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What's Out There Beyond Known Space?

fiat_knox said:
What's out there beyond Known Space?
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Only Larry Niven knows.

"Known Space" is what the (small slice of the) universe Larry Niven writes about is called and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Traveller Universe. The slice of the Traveller Universe that the Imperium is part of is called Charted Space.

It's a common fallacy, no doubt due to the popularity of Niven's books.


Hans
 
ThunderChilde said:
Ah I was just messing around with the Travellermap.com core route run, and if anyone knows the anser to this, whats with the wide swath of destroyed systems? Nearly all of the last sub-sector map is asteriod systems, and I mean every hex is filled, I only assume there are stars in the hexes, and I may be wrong on that count.

When I get home or tommorow morning I will be posting the contents of a shipment from Crazy Egors of traveller goodies.
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I don't know what happened to Clifford Linehan's site, but there used to be a fascinating e-mail discussion between him and Marc Miller discussing the layout of the galaxy as one would travel closer to the core.

The end result is that the closer one gets to the core, the younger and denser the stars and star systems until you get to the edge of the radiation barrier (where you see the red zones).

Also, as an exercise a while ago, I created a program to generate sectors specifically for wilderness generation for a discovery campaign. It generates worlds based on some rules created by DGP for the Grand Explorations book that was never published. It made the chances of intelligent life incredibly rare. I think I generated over a hundred sectors and never had a high-tech (or even mid-tech) society develop. It did have the option for Ruins to be placed - a society that had developed to a point, but then collapsed.

I had been interested in this due to the "Core rescue" concept that was introduced in the 1248 products. Then real life got in the way, as always... :rolleyes:
 
ThunderChilde said:
I am 1248 ignorant, what was the concept of core rescue?
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The basic concept is that the Empress Wave (from TNE) was created as a sort of racial S.O.S from another human major race close to the core. There was also another, slower than light and more destructive component to the Empress Wave. The "core rescue" was to be the effort of the remnants of the Star Vikings, who apparently could not fit in well with society anymore, to rescue these people by searching them out by exploring to coreward.
 
So....what is the Empress Wave, I've seen it cited in many a post and still don't know what it was supposed to be. I think it's supposed to be enormously destructive, unstabilize jump travel? or some such. Heck of a distress call.
 
ThunderChilde said:
So....what is the Empress Wave, I've seen it cited in many a post and still don't know what it was supposed to be. I think it's supposed to be enormously destructive, unstabilize jump travel? or some such. Heck of a distress call.
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Well, it's kind of a MacGuffin that was introduced in TNE that was to explain a bunch of retconned Zhodani civil war activity and to maybe act as some kind of psionic activator according to Dave Nilsen. At the time, there was very little detail about it other than it was a wave moving at light speed approximately at the imperial border in year 1200.

Then GDW went under and it languished until Martin Dougherty picked up the ball and ran with his interpretation for 1248.

I think Martin's interpretation is a bit different from what Nilsen was intending, but that is what started the "core rescue" concept.
 
mike wightman said:
These are GURPS Traveller only.

I would have a hard time accepting them as OTU canon.
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Me too, but that's because I have a hard time accepting them as GTU canon. Prime candidates for an emergency retcon, IMO.

But, also IMO, there's no such thing as GTU only. The GTU and the OTU are identical up until some time around 1115. So anything that applies to the GTU and is not the result of the divergence is also found in the OTU.

Note that I'm talking about background information, not rules. Though in many cases, rules do say something about the background, so it's not always very clearcut.



Hans
 
Still, canon in Traveller has always been around just to spark the imagination of the referee, so whether the Empress Wave is psionic or photonic or rimward of Sol is a vast region of lemon jello, the referee can take it or leave it. Anyone familiar with my ravings knows I mostly leave it.

So, to get those free-thinking, non-canon-hugging minds moving in a liberating direction, what things could be beyond human space other than the obligatory alien threat or just more space? Get those creative juices flowing, Travellers!
 
Ran Targas said:
Still, canon in Traveller has always been around just to spark the imagination of the referee, so whether the Empress Wave is psionic or photonic or rimward of Sol is a vast region of lemon jello, the referee can take it or leave it. Anyone familiar with my ravings knows I mostly leave it.

So, to get those free-thinking, non-canon-hugging minds moving in a liberating direction, what things could be beyond human space other than the obligatory alien threat or just more space? Get those creative juices flowing, Travellers!
Click to expand...

Mmmm, Jello.... :)

For my part, I've always loved the mysterious anomalies - think Dyson Spheres, beings comprised of energy (especially out towards the rim), strange mutli-dimenisonal encounters like those seen in the 2300 adventure "Bayern".

For an exploration campaign, though, the trick is to get some kind of motivating factor for a government entity to want to visit these places in person that could result in a 20 year round trip. A government isn't going to say, "Here's a several hundred MCr ship - go on out in whatever direction and let us know what you find." They would have a specific mission. Perhaps long-range telescopes detect a cloud of dark matter emitting signals that shouldn't be there. This happens to be in between two of the spiral arms of the galaxy and requires a massive planning effort.

Of course, if you have another campaign idea in mind (non-Imperial), you can do whatever suits your fancy. A "Galactica" type campaign might be kind of interesting as you could discover things as you went along.
 
The Valkyrie were part of the author's home Traveller game. He then ported the whole mess to Spacemaster when he worked on that game, then BACK to Traveller in the GT aliens books.

The Valkyrie aren't the only addition of his that I find questionable, but they are the worst, IMO.
 
Yep, GT has some really good stuff (Nobles, Sword Worlds, Interstellar Wars) but some of the stuff that went into the Alien books :eek:
 
Ain't that the truth.

However, there's at least one GT canon invention(?) I consider awesome if esoteric: Longbow II.

http://traveller.wikia.com/wiki/Longbow/secret

It would be very useful for a deep-space explo campaign, needless to say.

But as a non-scientist I have a hard time even just visualizing the set-up. Or the images it might produce.

LKW must have gotten the idea out of Scientific American or some such. Could anyone point me to a website where a contraption like this is illustrated and/or explained in layman terms?
 
Longbow was actually introduced in the Survival Margin bridge product between MT and TNE, then expanded upon in the TNE Regency Sourcebook.

That is what discovers the Empress Wave and the Zhodani infighting, and the Lishun Depot was supposedly where Strephon was when the "assassination" took place.
 
Rhialto the Marvelous said:
Ain't that the truth.

However, there's at least one GT canon invention(?) I consider awesome if esoteric: Longbow II.

http://traveller.wikia.com/wiki/Longbow/secret

It would be very useful for a deep-space explo campaign, needless to say.

But as a non-scientist I have a hard time even just visualizing the set-up. Or the images it might produce.

LKW must have gotten the idea out of Scientific American or some such. Could anyone point me to a website where a contraption like this is illustrated and/or explained in layman terms?
Click to expand...

http://www.vla.nrao.edu/
 
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