RandyB]

posting something that's clearly trying to provoke a negative reaction form the forum. I.E. trolling of some sort.

in particular, snide comments or put downs about certain points of the traveller setting (for example saying you don't like the aslan fluff is fine, but saying that anyone who likes the aslan fluff is tapped in the head is not)

Well, that keeps me safe. My dislike of the Aslan stems from a bad experience (Referee's SO Syndrome) in one campaign, once upon a time. "YMMV" isn't just a disclaimer, it's an admission of fact.

 

[kilemall]

The Big Background

When my friends demanded a Traveller campaign, it had been at least 25 years since I had cracked open an LBB. So in a way it was a trip of nostalgia, and going back to some deep gaming roots.

We all agreed on going CT, so I bought the Book 0-8 collection and dug through it all again.

So fun stuff, but going through it all I got real tired real fast of the ol' Imperium.

Didn't want to go into high powered stuff, or ramp up to TL15 or beyond, or run a Striker action, and didn't care for first second or nth Imperium.

I knew I wanted a grungy gritty Aliens/Space Above and Beyond type feel.

So I assumed a Terran Confederation type setup like in the Interstellar Wars sourcebook with nations still holding onto their sovereignty but, only no Vilani Imperium (that anyone knows about or encounters anyway).

The impetus for the TC is therefore not the 'alien threat', but a different kind of bug- plague.

A huge plague hits Earth and devastates the population, over 3/4 of humans die at the same time that population and pollution were combining to change the atmosphere to tainted at the least.

Power shifts from nations to pharma corps, who under the duress of finding and then selling a cure effectively absorbs a disproportionate amount of the world's finances, thus creating the Pharmabanks.

The nations are crippled by the crisis, but still have enough clout to force action for their people and threaten appropriation of the Pharmabank assets.

At the same time, the Earth nations do not have enough people to risk wars, and did not want the Pharmabanks to be able to pick and choose safe havens or aggressor nations to back. So to keep this power bloc under control and not allying with potential enemies while making use of their resources, the nations all signed onto creating the Terran Confederation.

After this political/economic move, a grand deal was struck-

1) Raw regolith leftover from Helium-3 mining was shot up into space into the solar foundry stations and melted down into huge forms for the Oneill cities, million person orbital stations at LaGrange points built to house the bulk of humanity.

2) Most of humanity moved off-planet into these colonies, to get away from plague threat initially and long-term move humans away from destroying more plant and animal species, the raw materials and design templates the Pharmabanks turned industrial genetic engineers craved, and the products that paid for the moves many times over. Starships and other air-breather/ pollutant ships are forbidden, orbital transfer is done by grav vehicles only, and all facilities but scout/medical must be TL3 or less. Earth nature has largely recovered from industrial effects although it will be centuries before the scars will be entirely mitigated.

3) It was found that raising children in a centrifugal environment was not conducive to good bone and tissue growth, so there are still nurseries and schools on Earth, far away from 'cultural heritage centers' that may contain plague. 'Born on Earth, work in space' became a typical pattern for most humans.

4) With unlimited power from the sun and and at greater expense Helium-3, at LaGrange points for lifting moon resources up at low cost, and exploitation of the asteroid belt underway, the cities proved to be a community set to usher in a new industrial age of affluence.

 

[mike wightman]

Sounds like a very interesting setting.

Will there be colonies on other planets in the solar system?

Are you staying within the solar system?

 

[creativehum]

Like the others, I'm very curious about this. My main interest is in seeing what sorts of inventive settings people cook up from scratch with the LBBS.

 

[kilemall]

That's the tech 8 to 9 situation. We're at tech 10, so jump does exist and there is an interstellar community. But I'll need to get into the specifics of jump before we get into the rest of human space.

Haven't decided what I'm going to do about Mars, likely terraformed, but I want a really good backstory on that one so I'm still cogitating on that.

Incidentally, the Scout service is THE lead service of the TC, since it is a Confederation all major military forces are national in nature, so there is still a US Army, Royal Navy (although space navy now), etc.

So the nations want to retain their firepower as a check against TC power, but want TC LE and a bit of balancing between nations so no one nation ever gets the edge, or the idea it can win out against other nations.

A TC navy operation is more like a Space Above and Beyond international effort, or a NATO anti-piracy patrol, which there is a lot of for reasons I will make clear.

The Scout service is somewhat compromised as one of it's duties is to explore worlds, ecosystems and maintain Amber Zones (more like Park Rangers), which in this milieu is less National Park and more Genetic Study/Exploitation Zone.

So Earth is the biggest Amber Zone so far, and among other things is a big training area for the Scouts.

This situation puts the Scouts squarely in the LE arena of the Pharmabanks' big interests, and also surveys for colonial planets where different nations are vying for colonial charters and want the best information to know where to put their efforts.

The Scouts are not wholly compromised by the Pharmabanks, but they do have to keep in mind what pays the TC bills and their service, the wants and needs of nations trying to score valuable land or keep the Pharmabanks in line, and try to balance that with 'doing good' or 'doing good science'.

 

[kilemall]

So once I had the home system and general milieu, there is the matter of setting up the local universe.

I have a plethora of resources- in addition to most every Solomani sector map ever made, I had the SPI Universe map, the StarForce map (the SPI game, not Star Blazers!), all those Project Rho maps, plus a few scattered hither and yon.

But I decided not to bust my brain or my players having a 3D map, freelance calcing parsecs etc.

I just went with the Imperium map.

And as I looked at the Imperium map with it's jump-2 routes, I thought, well how could I make this grittier and play differently?

Well, its simple, go with Tech 9 or 10, J-1.

Now all of a sudden you have fueling stations in the middle of nowhere.

Or in the case of Earth, the Oort Cloud, a mechanism of Solid Gold for Traveller.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud

Thanks to the Oort, you literally HAVE refueling ice halfway to the Centauri worlds.

You also have the ultimate pirate base, unlimited fuel and oxygen supply breaking down the ice. Which suits me to a T, as a major power group I wanted were pirate clans ala Exosquad.

With Oort Clouds in play, you can never get rid of pirates, it's too vast a space with its own built-in logistics, only limit their power and damage and access to yard facilities.

Oort clouds should probably be limited, assuming our theory about them is correct they may be rather rare. I would also assume that something like red dwarfs would have less gravity to hold onto significant material and would have been around the extra few billion years to see most of their Oorts turned into comets and go on that long trip to oblivion.

In any event you want some extrasolar communities, not one. I'm probably sticking to main sequence stars and young red stars.

As for system generation, I went with a two-parter.

I used this list to match the Imperium map stars to real stars-

https://www.prismnet.com/~thrash/known.html

Then used them to plug in as star values and genned systems using this system which I presume most are familiar with-

http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/RTT_Worldgen

The results have been most satisfying, and I didn't have to go bonkers with more complex systems or go with generic computer genned ones.

 

[kilemall]

Alrighty then, the next variable is how much map, in what pattern, has human habitation gone?

And that leads to a major rule change.

Remember I want to give the impression of raw frontier, new territory won the hard way, hard science feel too, and I didn't want to use up the whole Imperium map.

So I have a Very Basic rule- you can't jump error-free to a destination without that specific bit of space having been closely 'mapped' for all gravitational, subspace, physical and energy debris.

If you do, you are risking jump errors similar to being within the grav zone of a planet.

This means that expeditions have to go at near C with low passage to target jump zones of the next system over, jump back typically with S class scouts carried for this purpose, then a full force of Scouts come in and map all the major initial desirable jump areas. Rinse and repeat, the next set of scout high C exploratory cruisers jump in even ahead of the establishment of exploration bases and push on to the next system.

So there is a time limit to how far out you can have expanded, based on the invention of the jump drive plus the time it took to hit on this expansion methodology then the years it has taken in transit.

There were already subC ships that made it to the Centauri systems and a VERY few pushed beyond, then tech 9 and jump drive was 55 years ago, about 15 years to get it together to do this and 40 years expansion, so effectively 36 LY or so out from Sol/Centauri, roughly translating to 9 hexes on the Imperium map (counting along a line to each system not a straight 9 hexes out, as you need intermediate jump points to get back with J1 in most cases).

So many of these colonial outposts are literally less then 10 years old.

There is a gold rush/laser like focus on finding out what can pay off from each system opened up. TC Scouts try to keep it under control but often it ends up being a Boomer Sooner sort of scene from every desperate nation or corps or individual with enough creds to scrape together a starship.

Then there is the other way- generate your jump based on what you can detect or model about the target system, then jump and take your chances.

So the REALLY desperate or immoral do this, with absolutely horrific loss rates.

But a few will hit the jackpot and make it, and possibly score a fortune- or find a barren no-fuel source system, with only star-skimming as the way to get home (with horrific risks and consequences of its own).

So, our intrepid scouts may find that someone is Already There, and a few of those are willing to kill them to delay the advent of opening conventional jumpspace to the rest of humanity.

There are other effects with this rule.

Having a base out in the middle of nowhere that is unmapped is true security as no one is likely to jump right to you.

Most nations will send out their own sub-C expeditions to map out and establish halfway jump/fuel points, and maintain their jump data as military secrets. Some megacorps, criminal enterprises and pirate clans do the same.

That Generate program is also the repository for jump data, so getting updates to commercially/officially known jumpspace is a Big Deal. For right now I am assuming there is a stream of updates that one gets as part of buying this software, probably during the yearly maintenance (my universe is VERY touchy about security to critical avionic starship computers, so no downloading off the local Net for updates).

The corollary is that as part of the deal to get updates, you have to provide all the jumpspace data you have gathered in the course of your travels, which means dumping your survey data and effectively telling the navigational authorities public and private where you have been.

So maybe you DON'T want to do that, miss out on the latest updates which means buying a new copy/license of Generate to get upgraded (or do it illegitimately), and depending on your ship's registering nation may make you a 'subject of interest' by LE and intelligence types from all sorts of organizations.

There may also be a profitable market in selling unique jumpdata to organizations wanting to get someplace no one else can.

Most of the Oort cloud for instance is unmapped, so getting that data may be a big intel or commercial deal.

Another possibility is that jumpspace data is withheld intentionally from your Generate program, and anyone violating that space gets shot before they can get away with jumpdata. This happens with big nation/TC naval bases.

Or more subtly, the jumpspace data may be intentionally wrong, and lead to misjumps you would not reasonably expect to occur.

That last point causes many paranoid orgs to verify with their own surveys and use only their own data to protect against error or sabotage.

Commercial ships can capture jumpdata just as well as scouts and military as a matter of jump safety if nothing else.

But the 4x longer range scout/mil sensor sets means a lot more space can be surveyed with the specialized stuff.

 

[salochin999]

So I have a Very Basic rule- you can't jump error-free to a destination without that specific bit of space having been closely 'mapped' for all gravitational, subspace, physical and energy debris.

If you do, you are risking jump errors similar to being within the grav zone of a planet.

Interesting idea.

 

[kilemall]

Incidentally the normal fuel rules wouldn't allow for high-C ships- you'd run out after X months even with low power consumption and momentum.

But if you noticed we already had a big Helium 3 mining effort on the moon, so yes we do have something other then ye olde L-Hyd fusion plants available.

Since I believe in essence of the thing and not excessive rules, get the feel not the accounting, here are my relatively simple alternate power source rules-

Fission plants become available at TL7, He-3 fusion at TL9, and the classic L-Hyd at TL10.

All costs for LBB2 and HG remain the same no matter what type.

The difference is in size of plant, fueling the power plant and the fuel percentage required.

He-3 plants output more power per ton due to less shielding required, and so output one power level up from their normal rating.

So an He-3 power plant built to rating 4 will output to 5, but use only as much space as a 4 plant, and will take damage as per its built rating.

Fission plants cost 100,000 CR per ton of power plant to fuel.

He-3 plants cost 1 MCR per ton of power plant to fuel.

The life of a fueling cycle is measured in Years x TL.

If the power plant is destroyed/rendered to value 0, in addition to being repaired/replaced it must be refueled.

L-Hyd fuel is not necessary for these plants, but IS used for maneuver- cut the fuel requirement for PP/M in half. Consumption only counts for days under maneuver.

Often ship designs do not take the fuel tonnage cut, they simply double the normal four week endurance.

L-Hyd and fission plants endure neutron embrittlement, they are designed for a safe 50 years of operation, but after that must be replaced or risk increased failure. He3 plants do not have this risk.

Fission plants have an additional risk- during combat, for each power plant hit an additional radiation hit is taken as per the Missile Supplement from JTAS, or the radiation table in HG if a fleet battle is being waged on that system.

This is due to coolant leak and vessel cracking.

If the plant is destroyed, one radiation hit per remaining value is taken.

The other drawback to He-3 power besides fueling cost is that it is VERY difficult to power down, not emit and try to hide.

That is because it takes a lot more power to initiate an He-3 reaction then the L-Hyd cycle. A 'normal' fusion reactor will take approximately 20% of it's jump capacitors to restart, an He-3 plant requires 3x the normal jump capacitors to start.

So if an He-3 ship is to have the ability to power down then restart, the design will require far more capacitors then normal.

 

[kilemall]

So, the alternate power systems give a lot of flavor.

Obviously He-3 is too expensive for anything but top flight military and corporate hardware, and most navies will only use it for power/size critical designs. Or, say our intrepid Scout Cruisers pushing the frontier forward.

Older ships will almost always be fission powered, with exciting radiation leaks in their future. Or they may have been repowered if they were in particularly good shape or useful.

A huge wave of L-Hyd fusion deployment obviously would happen, safer AND less up front cost, but the savvier orgs/captains might take on the risk of fission for the long term savings on fuel and/or greater range or carrying capacity.

 

[kilemall]

Another technology critical to high C travel is low berthing, for life support supply issues if nothing else.

I also have some serious high-G/artificial gravity rules which make it desirable during even an in-system maneuver.

Hot Sleep, Fast Drug in combination with time dilation, can be an option, but going into serious accel/decel means administering antidote to everyone, so low berthing is usually more desirable.

Hot Sleep can be cheaper though if you factor in live life support at 1/60th the cost vs. full low berth even with time dilation for long trips. Low berthing wins out though for short trips/frozen watches of less then 60 days.

The idea is for low berthing to be more like the routine use in the Aliens universe and less like Planet of the Apes/2001 catastrophe.

So, I have gone to a different model then the 'it works fine or you die horribly and you lose X percentage of your frozen watch'.

When low berthing, there are two skill rolls for putting people into, then out of freeze, at routine check level.

In my campaign I have a very different task roll system, an effective equivalent would be the 5+ roll, add Medical skill, subtract -4 for no skilled attendants, and 2 is always a failure.

Ship's Robot with a medical attendant or a medbot attached/built into the low berths can act as the medic. This is common practice particularly on vessels that do frozen watch routinely, such as Scout Cruisers or high-G military ships.

Upon failure, apply 2D damage.

If there are two failures, one being frozen and one being 'thawed', you can come out of low berthing with 4D damage.

So low berthing is rarely fatal, but can be a real threat to the sickly, the wounded, and small children and animals. It may also hurt a merc force or fighting ship crew to have to be hospitalized right when they are needed in a battle immediately.

That damage possibility leads to the phenomena of colonial families on a budget sometimes booking low berths for the adults and high passage for the kids (and stewards literally having to be babysitters). Medium passage is generally speaking not possible for younger then 14, and many liners and ships refuse medium or high passage for unaccompanied minors at all.

A fun light adventure might be simply having to survive wrangling unaccompanied kid passengers on a merchant/liner run.

There is a financial effect good or bad with low berth success or failure.

Add +1 to the number of Low Berth tickets sold with each run where there have been no fatalities, and -5 for every trip with a fatality.

The Low Berth Lottery custom is also slightly different.

The CR10 out of low tickets and administered by the chief steward part is the same, but payout terms are different.

If there are no fatalities the lottery goes to the medic(s), the low passengers enter a lottery bid for a guess is for one or more fatalities, if there is a fatality the money is split among several winners, and the captain gets the money only if the 'winners' are deceased.

This gives a small incentive for the medics to do well, most low berth people are happy to survive the process, and the out of pocket expense to the captain and/or owners/crew bonus more then make up for this slight cost by increased low berth sales for a 'lucky' safe ship.

Conversely, if a ship has had several fatalities in a row, it may need to rip out the low berths, or be sold or change name/registry, as no one will book a flight on a killer ship.

 

[Jame]

This sounds like a strongly-alternate version of The Outer Veil by Golan 2072.

Mind, to me this is a compliment! So keep up the good work.

 

[kilemall]

Yet another critical technology is the problem of going near the speed of light.

Redo from another post on speed limits-

Re: the upper speed limit, I'm working within CT and with the missile supplement in play.

The missile supplement is important as it gives you a hard number for what 1 hit is re: joules.

The rule states that you add a hit for every multiple of 300mm closing speed between a missile and it's target.

300mm is 3Gs or 30000 km per 1000 seconds, or expressed another way, 30km/s or approximately .0001 C.

Missile supplement missiles are 50 kg total, so I am assuming 10kg of fuel burned on average before impact, 40kg at 30 km/s.

That yields 18 gigajoules, on the boom table something like 9x the power of a TLAM-C Tomahawk warhead. So even our commercial grade starship hulls can shrug off a lot if that is the damage threshold.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_htm...The_Boom_Table

On the other hand it means that even very low pokey 1G accel to jump distance can be fraught with peril if there is debris out there.

In practice I am assuming a rock big enough to be 40kg would show up on radar and ships will simply maneuver to avoid (a primary reason why pilots are on duty). Or in an asteroid field/ring, there is a much greater change of impact and you just go slow, period.

Large rock groups like the ones that generate meteor showers would be the space-going equivalent of reefs, charted and to be avoided. Corollary is unexplored systems will be full of uncharted 'reefs' waiting to wreck fast moving ships that are not prepared.

Further assumption- the threat is likely smaller rocks or debris that is unmapped and unremarkable, coupled with the need to go faster then 3G/.0001 C.

Heh, or maybe Sand fields from ships' sandcasters.

So a more typical issue would be something 1kg or less, what's the speed limit in that scenario?

Assuming the 18GJ per hit limit, something short of that.

Playing around with the joule/impact calculator, I get 189 km/s, or .00063 C, or 18.9Gs or 1890 mm.

THAT is your absolute safety limit. Beyond that, there are risks, or countermeasures to be taken.

Never knew you were playing with death at slow Traveller speeds, did you?

Now for Big Drama and going say .1C, 30000 km/s. The 1kg impact becomes 450 TeraJoules. Divided against the 18GJ hit value, that's 25,000 hits.

Well. Go for it speedy.

The other factor is probability of impact, which should be VERY low but not impossible, rising to near probably in asteroid belts, rings, orbit, rock fields, etc.

Right now my working rolls are
* 4D(6) per week for inner planet space,
* 5D(6) per week for outer planet space,
* 6D(6) per month for deep space,
* 3D(6) per hour for asteroid belts/rock fields or
* 2D(6) per hour for planets with rings or satellite/sentient space debris.
The (6) means all die must come up 6 in order for the impact to occur.

These objects were too small to be mapped or come up on radar ahead of time. Normally mapped or large objects are avoided with an easy skill roll, surprise objects like these are avoided when possible with a challenging skill roll.

Avoidance assumes mapping or detection. If the ship is shut down for stealth, then there IS no active sensor operating, passive sensors are on an absolute minimum on capacitors, optical guidance is the main tool, and maneuver thrusters are practically manual (direct emergency link to helm, difficulty level/-4 to every maneuver).

Under stealth AND unmapped conditions (no charts available), hit probabilities go up to all 4s, all 5s or all 6s. For stealth OR unmapped situations, rolls are for all 5s or all 6s. Under stealth avoidance is impossible.

When an impact roll comes up, roll 1d6/2 to determine the strength of potential impacts, then roll 1d6 for type and consult table below.

When avoidable, roll challenging skill roll or 11+ with pilot skill, ship G rating and evade program bonuses, or agility/computer for HG. 1 hit against ship per kg per multiple of 18.9 G of impact.

1- 1-3+ kg rock mapped but nav system didn't alert, easy skill roll, or as above but 4+ with 2 as a guaranteed failure. Roll 6d6 once for rock speed.
2- 1-3+ kg rock, movement is below damage threshold, damage is only ship speed.
3- 1-3+ 1 kg rock(s), roll to avoid per rock.
4-a cloud of ice too small for detection to discover in time, impacts occur, no chance to avoid, apply as per 1-3 1kg rocks.
5- add 6d6 G speed of object(s) impact into ship, roll again for type- no limit to G increase. Ignore in asteroid belts or planetary grav wells.
6- double impact strength, roll again for type- no limit to doubling.

For unmapped rock/ice fields, I would leave that to referee imposition. Wouldn't do it very often, but it should happen at least once to the players, or NPCs the players know, and definitely at least once for hardcore scouting/frontier smuggling beyond settled areas.

Implementing something like this even if you disagree with my numbers and assumptions makes for very interesting space terrain, tactical or hide and seek play options, and a sense of 'no really you are in space and you can die' if you choose to exceed safety limits, or even just moving at all.

And this feel is what I am trying to go for in terms of making for drama, risk, etc., even in a merchant run.

Haven't done it yet, but I expect the numbers are scarier for solar flares.

 

[kilemall]

This sounds like a strongly-alternate version of The Outer Veil by Golan 2072.

Mind, to me this is a compliment! So keep up the good work.

Did a quick lookup of him and his blog, can't pick out a definitive set of rules/setting beyond the polity thread and various star map this and that, can you point me to something I may be missing?