IMTU

In My Traveller Universe…

Traveller is a role-playing game that has existed for over 40 years. During that time, it has built up a lot of lore, mostly centering around its Third Imperium setting. But, like all history, some things are real and some things are apocryphal. Everyone has their own interpretation of how things work in Traveller

Some of these are obvious; not everyone likes the MegaTraveller Rebellion era and even fewer like the Virus-influenced New Era setting. Others are more left to the individual campaign. Is piracy viable? Is “deadfall ordinance” (dropping asteroids on planets) common? What exactly is a low berth?

Every campaign answers these, and many other things, in their own way. This is a collection of how things work In My Traveller Universe.

The Fundamental Concept of Traveller

This one is pretty subjective, but to me, the fundamental thing that makes Traveller different from other science-fiction settings is the way communication works. There is no faster-than-light “radio”, and faster-than-light travel from one place to another always takes a week. No exceptions. So, even in an Imperium spanning thousands of light-years where starships are common, every planet is at least a week away from every other planet. It may take a planet a month or more to learn of something that happened only a subsector away. One side of the Imperium is almost a year away from the other. Planets are far away from each other, which means every planet is different. There is no single, unified Imperial “culture”. Every planet has its own culture; every planet is different.

The Role of the Imperium

OK, given the constraints of communication… What exactly is The Imperium?

The Imperium isn’t an actual, centralized government. It can’t be. By the time the Emperor on Capitol learned that something was going on in an outer sector and sent a response, almost a year would have passed. The Imperium obviously can’t be thought of as a single, unified “government”. So what is it?

The Imperium is an ideal. Maybe a false ideal that a lot of people have bought into, but it is an ideal.

The Imperium doesn’t control worlds. It controls the space between worlds. Specifically, it controls trade. This is an important distinction.

Because of the Imperium, the various megacorps can operate on a scale never before conceived. For example, today, in the 21st century, know how corporate farms are slowly forcing family-owned farms out of business. Maybe we are upset about this and think it is wrong, but from a purely economic point-of-view the larger, corporate farms are more efficient than an individual family-owned farm. We will pay lip-service to being upset about those people who have lost their livelihoods, but… we still buy the cheaper food.

The Imperium has done this on a galactic level.

Some planets do nothing but produce food. And not multiple kinds of food, just one food. Entire worlds devoted to producing wheat. Or fish. Or whatever.

They survive because the Imperium protects trade. They can sell their food and buy everything else from other planets.

There are planets devoted to mining. Or manufacturing. Or entertaining. Economies of scale have grown to planetary size. Even system sized. But, they can’t grow larger. The speed of travel and communication prevents it from going further.

So the Imperium, in its present state, represents the largest and most efficient economic system that is possible. And that is what it protects.

The Imperium owns the starports that allow trade. It builds and protects them. It runs the Imperial Navy, which protects that trade, along with the Army and Marines. If a system starts acting in a way that will hurt trade, then the Imperium takes whatever steps it (or it’s most local representative) thinks it has to to make sure that the trade remains safe. The Imperium is funded by a value-added-tax on anything sold at its Starports, the ones it built. Planets, operating at their individual economic maximums, cannot survive without trade. So, they happily pay the tax.

The Imperium doesn’t care how the planet runs itself or how it treats its own population. Planets and systems are free to govern themselves however they like, as long as the trade keeps flowing and the Imperium gets its tax.

This is the Imperium.

Most of the population sees “The Imperium” as the Imperial Knight who oversees Imperial interests in a single city or county. Or the Count or Countess who represents their world.

Or maybe they are aware of the Baron or Baroness who is over their subsector, or maybe even the Duke or Duchess who rules their sector. Rarely the Archduke/Archduchess who rules their Domain. Very few feel the Emperor, far away on Core, represents them.

Some of the Knights and Counts feel as if they should do their best to help the local population. Others think as long as the trade keeps flowing it doesn’t matter.

By the time you hit Baron or Baroness, things are too distant. Very few of them care about the individual worlds in their subsector. As long as the subsector economy is functioning, then the Knights and Counts must be taking care of things, right?

The Dukes and Archdukes are completely dependant on the nobles below them to be taking care of things. They are working on such scales that individual worlds are meaningless to them.

But, in the end, trade reigns supreme. As long as the trade is flowing then they are doing the right thing. If it isn’t, then they aren’t.

So What About the Rebellion?

First… it isn’t a Rebellion; it’s a Civil War. Factions aren’t trying to overthrow the government, they’re all convinced that they are the “Government”. To “save” the Imperium, the warring Emperors and Empresses are actually tearing it apart.

Because they forgot trade.

The billions of people living in (say) the Old Expanses don’t really care who sits on the Iridium Throne. That’s too far away to really affect them. That speed of communication thing again.

But… When the fleets that were supposed to protect their trade leave because Lucan has sent them to chase after Dulinor, they notice. When Margaret pulls the reserve fleets away to defend herself against Lucan, they notice. And, when the Solomani arrive to fill the vacuum created by the Imperium abandoning them? They really notice.

This is what I find so fascinating about the MegaTraveller era. The canon Third Imperium was the longest-lived political entity in all of humaniti’s history. There has never been anything in real or canonical Traveller history that has lasted anywhere near that long. Over a millennium of relative peace in which every planet in the Imperium had settled into a pattern where they were completely dependent on each other while, at the same time, being completely independent of each other.

And then that changed.

I ignore Virus in my Traveller universe because I don’t need Virus to completely destroy things. The disruption to trade that the “Rebellion” will cause tens of thousands of planets will do what the Virus did without introducing another fantastical element.

And, when everything is falling apart around you, when everything you have believed your entire life, the lifestyle your ancestors have enjoyed for dozens of generations, is suddenly threatened? What do you do?

That is why this Log is set in the “Rebellion” era. Because it is an interesting era. It’s easy to be a hero when everything is actually pretty much fine and stable. It’s harder when things are really getting bad.

Welcome to the Rebellion.

Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable from Magic

Science Fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once made that statement. Traveller, to me anyway, has always tried to stay on the “science” side of science-fiction–unlike a lot of (most?) other games–but to function as a game it has to allow certain standard science-fiction tropes to exist.

In My Traveller Universe I have actually ignored a few things from the canonical setting while others I have kept. Here are the major things that I have kept and more than a few that I have changed.

Let’s start with the obvious. Jump Drives. Everything we know about physics, right now in the early 21st century, says that faster-than-light travel is impossible. OK, fine. Physics is a downer sometimes. But… having a faster-than-light drive is fun! You can’t really have a Space Opera setting without one.

I never define how a Jump Drive works, really. It somehow destroys a bunch of matter and the ship goes somewhere parsecs away. The way I describe it is that it is like throwing a ball instead of rolling it along the ground. The ship is “flung” into Jumpspace and then “falls” into the gravity well of the target planet. I have no idea how that actually works. For game purposes, it doesn’t matter. Jump Drives exist and work as described; that’s as far as I need to worry about it.

The other “magic” I accept is Gravitics. I honestly don’t know if this is magic or not. We’re pretty sure that gravity is just another fundamental force, like Electromagnetism or the Weak and Strong Nuclear forces, but it seems to be less understood.

I can’t say that we won’t, someday, understand how to manipulate and control gravity. But, for game purposes, I assume that we have. Gravitics is ubiquitous in the setting so it gets a pass.

Then there are the things that are “canonical” that I reject.

The first is psionics. When Traveller was written in the 1970’s parapsychology was an actual field of study. The CIA was researching it. Duke University was doing a lot of studies on it. And it was very common in the science fiction of the time.

Since then psionics and parapsychology have been relegated to the fringe sciences. No one really takes it seriously anymore. But… it’s a fundamental part of Traveller canon, mainly because of the Zhodani. The big enemy of the Imperium is a culture of psionics. How do you ignore psionics and still stay faithful to Traveller?

I went with what I call “cyonics”. People have computer chips implanted in their heads which allows them to connect to the local computer networks. So they can talk to each other mentally; it’s just the equivalent of messaging each other. They can manipulate objects with their minds; it’s just them sending instructions through the local net to whatever they are interacting with.

Most citizens of the Imperium reject this because they don’t want their innermost thoughts connected to the local nets. The Zhodani require it of all citizens so that all of their innermost thoughts are connected to the local nets.

It’s a subtle change, but one that removes a “magic” ability from Traveller and replaces it with advanced technology.

So How Do Starships Work, Really…?

I’ve already talked about Jump Drives. They’re magic. Don’t worry about it beyond that. See “Sufficiently Advanced Technology” if you haven’t.

In my Traveller universe, Maneuver Drives are fusion drives. I know that as of the MegaTraveller era they are supposed to be “Thrust Plates” but I don’t accept those. First Edition High Guard had rules for using your ships drives as a fusion cannon, so that’s all I need. Ignoring thrust plates also lets me avoid another “magic” technology.

This also gives me another advantage. If you actually calculate how much energy the fuel used by Traveller drives and power plants could produce it doesn’t make sense. The power required to run a Free Trader for a week could power all of North America for decades. And, even if the power converter is 99.98% efficient, the ship would be an expanding cloud of vaporized metal in just a few seconds from the waste heat.

So… how to resolve this without massively changing the design sequence?

Well, let’s assume that fuel isn’t liquid hydrogen. So what is it then?

Fortunately, we have the Challenge Magazine volume 31 which contained the scenario “Wrong Way Valve”. In that scenario, a ship is filling its tanks up with water and gets flooded.

So here’s how I assume things work. Most of our “fuel” is simply water or some hydrocarbon like methane or propane. Anything liquid at (relatively) normal temperatures and pressures. Our fuel purification plants (if we don’t just buy purified fuel) separate out the deuterium and tritium from the hydrocarbons or water. That is what actually gets used in our fusion power plants.

The rest of the “fuel” is used either as reaction mass and accelerated at extremely high velocity out the back of the ship to make it move, or as coolant and just vented into space because fusion power plants are really, really hot.

The downside to this is that an active fusion drive is not something you want near where people are living. Like Starports. Ships need to get to orbit, or at least above the atmosphere, before they kick it in. So, how do they get there?

I assume all ships have gravitics systems they use for atmospheric or near-planet operation. Just like air-rafts. So, they lift on gravitics and get to the upper atmosphere or even orbit before shifting to their fusion drives.

As for gravitics, I assume they need a gravity field to work “against”. And that depends on the inverse square law. So… you get to one planetary diameter away from the planet (that’s two radii) and your gravitic drive is only 1/4 as efficient. Two diameters and it’s 1/16th. You aren’t getting to 100 diameters out that way. Not anytime soon anyway.

So, you go to orbit with gravitics, then switch to fusion drives.

OK, you may be asking, but what about ships built at tech levels that don’t have gravitics?

That’s TL 9, which is so far below standard Imperial tech that I can safely ignore it. If you have a specific scenario where it becomes important then you can come up with whatever workaround you want. But, for basically any situation that comes up in the standard setting, anyone who is building a starship has access to fusion, gravitics, and jump technology. Yeah, wondering what other options are might be interesting, but it is really irrelevant when it comes to how the setting works from day-to-day.

Of course, this may become a more interesting question as the Civil War progresses and worlds start getting cut off from one another. We’ll… worry about that later. I’ve got a few years to write through yet.

Wait… Fabricators, Dispensers, and Recyclers? What are those?

Traveller was created in the 1970’s. Back in those days, recycling was something we wanted people to do with newspapers and the thought of anything resembling 3D printing was pure science fiction. The concept of nanotechnology was still a few years away. But now, we’re dealing with the economics of one and the onset of another.

I decided that, by the 57th century, we would probably have all of this worked out. Recyclers break things down into their fundamental atoms, fabricators turn them back into usable items, and dispensers deliver them to the consumer. This is all common and routine and no one really thinks about it.

(And I used “Dispensers” instead of “Vendors” because I wanted to use the word vendor to refer to a person. A dispenser is a machine.)

Anyway, this introduces a problem to the Traveller setting. If the ability to create anything out of raw materials is common, then what are Free Traders trading? I’ve already said that the entire basis of the Imperium is trade. Doesn’t this break that?

I decided that fabricated items are good, very good, but not quite as good as something made by people. Fabricated clothes don’t quite fit right. Fabricated food doesn’t quite taste as good as something a chef made. And fabricated machines and parts don’t quite work as well as manufactured ones.

So that’s how it works. Many people (actually most people on what is called “Basic”) probably get by on fabricated items. They’re almost and good and work almost as well. But, when they can, they want “real” items. And thus trade is saved.

Basic? Where did that come from?

We have a setting where computers, robots, and artificial intelligence (a term I think Classic Traveller never used) are ubiquitous. It also has fabricators, as I just described. So… what do people do?

A sizable proportion of them do nothing. But, the worlds of the Imperium (and the majority of the other polities (I’m looking at you Solomani)) realized that having massive unemployed (and unemployable) citizens was a recipe for disaster. So, they created “Basic”.

Every citizen of every world has their necessities taken care of. Everyone has food, clothing, shelter, education, and entertainment. Plus a small stipend for “luxuries”.

Most people are happy with this and are content to spend their days watching net-vids while lying in somewhat cramped quarters while eating fabricated food. Those who don’t find what jobs still require human (sophont) oversight and gain themselves better housing, food, clothing, and entertainment.

The really unhappy ones? Well, who do you think Travellers are?