What are Traveller's Technoligical Assumptions

[dmccoy1693]

Hey everyone,

Traveller noob asking a noob question: What are the general technoligical assumptions that tend to cross all the editions? Artifical gravity on all ships or just those over a certain size, food replicators, fuel is near infinite (or lasting longer then the PCs will), intersteller communication speed, etc? Please feel free to elaborate more on anything else I missed.

 

[Sifu Blackirish]

Well, some basics that I remember off the top of my head...

* communications is limited to the speed of transportation.
Without FTL communications, it is impossible to maintain the sort of hierarchal centralized government seen in places like Star Trek's Federation.

*subject worlds have a great deal of autonomy.
In a multisector empire, it is not physically to be everywhere at once. Local worlds have their own defense forces, with imperial forces acting as cadres or high tech independent forces.

There's lots more that others can add!

 

[tjoneslo]

The largest assumption in all versions of Traveller is that Technology has not significantly changed humanity. Any technological changes that would make you ask "is he still human?" have been ignored or not implemented.

The second largest assumption about technology it that it is old. All of the scifi stories you read (or see) about the shiny new thing: In Traveller that shiny new thing was discovered a thousand years ago (or more). It's been the new thing, the retro-thing, the retro-retro-thing, numbered, filed, forgotten, rediscovered, adapted to purposes it was not intended, was the new-retro thing, had the book, movie, and tri-D made then remade, mocked, become overdone, and is now part of the background like a white wall.

That said:

• There is a lot of cheap power. Traveller assumes that fusion power works and can supply all the power one needs in a very small space. Fusion plants can be powered for a long time (months to years) with a single load of fuel. The fuel (Hydrogen) is cheap and easy to obtain.
• Gravity control exists, allow for flying cars and cheap space flight but with some limits on fine control.
• Cheap Space flight exists, including all the subtle parts of making this true, including reliable life support systems
• Nanotech, cybernetics, robotics, genetic engineering, ubiquitous computing exist, but as background elements. Nanotech only works in a large industrial setting. Genetic engineering exists only to make food products and occasionally create new alien races, not turn everyone into mutant freaks. Robots can fill in for menial tasks, but never quite replace people for important tasks. Given no FTL radio, a computing networks are confined to single worlds. AI is a harder problem than expected.
• Older technologies still exist and are used because they still work. Classic example is the Shotgun. It's cheap, easy to make, doesn't break and kills real good. Therefore people still have them and use them. Traveller is never afraid to throw in older guns (like flintlock rifles), steam engines, water wheels, chemical rocket engines, vacuum tube computers, and the like

I've probably forgotten a few important ones.

 

[zonk]

Good summation! :rofl:I particularly like this

The second largest assumption about technology it that it is old. All of the scifi stories you read (or see) about the shiny new thing: In Traveller that shiny new thing was discovered a thousand years ago (or more). It's been the new thing, the retro-thing, the retro-retro-thing, numbered, filed, forgotten, rediscovered, adapted to purposes it was not intended, was the new-retro thing, had the book, movie, and tri-D made then remade, mocked, become overdone, and is now part of the background like a white wall.

 

[The Thing]

Another assumption is that psionics exists, and that psionic technology isn't hard to make, hence people can have anti-psi headgear if they want.

Also, it's assumed medical tech has made it possible to live on alien planets that evolved different biospheres and different biochemistry.

 

[BlackBat242]

You have all forgotten the biggest assumption of all... JUMP DRIVE!


Faster-than-light travel (using a form of inter-dimensional shifting) is not only possible, and not only developed, but virtually perfected.

This allows even old, mediocrely maintained ships to safely jump over 95% of the time.

And this technology is useable by really small ships (100 Dtons), and is simple enough for civilizations who cannot invent their own to copy successfully.

 

[The Thing]

Yes, a good observation on jump drive. But then again it's not without precedent. Just look at powered flight. How long did it take humanity to develop it? Millennia.

Now, barely a century after it's development, children can build flying machines from kits, or even from scratch if they're bright enough, and anyone who can understand a car or motorcycle could maintain a basic airplane, like a piper cub. It's not too hard to build a basic flying machine from just about any old internal combustion or electric motor, some wood and other simple parts.

Maybe, for all we know, the jump drive will someday be so routine that people will be able to cobble them together from available parts.

 

[aramis]

* Life is everywhere
* We are almost an infestation on our part of space
* The Vargr really are "Wolfmen" and are genetically Terran
* Most humanoids are in fact terran in origin.
* The Hominin lifeform is VERY efficient, and seldom evolved away from.
* Spacecraft Life support is reliable, and available, but fairly expensive and not generally regenerative systems.
* Cryogenic passage is reliable but not safe.
* Fusion is incredibly inefficient, but readily done at this very low efficiency
* H Sapiens is able to interbreed with MANY other Homo ____ reliably and produce viable offspring.


* Even after 7000+ yeaars of use, J-Space is still not understood.

 

[Ganidirsii O'Flynn]

Hey! First off, GRATZ! Traveller Noob on finding the Best Sci-Fi Game Ever (tm).

Tech assumptions:

First off, understand that when Traveller was developed, Compaq was a serious competitor in the desktop market. Some of the first Traveller boards required a subscription to GEnie and CompuServe. So, Traveller's tech grew with the times, and with Sci-Fi in general.

Here are the basics.

*Interstellar travel is possible, cheap, and almost (!) always safe. It has been a fact of life in this part of the galaxy for thousands of years. It is an on-ship engine does not require 'jump-gates', 'warp-tunnels', wormholes, etc. to work. It's called, btw, Jump Drive. Further, there is a set number of hours that a jump will take you (roughly 6-7 ship-days), and the higher power a drive have onboard dictates how far you'll go in that time. The range is 1 to 6 parcecs. As a note, the extra-dimensional space that jump drive carries you into is still not well understood.

*Interstellar communication is not possible. The news travels as fast as the ships do. This leaves corporate, military, planetary and independant personnel with wide lattitude to do their jobs.

*Fusion power is cheap, plentiful, and efficient. The standard fuel is hydrogen that can be scooped from gas giants, ice caps, or oceans and 'cracked' to remove excess oxygen.

*Computers are ubiquitous, but they are not uniform. There are several differing computers at various tech levels.

*Psionics is a real, recognised ability, if not fully understood. The ability, for example, is not hereditary and geneticists have not identified a 'psi-gene'. How a society deals with psi abilities plays a large role in politics.

*The universe teems with life, and the humanoid/bipedal form is very common. HOWever, each alien culture is a culture, not a human in a furry suit.

Beyond, this, everyone else seems to have covered alot.

Welcome to the board and to my favorite game ever.

*

 

[Golan2072]

Welcome aboard!

Generally speaking, Traveller has a conservative technological outlook: computers are big and tend to be mainframe-y, cybernetics/bio-engineering/nanotech tends to be limited and rare, conventional firearms are far more common than energy weapons, and AIs are very rare except for in the New Era incarnation of the game.

In more details:

- There are no FTL communications; therefore, information moves at the speed of travel (that is, at maximum, six parsecs per week, and usually slower).

- Interstellar travel uses Jump Drives. Each Jump takes one week but could cover between one to six parsecs (depending on the drive model) and eats A LOT of fuel in one gulp. Jumps could be performed from anywhere but are very risky close to planets (up to 100 planetary diameters).

- Fusion is the main source of energy in most starfaring societies, and could be built into very small units as well (you could even have a fusion-powered tank or robot). Fusion consumes a relatively tiny amount of fuel; jump drives are the reason for most of any ship's fuel tank size.

- Interplanetary movement typically uses an inertialess drive which is an evolution of anti-grav technology; it could give constant accelerations between 1 and 6 Gs and, in most versions, uses only power and no propellant. It could also operate well within an atmosphere.

- Gravitic technology is common in all starfaring societies. Virtually all starfaring-era ships (regardless of size) have artificial gravity and inertial compensation, and grav vehicles are common (though somewhat expensive). At the top ens of the tech scale, personal gravitics (i.e. grav-belts) become common as well and gravitics tend to completely supplant ground vehicles.

- Energy weapons (laser, plasma and fusion) exist and are widely used by most high-tech military forces as support weapons, but conventional firearms are still ubiquitous at the personal level, not to mention civilian use; even the low-tech shotguns and revolvers are still around. The same goes to swords, which, surprisingly, are even in wide use by high-tech marines!

- Ship weaponry revolves around missiles (long range, with some military versions having nuclear warheads) and various energy weapons ranging from simple beam or pulse lasers through plasma and fusion guns to particle accelerators and the dreaded meson gun. There are almost no energy "shields" except for anti-meson "screens", anti-nuke "dampers", repulsor beams and the ultra-tech "black globe" shield which, while rendering the ship virtually invulnerable, also render it immovable and don't allow it to attack or even use its sensors; all of these are very high-tech and expensive and are used only by high Tech Level navies.

- The ground combat paradigm has a WWII/Early Cold War feel to it; Grav vehicles also tend to feel more like ground vehicles than aircraft.

- Computers for the most part follow 1970's assumptions (naturally, this is an 1970's game): they tend towards the mainframe end of the scale and, under some versions, they use tapes (!). Things such an internet equivalent have been, naturally, added only as a semi-afterthought in later versions; hacking and virtual realities are rarely dealt with by the rules or the adventures. Smaller computers exist but are usually way too high on the tech scale and way too expensive and heavy in comparison to RL exemplars with similar capabilities. Similarly, cellphones are rarely given in most traveller equipment lists and comm gear tends to be heavy and bulky.

- Cybernetics are rare, very rare, and so is nanotech. "True" AIs are extremely rare in most versions of the game though "autonomous" robots exist in some places; anyway, AIs/robots tend to be in the background of the game... Unless you are playing in the New Era setting, that is (where a strain of viral AI has infiltrated most computers around known space and subverted them to its goals)...

- Genetic technology is far more common than cybernetics, but tends to be used to produce human variant races rather than be used on an existing person or produce organic cyberware-equivalents.

- Psionics exist, are scientifically proven, but are shunned by most cultures (except for the Zhodani, who are rules by psions) and thus they are rare and very little research goes into them.

 

[mbrinkhues]

Things that DON'T EXIST in Traveller:

+ Replikators

If you want food, you open a pre-packed meal or learn to cook and use the galley. No magic wall-mounted maschines that produce "Earl Grey, hot". Use a tea-egg and hot water

+ No Transporters

Traveller still uses rugged, reliabel shuttles that work even during an Ion Storm or with the main characters in danger

+ No Terminators

Or other humorless, long-running Androids that look like a human. As far as the average imperial citizen knows Human-Lookalike robots don't exist outside a semi-reliabel prototype in a lab or two. And robots have a rather short duration(1)

+ No Starfleet Deflector shields

The best the Emperor can get is a Black Globe. And that either is on 100 percent and absorbs energy from BOTH sides (making your weapons and drives useless) or is on 10 percent and has little effect.(2). And even those globes are rare and have a lot of problems.
Some ships can defend against one (Nuclear Weapons) or two (Meson Weapons and Nukes) and rely on luck, armor and sand for defence against lasers, particle beams and explosive missiles

+ No Keyfinder of Doom

There is no Traveller-equivalent to the Typ-1 Phaser from TNE or the handphasers/lasers from Enterprise, Galactica, Space:1999, StarWars etc. Laser weapons require big/heave energy batteries and cables. Plasma/Fusion guns are even bigger and heavier.




(1)Yes, I have read a certain set of adventures in the DPG Magazin.
(2)High-flicker BG and the WG are theories for most Traveller Beings

 

[aramis]

Matter Transporters are only TL 16 (CT, TTB, page 87). No stats for the technology are given. So it is a case of "It can be built withing the imperium, but only in a few key locations."

Human-looking "Pseudobiological" robots are available at TL 15. (CT, Bk 8) Coincidentally, experimental true ai can be built at TL15 (it's a tl 16 system).

MT Changes neither. TNE ignores both as far as I know, but definitely includes AI. ISTR T4 uses the same tech table as CT, but then uses the divergent FF&S for implementing tech.

 

[jfetters]

Hey everyone,

Traveller noob asking a noob question: What are the general technoligical assumptions that tend to cross all the editions? Artifical gravity on all ships or just those over a certain size, food replicators, fuel is near infinite (or lasting longer then the PCs will), intersteller communication speed, etc? Please feel free to elaborate more on anything else I missed.

Ultimately, it depends on the flavor of the campaign and setting that you want to run. If you want to run a classic Imperial setting, then what has been covered in this discussion is true.

I think when you boil it down to the basics, there are two technological "assumptions" that exist in every setting - artificial gravity and FTL. Other than that, you can pretty much do whatever you want.

 

[JAFARR]

Just enough hints of other technologies that may exist if you run across some Ancient artifacts. Remember if you want to throw something like this in you can quickly unbalance the game. You can always use the, "It seems to have quit working and you don't know how to get it working again." line.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Faster-than-light travel (using a form of inter-dimensional shifting) is not only possible, and not only developed, but virtually perfected.

Question: So does FLT create a fold in space and merely cross the fold, enter an alternate dimension of existence (akin to B5's hyperspace), or tears the section of space surrounding the ship and used that to slip through space (like a piece of soap through water)?

Off topic questions: What do you do in Traveller? I mean I know that it's similar to Firefly in that you take jobs (from sometimes shadey people) and similar to D&D in that you goto places that no living soul has seen for 1000's of years, but give me a better feel of the game. Also, are there any races/monsters that players typically love to kill (like Kobolds or Goblins in D&D)? (If you can't tell, I'm an old D&D gamer looking to "jump ship" thanks to 4E.)

BTW, thank you everyone for the greeting.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Jumpspace is like hyperspace, but trips always take ~7 days.

Who do PCs like to kill? Each other

 

[Golan2072]

Off topic questions: What do you do in Traveller? I mean I know that it's similar to Firefly in that you take jobs (from sometimes shadey people) and similar to D&D in that you goto places that no living soul has seen for 1000's of years, but give me a better feel of the game. Also, are there any races/monsters that players typically love to kill (like Kobolds or Goblins in D&D)? (If you can't tell, I'm an old D&D gamer looking to "jump ship" thanks to 4E.)

Many possible types of Traveller games are possible. The "Big Four" are:

1) Exploration. Take your ship into uncharted (or poorly charted) parts of the universe and explore, be that for a government, a corporation, private attempts at speculative trade, a research institution or simply to satisfy your curiosity and wanderlust. Adventures naturally revolve around troubles encountered "out there", such as hostile (or difficult to communicate with) natives/wildlife, deadly ancient ruins, local conflicts, and rival explorers. A variant of this game type is the Belter game, in which the PCs seek out profitable mining sites in asteroid belts and, naturally, tend to run into monopolist megacorps, claim-jumpers, hidden pirate bases and/or alien artifacts.

2) Mercenary. The PCs are a mercenary unit (if it's a small elite unite, usually squad-sized or smaller) or the commanders of such a unit (if the unit is larger). Adventures are called "tickets" and are almost always called by patrons (megacorps, governments, even individuals) who hire the mercenaries. Needless to say, adventures revolve around military engagements, though, of course, a bit of diplomacy and spec-force action could always be thrown in. A variant of this game type posts the PCs as active-duty personnel in a government's military force.

3) Merchant. The PCs engage in speculative trade, usually picking up cargoes and passengers as well - think Firefly. Adventures include encounters with pirates/customs/black-marketeers, smuggling, troublesome passengers, hijacking attempts, and, of course, odd jobs on the side when the going gets tough. A variant on this is the Pirate campaign in which some, or all, of the goods are not bought but stolen - ARRRRR! YE MATEY!

4) Odd Ends (AKA seeing the universe). The PCs have a ship; they go around looking for odd jobs, strange opportunities, thrills and the sights of the universe. Anything that gets in their way could be an adventure - just insert a story hook depending on your players' tastes. A variant on this revolves around noble PCs and their yacht out to enjoy the universe.

Many more possibilities exist: law-enforcement, criminal activities, politics, empire-building, bounty-hunting, big-game hunting, news-reporting, diplomacy and horror are only part of the possibilities.

 

[jfetters]

Question: So does FLT create a fold in space and merely cross the fold, enter an alternate dimension of existence (akin to B5's hyperspace), or tears the section of space surrounding the ship and used that to slip through space (like a piece of soap through water)?

Off topic questions: What do you do in Traveller? I mean I know that it's similar to Firefly in that you take jobs (from sometimes shadey people) and similar to D&D in that you goto places that no living soul has seen for 1000's of years, but give me a better feel of the game. Also, are there any races/monsters that players typically love to kill (like Kobolds or Goblins in D&D)? (If you can't tell, I'm an old D&D gamer looking to "jump ship" thanks to 4E.)

BTW, thank you everyone for the greeting.

The nature of FTL also depends on the flavor of Traveller you run. 99.99% of the time, you are going to be using the standard Jump Drive, but the TNE release allowed for variant settings that could use stargates or subspace among others. But the nature of hyperspace itself remains a mystery.

And as far as a specific "baddie" race, it all depends, although I love Andrew's response! Aside from other characters, there have been attempts to make "bad guy" races or groups (Lucan's Imperium, Virus, the K'Kree (or, in 1248, all of the above ), the Zhodani (for a while)) but again it all depends on what you want to do. Some of the best experiences are when the PCs get a "recurring villain" (or group) that keep them on their toes.

Anyway, you can always make your own space goblins...

 

[jimg]

- Energy weapons (laser, plasma and fusion) exist and are widely used by most high-tech military forces as support weapons, but conventional firearms are still ubiquitous at the personal level, not to mention civilian use; even the low-tech shotguns and revolvers are still around. The same goes to swords, which, surprisingly, are even in wide use by high-tech marines!

This is one of the bits that always baffled me about Traveller. Don't get me wrong, I kind of like the image of a imperial marine with a cutlass. I just never could figure out a rationalization for a military force capable of fielding man-portable fusion guns to actively train swordsmen.

 

[dmccoy1693]

This is one of the bits that always baffled me about Traveller. Don't get me wrong, I kind of like the image of a imperial marine with a cutlass. I just never could figure out a rationalization for a military force capable of fielding man-portable fusion guns to actively train swordsmen.

Close quarters combat. The US military to this day is still trained to use hand held weapons. Granted not long swords, but knives, daggers, etc because you can keep one in your boot and not worry about a round accidentally going off. Full dress uniform for the US Marines includes a longer sword (not exactly sure what type).

Hand held melee weapons require no ammo, no battery, has no reloading and has more used then a gun (leverage to open a stuck door just enough to get your hands in there and open it the rest of the way, crude wire stripper, etc).