Cultural hegemony.
The 3I generally limits its enforcement of human rights to a theoretical freedom of interstellar travel and a prohibition on de jure slavery. It can and does intervene on other issues, but isn't obliged to do so.
Reinventing Traveller
- Thread starter DaltonSpence
- Start date
The 3I generally limits its enforcement of human rights to a theoretical freedom of interstellar travel and a prohibition on de jure slavery. It can and does intervene on other issues, but isn't obliged to do so.
This is why the unity in my setting subsidize space travel.
That’s limits of enforcement, in a real sense probably what they can enforce without resorting to something like the Zhos.
But the practicality of being a trade empire means a level of adherence to keeping the goods flowing and contracts paid.
Kind of like how US cop shows have propagated the concept of Miranda rights in countries where that isn’t a thing, the exposure to bare minimums of keeping revolts and contractural functionality would seep through despite the best efforts of authority.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
The Third Imperium: I'd like to say feudalism, but I'm thinking more vassalship, along the lines of Persian satrapies.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
It's more akin to mob bosses and made men...
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Robber barons, legitimized.
Basically, protection money, in that sense.
Basically, protection money, in that sense.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Does the Imperium intervene and improve the standard of living of its member citizens?
No
Does the Imperium turn a blind eye to violations of its citizen's 'rights'?
Yes
Does the Imperium insist on its 'protection money' being paid?
Most definitely.
A thread about re-inventing Traveller must address how tied the core rules are to a setting and the nature of that setting.
The Imperium has changed a lot in tone over the years - from dark and oppressive in the proto-Imperium stuff, to white hat yanks in space and then finally the transhuman playground of wafer based entities...
No
Does the Imperium turn a blind eye to violations of its citizen's 'rights'?
Yes
Does the Imperium insist on its 'protection money' being paid?
Most definitely.
A thread about re-inventing Traveller must address how tied the core rules are to a setting and the nature of that setting.
The Imperium has changed a lot in tone over the years - from dark and oppressive in the proto-Imperium stuff, to white hat yanks in space and then finally the transhuman playground of wafer based entities...
Silverhawk
SOC-12
I agree with you on all of this.
My philosophy for a game is that there are the Core rules. These are the basics to run the game regardless of setting. Then there is the setting which may have additional rules specific to that setting.
Think about it like a car. Under the hood is the engine (Core rules). The setting is the body and interior. You pick the options. If you like the car but think the engine is underpowered you could then try a different engine. Like the engine but want leather seats okay that can be changed too.
GURPS is pretty good at this.
Straybow
SOC-14 1K
But '50s and '60s "space opera" is wildly variable in "hardness." The Lensmen series comes to mind, with speculations on an "island of stability, " superheavy atoms that somehow are non-radioactive and have odd characteristics. It also had teleportation and other things that simply don't appear in Traveller.
The default rules are very much hard sci fi. Yes, slugthrowers make it "hard." Yes, lasers being clumsy due to large power requirements make it "hard." Yes, PG and FG being even clumsier due to even larger power requirements make it "hard." Yes, sublight travel being dominated by vector mechanics and single-digit-G acceleration instead of superfast handwave travel make it "hard." Heck, just the fuel requirements make Trav hard compared to much scifi (Firefly/Serenity comes to mind with ships that apparently have no fuel at all).
The absence of particle/radiation of the week a la Star Trek TNG makes Traveller "hard." The absence of "space weather" seen in both ST and SW makes Traveller "hard."
Most notably to my point, Traveller makes some effort to pay attention to stellar classification. The same attention should be paid to black holes. They don't just magically "suck things in." It is gravity, not magic. Gravity precipitates ships out of jump in a predictable fashion in Traveller. A black hole is just gravity. Except for a megamassive, galactic-core-sized black holes, they would not form a travel hazard any more than a main sequence star would. They aren't "invisible" unless they are rogue objects ejected from the original stellar system and have consumed whatever accretion disk they carried with them.
Straybow
SOC-14 1K
All mostly solved by having enlisted ranks
Simple, miss the commission just roll promotion and those are enlisted ranks.
No rank benefits.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I've been doing enlisted ranks that way for years now. Army, Navy, Marines, merchants - characters who fail a commission roll can roll for promotion and advance through E1-6. They still get to roll for a commission each term and if successful swap to an O rank one lower than their E rank.
In response to Straybow - a couple of SUVAT equations and a pseudo-vector based ship combat system don't make it hard sci fi either.
Jump drive, a magic maneuver drive, vehicle scale fusion power plants, man portable laser weapons, grav vehicles, anagathics, no alien races, and psionics all make it soft sci fi - so I make it soft thanks to a score of 2 to 8.
Now compare with the T2300 setting and rules - which is harder?
In response to Straybow - a couple of SUVAT equations and a pseudo-vector based ship combat system don't make it hard sci fi either.
Jump drive, a magic maneuver drive, vehicle scale fusion power plants, man portable laser weapons, grav vehicles, anagathics, no alien races, and psionics all make it soft sci fi - so I make it soft thanks to a score of 2 to 8.
Now compare with the T2300 setting and rules - which is harder?
T2300 is harder SF; no doubt. But its default setting is much less "Space Opera" and more "military SF". This leaves far fewer options for play. Owning your own ship in T2300 is just...completely unlikely, for anyone less well-heeled than Bruce Wayne (or Jeff Bezos). And since the tech doesn't match up with Traveller's, it can't be used as a "prequel".
But Traveller is not Star "magic technical term of the week" Trek, either.
Later versions of Traveller had problems similar to T2300: the "post-virus, post-rebellion" setting effectively stripped away what made Traveller so well suited to play: the enormously broad Imperium setting.
To some degree GURPs, and now Mongoose, rescued Traveller by just ignoring those versions. Virus? Rebellion? Never happened. Too bad (not) about Dulinor's shuttle going "boom"....
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mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
2300AD suffers from them concentrating far too much on the Kafer war and not enough on the battle against the provolutionists, the exploration of unknow space, the conflicts between nation states.
The cyberpunk tie in was a strain, bit with a more modern take on transhumanism it can be included with the punk element that dates it dialed down or removed.
I am so happy to see the first big release for MgT 2300 will be a re-imagined Bayerrn campaign. The longer it takes them to get around to ruining the setting by concentrating too much on the Kafer war the better.
Which reminds me - if re-inventing Traveller it would be to update the tech (in addition to my earlier suggestions
)
The cyberpunk tie in was a strain, bit with a more modern take on transhumanism it can be included with the punk element that dates it dialed down or removed.
I am so happy to see the first big release for MgT 2300 will be a re-imagined Bayerrn campaign. The longer it takes them to get around to ruining the setting by concentrating too much on the Kafer war the better.
Which reminds me - if re-inventing Traveller it would be to update the tech (in addition to my earlier suggestions
)
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Stop right there. You're dead wrong.
Teleportation is present in ALL GDW & IG editions, as well as T20 and MGT 1. In CT-77 B3 pp 40-41.
CT/MT psionics are a game-balanced version of Lensmen... Just replace Arisians with The Institute...
TNE is closer.
T4 backs off a little.
The Lens is obliquely referenced in the Special writeup.
Only things needed for doing Lensman are the lens itself, inertialess drives, and Allotropic Iron PP...
Straybow
SOC-14 1K
I'm not considering psi, which is admittedly not hard sf. It isn't tech or astrophysics, which is where we can measure hard v soft. It's also likely the most frequently ignored part of Trav. I don't recall anybody pointing to psi as essential Traveller in those various threads.
Yes, they do. Compared to "flying in space" seen in SW and the like, any simplified vector movement and t=√2D/A is hard.
Unless you think all hard sf has to be relegated to relativistic sublight travel you don't have a point on jump drive being "soft."
Vehicle scale fusion is neither hard nor soft. The smallest Tokomak is not much larger than 4 Td. Unless you think restricting everything to current levels of tech is required for "hard," that's not a point in your favor.
SW blaster? Soft. ST hand phaser? Yeah, soft. Laser weapons that require an external backpack energy source? Not so soft.
Maneuver drive, grav, anagathics? Neither soft nor hard. Depends so much on how they're done. Maneuver goes back to vector movement being hard.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
No thermodynamics in Traveller - soft sci fi
I do not consider Traveller to be as soft as Star Wars which is really borderline cartoon tech-fantasy, nor as soft as Star Trek.
But to qualify as hard sci fi to me the fiction bits must be an extension of exotic current theories rather than just 'magic' and they have to be consistently applied.
How does Traveller explain certain key technologies?
How do you get man portable laser weapons with barrels instead of mirrors {ever see the laser weapons in the D&D adventure Expedition to the Barrier Peaks?)
How do you get fusion to work?
How do you shrink it down to vehicle size?
How do null grav modules, artificial gravity floor plates, acceleration compensation all work? Are they all based off the same technological breakthrough or is each one a separate field...
What do they do with all the waste heat?
I do not consider Traveller to be as soft as Star Wars which is really borderline cartoon tech-fantasy, nor as soft as Star Trek.
But to qualify as hard sci fi to me the fiction bits must be an extension of exotic current theories rather than just 'magic' and they have to be consistently applied.
How does Traveller explain certain key technologies?
How do you get man portable laser weapons with barrels instead of mirrors {ever see the laser weapons in the D&D adventure Expedition to the Barrier Peaks?)
How do you get fusion to work?
How do you shrink it down to vehicle size?
How do null grav modules, artificial gravity floor plates, acceleration compensation all work? Are they all based off the same technological breakthrough or is each one a separate field...
What do they do with all the waste heat?
Straybow
SOC-14 1K
Now you're talking about Traveller art, which wasn't in the original black books. Nothing in the description says the lasers have barrels, just a length and a weight. Still more hard than soft, given the need for an external power pack.No thermodynamics in Traveller - soft sci fi
How do you get man portable laser weapons with barrels instead of mirrors {ever see the laser weapons in the D&D adventure Expedition to the Barrier Peaks?)
How do you get fusion to work?
How do you shrink it down to vehicle size?
Again, a Tokomak is not much larger than the 4 Td of an A power plant. The original black books didn't have smaller fusion power plants, except implied that small craft have smaller power plants.
I agree that the Trav paradigm of proton fusion is soft sf. Proton fusion is weak force controlled and barely works in stars. The energy density in the core of Sol is less than 300 W/m³. Every time I hear some sci-pop dude/chick say the sun is a "thermonuclear bomb" I laugh. It's more like a brick kiln.
However, the original LBBs didn't mention proton fusion specifically (that I can find). The idea of "refined fuel" would make sense if that meant enriched D content, but it doesn't. The power plant runs just fine on unrefined hydrogen, and refined doesn't increase the power output or reduce fuel usage rate.
Elsewhere I showed that D-D fusion could account for all the power per ton of fuel, based on EP = 250 MW and fuel usage. It just doesn't work to try to fuse the D in it's natural concentration. It would send the Lawson PT criteria up by an order of magnitude. Same for D-T with external source of T. The low concentration of natural D wouldn't work.
And, you're right about thermodynamics. I've said elsewhere that the real handwavium isn't fusion or jump drive or grav tech. It's heat. Even at 99% efficiency a 1 EP power plant would be dumping 2.5 MW of waste heat into the ship. The engineering section would be slag in a day.
If you're insisting on current theories nothing could ever be hard sf and involve anything that requires such power levels.
Unless you want the ships to have hilariously-large radiators (and nobody wants that -- even Discovery from 2001, a Space Odyssey, which was pretty hard SF, had the heat radiators deleted because they'd've looked too much like wings and nobody would believe a hard-SF spaceship with wings...) And even then... nah.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
I once considered solar sails, with radiator veins.
Like elephant ears.
The Dumbo option.
Like elephant ears.
The Dumbo option.
