That's the blessing and curse of Traveller and it's really important that the Referee keep the players on a tight leash.
There was a published adventure (where I don't recall) where the players were to try and assault and recover Something from a fortified asteroid. Ideally, you call some space emergency and they have to let your ship land. The asteroid was in a system with a world with a Tech 5 Theocracy.
Through careful quizzing and skillful gamesmanship, the players (I was one of the players) managed to, essentially, import very high tech, very cheap, and very powerful "solar powered calculators", and sell them to the population on the Tech 5 world at truly gross profit margins.
Once we were all millionaires, we were specifically unmotivated to assault the asteroid for a mere 10,000Cr. The ref was underwhelmed.
In another fine episode, the referee, being a budding archeology and anthropology student, worked weeks on creating and detailing a mini civilization. Maps, cities, people, history, everything.
The game was that the players ships computer fritzed out and the only spare happened to be a Holy Relic for this civilization on this remote world.
About 2 hours into the game, as the players were about to reach the frontier of the main city, one of them realized and queried about what type of computer did their ships boat have. It turned out to be enough of a computer to "fix the problem", and the players rocketed back to the ship, barely scratching page two of the burgeoning epic.
"Chris, we know that you've spent hours upon hours working out this city and environs. We also realize that the night is still early. Therefore, in consideration of the time and all of your hard work, we're going to nuke the city from orbit. Load up the missiles Mikey...Tom, go get the beer."
Obviously, these are gross holes in the scenarios left open by the referees. But, the detail with something as wide open as Traveller is simply that there can be a LOT of holes.
So, keep the players on a tight leash, or this can happen to you.
