Non OTU: Traveller ATU How To #4: The Academy

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Useful tips, features, color, and rules to give your Traveller game a feel like Jack McDevitt's "Academy" series.

CHARACTERS

The major difference is the absence of an overarching nobility. "Social Standing" is more like socioeconomic class as we understand it. And that's OK.

So don't award a noble class if SOC rolls high. Just record the value and move on.

There would be no such thing as a "Noble" career. If you were keen on using it, you could rename it to "Politician" and you might be okay with it.



EQUIPMENT

Generally TL 9 equipment and vehicles exist, except there are no gravitics.

There are no laser rifles, etc.
There is no PGMP.
There is no gauss rifle.

Accelerator rifles exist.
Assault guns exist.

 

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STARSHIPS

Starships are called "interstellars".

Decks do not seem to be perpendicular to thrust -- passengers and crew simply belt in and wait out acceleration. That means these ships stick with 1G most of the time, don't typically do more than 2G (or 3G), and wouldn't do more than that in a civilian situation anyhow.

Interstellars range from 100 tons to (perhaps) 400 tons, and support 4 to a dozen or more people. Some are configured to carry mostly cargo. In the series, all of them are chartered vessels -- there's no tramp trader. This doesn't have to be the case in the games, of course.

Some interstellars are airframed and can land on a world surface; however, this is apparently expensive and a bit risky, so instead most ships are braced hulls. These will have two landers, which are of course orbit-to-surface small craft. They'll be Launches, or Slow Boats, or Slow Pinnaces, each in their own hangar.

Planetoid hulls are (perhaps) too bulky to turn into spacecraft.


Drives

The maneuver drive is more fuel hungry than the Traveller one. They're like HEPlaR drives without emissions.

The "spike" is a drive element that allows very fuel efficient landing and liftoff on world surfaces.

Hazeltine drives are different from jump drives in two ways:
(1) They are "touchier", requiring a few days of travel time to get to a jump point.
(2) They are a velocity, in parsecs per week. They continue on until forced to exit.

Thus you can spend 2 days travelling to a jump point, inject into hyperspace, run the drives for about 10 seconds, exit hyperspace, and then be about 2 days away from Saturn.

Fuel use is therefore different. Based on how Traveller ships are built, I would say these ships need 20% of their hull devoted to fuel for a typical round-trip voyage... and half of that is for the "maneuver" drive.



TECHNOLOGY

"TL9 without gravitics".


Starports

Starports are class C, D, F, or G, except for the "Wheel" orbiting Earth, which is a class A or B.

 

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BACKSTORY

2200 AD. Interstellar exploration and survey has become a regular thing, and Earth is looking for worlds to terraform. Local space has a number of worlds that once had civilizations -- no longer. Some of them died out a million years ago, and some of them were relatively recent (10,000 years ago). One world is known to have another civilization, and they're not interesting -- stuck at TL5 and fighting a series of wars that is slowly destroying their planet.


READING LIST

Chindi
Omega

(The other books in the series are okay, but not as good.)



ADVENTURES

These will tend to be survey-based, with some terraforming-related themes, politics, and a dash of terrorism.
Archaeological exploration, fights against nature, and Ancient Tech Big Dumb Objects are common features.