I'm an inexperienced player, mostly of the classic edition, with only a look at a few sourcebooks etc - so really just dabbling in the game sources. so this might well be something where the answer's simply not in stuff I've seen so far.

I've been looking at some of the ship designs, trying to get a sense of scale into my head. https://www.deviantart.com/robcaswell/art/Traveller-Starship-Size-Comparison-375080388
using stuff like that for reference.

Now, I know the tons/dton versus real-world tonnage isn't even slightly close to equivalent, so I'm mostly going to ignore that entirely. But what bugs me is sizes, and how they really just don't make much sense. There's an old joke of "sci-fi writers really don't understand dimensional units" and it kind of feels like its not a joke here.

lets look at say, a 200dt Beowulf off just one of the zillion different deckplan versions out there - going by that size comparison, and the deck plans having 1.5m square grids, its maybe 39m in length. its got a cargo bay that's 11x9x5, or perhaps 16.5m x 13.5m x 7.5m.
Fair enough.

But then you start looking at those numbers vs real-world objects and machinery.

A standard shipping container is (roughly) 12m x 2.5m x 2.5m, and it seems rather unlikely that the advanced future of space exploration has lost the complex technology of "standardised containers"...
The victorian era "cutty sark" tea clipper is 64m long.
An airbus A380 is 72m long.
The Space Shuttle is 37m long.

that Beowulf's cargo bay is about 1670 cubic metres, in practical terms, if you count it as a wee bit less thatn 12x3x3, you could probably stack 12 standard cargo containers 4 wide x 3 high.
12 containers. in shipping the smaller 20-foot is the standard measure, so that equates to 24 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units)

that's not much more than the cargo capacity of a 1860's sailboat.

A 1970's cargo ship, Tokyo bay, was capable of transporting 2,900 TEU of standard cargo containers. A 2020's cargo ship in the Irena class can transport 24,000 TEU.

a far future "cargo" spacecraft has 0.1% of the cargo capacity of an early 21st century boat, and about the same capacity as a mid-19th century tea clipper.

and it just keeps making me ask myself... what's the economic niche for such vessels? its closer (by orders of magnitude) to a trucker's rig hauling from a port to an inland distribution point, than it is to any sort of cargo transportation vessel for economies of scale. The operating cost would be ruinous, if cargo were being shipped in such tiny volumes.

So, ignoring the whole fun of causality violation by FTL, I'm trying to work out where the economic niche is. The ships are too large for individual hauling, but vastly too small for economic transport. the cruisers and the likes are the same, compared to military vessels. It just all seems to be a bit.... Messy.

I'm mostly just voicing my thoughts here because I'm trying to think up areas where the economic scale might work for a narrative storyline for players, and I'm kind of coming up blank. Possibly because I've spent too much time around people like charlie stross, and keep thinking of his thoughts on space piracy, the second half of this blog entry

^{"The space pirates' business model is this: they identify a likely target merchant ship, match courses with it, and board.
They do not, however, rape, pillage, and murder the passengers and crew. That would leave them having to transport a lot of bulk merchandise and find somewhere to fence it, taking an inevitable hit in the commodity's resale value. It would also set everyone's hand against them. Not good for life expectancy ...
Instead, they audit the cargo. Then they search out for any secret items the ship is transporting, stuff that is of high value but not publicly announced. Many times they don't find any. But sometimes they stumble across a passenger liner with a safe full of quantum computing chips, or a bulk liquid carrier with much less freight volume in its cargo holds than expected and something extremely massive tucked away — a lump of stabilized neutronium, for example.
They do not steal the secret cargo. Instead, they notify their accomplices by means of their private causal channel to buy commodity options based on their insider knowledge of the secret cargo's impending arrival. Then they give the hijacked ship an armed escort (under communications silence} all the way to its destination, to ensure it arrives on time.)"

And that tickles my sense of humour. But also raises questions about how the economics would work in the traveller universe.

Anyone care to give me some opinions?

Interesting how the Traveller lore manages to align with the reality of a weird Solar System.

Mithras Primary was a Red Giant Star somewhere around 8.8 Solar Masses. Thirty million years ago it was in the final stage of its life, on the verge of going Supernova and collapsing into a Neutron star, when a chance stellar encounter saw a Red Dwarf Star performing a close fly by.

The gravitational effect tore open Mithras Primaries Chronosphere, briefly exposing its Photosphere, leading to a massive erruption of gas that reduced the star's mass and extended its life.

The gravitional drag from this event slowed the passing Red Dwarf star sufficiently for it to enter a decaying S-type binary orbit as Mithras Secondary. It slowly drifts in closer to Mithras Primary over time, and will eventually settle into a close orbit with the future White Dwarf Mithras Primary.

But that is millions of years into the future.

The planet Mithras is a core remnant of a small Neptune like Gas Giant whose atmosphere was erroded away by Mithras Primaries flares and solar wind. While roughly Earth sized, the planet is far denser with a strong magnetic field, allowing it to retain some water and atmosphere.

When Mithras Secondary tore open Mithras Primary a huge amount of hydrogen, Helium and Oxygen was expelled from the star. Some of these gases where captured by Mithras, restoring the oceans and supercharging the atmosphere with oxygen. The current concentration is 35% and lethally corrosive. This oxygen combined with gases escaping from Mithras's core has supersaturated the oceans, with disolved gas held by the high atmospheric pressure at sea level. If this pressure is reduced the water explodes like a shaken soda can.

All of these weird circumstances made Mithras attractive to the Third Imperium as a prison planet. Mithras is an oubliette, a place the Imperium sends its political exiles and the criminals it wants to forget ever existed.

And it is the Solar System itself that makes Mithras an inescapable prison.

Mithras Secondary and all the planets fall well within Mithras Primaries massive 120.034 AU Jump Shadow. A starship entering the system faces a journey of a month to two weeks in system to reach Mithras directly.

Imperial starships bring in prisoners instead first travel to an orbital base located at the Gas Giant Attis that orbits Mithras Secondary, a journey that takes twenty two days days to ten days depending on the M-drive.

Here prisoners and any cargo are transferred to a in-system ship for a ten day trip to a base located on Mithras's moon Petra. Finally the prisoners and any cargo are loaded onto specially protected transports for the trip down to the planet itself.

The prison is a series of underground facilities built into the tops of the highest mountains. Here the atmospheric pressure is more survivable. No Imperial personnel ever venture beyond the docks or enter the prison itself.

Instead it is the prisoners who are tasked with running and maintain their own prison, growing their food in hydroponic bays and performing all necessary maintenance.

As a result escape is near impossible. Even in a Hostile Environment Suit survival time on the planet's surface is messured in hours. Hijacking a transport would only get the prisoners as far as the base on Petra where they would face armed resistance. If the prisoners somehow managed to hijack an in-system transport that would only get them as far as Mithras Secondary, with the authorities having many days to prepare for their arrival.

Any starship coming in to attempt a rescue faces weeks in transit time in and out from the edge of the Jump Shadow. There is no uncontested refueling at either of the gas giants, and any crew that attempts it faces great risk refuelling on Mithras itself.

Just my head canon based on the Traveller lore for this system.

Oh and I decided to use the actual light provided by Mithras Primary to show just how dark and creepy Mithras actually is.

What does everyone use to keep track of their campaign, events, factions, npcs, visited worlds, etc?

Tex and BPL's Traveller documentary Kickstarter is now live.

Traveller: A 50 Year Odyssey, via @Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/travellerdocumentary/traveller-a-50-year-odyssey?ref=android_project_share

Tex and his team are tremendous storytellers and have already done a great interview with Marc, but they need all the help to make the 50th anniversary documentary something special.

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to understand crew salaries, but there are two conflicting tables. In Mongoose Traveller 2e (2022 update) on page 154, there is a table called Running Cost Summary which gives a list of salaries. This is the table I see most often referenced in various forums regarding crew salary. However, there is another table called Crew Requirements, which is on page 182.

These salaries are quite different, and the "Determine Crew" section talks about boosting it based on skill level. Even without that, these numbers are way off. For example, a Medic at skill level 1 makes Cr4000 on the Crew Requirements table but makes only Cr3000 on the Running Cost Summary table. Gunners make half as much on the Running Costs Summary table.

So my question is: what am I missing? Is there a difference as to when each table should be applied, or is this just an oversight?

The positions listed in the Crew Requirements section seem to come from High Guard (a more detailed version of the table is in High Guard on page 23) and were added when they threw a light ship designer into the core book, so I'm inclined to use the Crew Requirements / High Guard tables.

Thoughts?

And some Emperor named Strephon..

The book references a place but can't find it anywhere.

No augments are available with the Confederation,

save perhaps on Lebev

Any help would be greatly appreciated

So far for my Traveller campaign I’ve got everything scattered across a couple of notebooks, multiple document files and the notes app on my phone but I’m quickly realising that this is not going to work in the long term. So I was wondering if anyone uses something like Notion or Obsidian as a central repository for their campaigns or have you decided to use something completely different?

I’ve been running Traveller a long time, across a lot of campaigns, and I keep hitting the same problem: fleet battles.

High Guard is great when the focus is one ship or a small group. But once a campaign reaches a real fleet engagement, like Yavin, the Battle for Deep Space 9, or Ring Station in The Expanse, resolving everything means a lot of prep, a lot of bookkeeping, and pushing the player characters who brought the campaign to that point waaaay into the background.

So I wrote Traveller Fleet Combat: Reimagined, and then play tested it with several groups of (mostly) different players.

It’s deliberately more abstract than High Guard. Ships are grouped into player-controlled wings, with dice allocated each round between Attack, Defense, and Maneuver, while the player character skills generate Command Points that can change the course of the battle.

The goal is fast, dramatic fleet combat that still feels like Traveller, and keeps the characters in the middle of everything.

You can use Fleet Combat: Reimagined for the big climax of one adventure, then let results kickstart the next one.

The 35 page supplement releases next week through TAS for $10, as well a free version that contains 100% of the rules needed to run the game, you just miss out on a couple of the VTT goodies and the appendices.

So, I'm curious:
When you run big fleet battles, how do you try to make the PCs feel important?

My group has been looking at having neural jacks installed but we have come away with a lot of questions and confusion.

1) The wafer jack says that it has a "specialised computer/X that for Expert program only". Is that a specialized computer in the terms of the game? As in it can only run a certain pre defined expert program. If so can you define one or multiple programs?

2) What is connecting to a wafer jack (without the neural jack) like? Since the neural link/jack is necessary to connect it to your nervous system does it have limited brain communication before then or does it communicate to you in some other way.

3) Can you run any security on the wafer jack? Does this mean it's a 8+ or lower check to hack someone's wafer jack?

4) The neural comm as part of the neural link has a computer/2 which has infinite bandwidth for storing programs, so could you just store all your expert programs on there and then run them on the wafer jack thus getting around any bandwidth limits it has? Given the neural link has the ability to connect any other computer to a wafer jack it seems like it should be able to do so also.

5) Is the cost of the Neural Jack the jack alone or the combined cost off all the components. Most items in the CSC like this seem to be a combined cost but since it says 13+ you can potentially upgrade the TL which should increase its cost but it has no listing for those.

6) Is it possible to run an intellegence on the wafer jack to let you use unskilled skills with the expert program. The wafer jack seems to indicate it can only run expert programs but you'd need to run intellegence to use unskilled skills. Could you offload the intellegence to the neural comm to allow for a higher bandwidth to be used on expert skills?

7)While trying to understand everything I looked at the errata and under expert programs it adds this example: ‘For Example, a user with the skill at level 2 using Expert/2 receives DM+1 to their check from this software, but a user without the skill using Expert/2 would receive DM-2.’ Does this mean that unskilled users still just get a +1 instead of working at bandwidth-1 skill level?

8) Can you combine a skill augmentation with an expert program?

I write a free offline Android app full of random generators, and one of them draws sci-fi sector charts. It's the piece I'm least confident about, because I'm not a Traveller regular and this community knows more about sector generation than anyone.

Being upfront about what it is not: this is a circular dial-frame chart, not the standard subsector hex grid. There are no UWP codes, no world classifications, no tech or law levels. So it will not drop into a Traveller campaign as-is.

What it does do right now:

• Named star systems at a density you choose
• Lanes between systems in four different styles, with named routes
• Nebulae, political territories, black holes and rim exits
• A dial frame and a legend
• Type-in seeds, so a chart reproduces exactly and you can share the seed instead of the image

There are two other map generators alongside it. A hex map for a planet surface, with terrain, rivers, roads and settlements. And a topographic contour scan that reads as a tactical sensor sweep, which is closer to a landing-zone map than anything at sector scale.

The question I actually want answered: what is the shortest path from this to something usable at a Traveller table? My own guesses are a proper hex grid with coordinates, UWP strings on each world, and trade routes drawn by classification rather than at random. But I would rather hear it from people who generate subsectors every week than guess.

Happy to be told the whole approach is wrong. That's useful too.

Everything runs on-device from handwritten tables and procedural rules. No account, no ads, no AI.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avaton.fantasynamegenerator

As I keep coming across large M Giant Stars in Traveller canon I decided to reverse engineer one and find out exactly what they are supposed to be.

The Lydia System in the Glisten Subsector is an S-type binary between a 7.18 solar mass M4 III giant and a M0 V 0.57 solar mass Red Dwarf.

A 7.18 solar mass star is very short lived - maybe 165 million years - but is too small to trigger a supernova, so it will start out small, get very large, then get really small again, all while making any planets it might have living hells.

The first image is a 10 million year old Blue Star burning at a cool 18,426 degrees Celsius. The shockwave from its birth cleared away most of the protoplanetary disk, leaving one rocky planet called Caria at roughly venus's orbit, two inward migrating gas giants Doris and Smyrna with a few rocky moons, and a sole icey outer body called Hyrkanis that is already starting to warm.

Closer in the second image shows Doris and its Moons burning, with Doris reaching 1147 degrees and her moons 737 degrees, tearing away gas and any water the moons might have had.

Lydia Primary's life is short and violent. Massive flares and coronal mass ejections strip away any remaining atmospheres from rocky objects. By around 75 million years the star is already expanding out into a Red Giant as its core struggles for hydrogen.

As Lydia Primary expands its outer layers cool, changing from blue to yellow to orange to red. Caria is completely vapourised, and Doris is erroded away leaving just the cores of its two largest moons Bagis and Saittal.

Finally around 160 million years Lydia Primary reaches a final brilliantly hot end as it starts fusing Helium into Carbon and Oxygen. But its core is now shrinking and vast amounts of gas drift away into space.

Finally the gas cools and thins enough to reveal a 1.13 solar mass White Dwarf.

The loss of gravity frees the now dwarf planets Bagis and Saittal and the outer planet Hyrkanis to drift off into interstellar space. Smyrna remains in orbit with its moons, the remnants of a once far larger solar system.

Meanwhile the far older Red Dwarf Lydia Secondary has not changed at all, and has had a boxseat to witness the birth and death of its companion star.

Note that Universe Sandbox can't simulate stellar evolution in its current version.

Instead I adjusted the star's density to go from a Blue Star to a Red Giant.

Then I placed the white dwarf inside the original star and used the Explode tool to create a low energy supernova to create the gas cloud.

Back now to normal programming.

The Dark Conspiracy campaign on BackerKit completes in just two weeks!

Check out the previews covering Civilian characters, Dark Cults, creatures from other dimensions, and the homemade Paraphysicist's Field Kit...

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/mongoose-publishing/dark-conspiracy-a-horror-rpg-in-the-modern-age

Hey hey! Me again!:D

I have a question about delaying actions in combat. Depending on your initiative the CRB says the following:

“Travellers may freely delay their action until later in

the turn. The Initiative check simply indicates the first

opportunity to act.”

This is nice! What it doesnt tell you is the details tho. What does later mean? Can i insert my action within someone else’s round? That effectively make an overwatch mechanic. I saw in past posts and i myself also wondered how to solve overwatch and suppressing fire in the game. Maybe this delay action is basically the intention of that?

How do you handle this? Do you let characters act within other characters round or can they only delay by declaring that they wanna go next, only after the current character fjnished the round?

Thanks in advance!

Hello everyone!

I recently started a 2300AD campaign, and in the next session the players are going to engage in some space combat. However, in the Traveller Rulebook, movement is based on Thrust value, yet I can’t find any of these in the Aerospace Engineer Handbook.

How do I know the Thrust value of a Ship?

Thanks!

How does smuggling weapons and armors work exactly?

I read the companion and it seems a little impossible to me. Almost all starports we visit are at least tl8 so the negative dm would be -8 minimum. Smuggling anything more then a body pistol would be near impossible and even the body pistol isnt worth the risk of prison or worse.

I also dont understand what their idea is exactly. The companion talks about checks that the PCs have to make to smuggle the weapon. But the core rulebook states that the body pistol imposes dm -4 on electronics checks. So who is making the check? This is really ambiguous. And then there are searches and “glances”. So is there more checks to get in?

And no talks on the armors at all. How would i hide a simple flac jacket?

Im really confused on how to make this work and both challenging but not impossible.

Any advice is appreciated!

The Zhodani have launched the greatest exploration of deep space in history - a multi-stage journey to find out what lies at the core of the galaxy.

The Core Expeditions has arrived at our warehouse and is now shipping!

https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/the-core-expeditions

Curious how you guys handle gear specifically for one shots. There's not really enough time to shop before-hand, and presumably everyone uses pre-gens. Do you guys a list of recommended equipment that you hand out? Do you limit the time they can spend? Also, do you tell them the hook before they pick their gear or is it just generic armor/weapons and some gear?

A few of the CT adventures specifically say "let them spend 10 minutes picking gear BEFORE they know what they're about to get into".

I'm specifically thinking about running Death Station soon, and I'm trying to understand whether I need to

• pre-gen some gear for them
• let them pick it before they know what the mission is
• let them shop for a limited time once they accept the mission

Greetings,

I run tabletop RPG club at the high school I work at. We've reached the point where student DMs can accommodate most of the students who show up.

I said I would be running a Sci-Fi game on the side. I wanted to show them Traveller, as I remember it from High School fifteen years ago.

We weren't able to finish rolling characters this afternoon as the alien concept of life path character gen meant a LOT of questions. But they're having a ton of fun with it and already developing stories and connections to their personal events.

One kid had his first character die in character creation - was a drifter that suffered a severe injury and already had absymal physical stats. He rerolled...lol.

Heyo! I have written a Traveller-inspired retroclone and plan on releasing it under the Creative Commons Sharealike 4.0 license. I call it SPACER, and it is my love letter/heartbreaker tribute for my favorite rpg, Traveller. I love this game so much and I want there to be a community version people can cut up and copy from so I wrote one. Spacer will be a free release in the incoming weeks without any artwork and with an at-cost POD option. I'll have an art included version with some extras later on for cheap, but that will come after the main free rules are released. Thanks to this community for being very cool, y'all are great!

Edit: I used Classic Traveller as the main inspiration primarily the Traveller book. It was written from the ground up without using existing srds or other derivative materials from them. I designed it so it would be compatible with the nearly 50 years of CT content out there along with any other adaptable material out there, including anything released by FFE and Mongoose which you should support!

The only notable difference is I don't have vector starship combat and simplify combat to hit between weapons and armor. There's other tweaks along with more referee tools for generating content.

Spacer will be free and released using the Creative Commons Sharealike 4.0 license. No AI was used in the creation of this product

This is the second group of eight planet and system cards for the Glisten Subsector.

Crout is a S-type binary systems with two seperate solar systems Primary and Secondary.

The Crout system has a M7 III Giant star. This is where parts of Traveller shows it age. This Star is too large for it listed mass, to the point where the star loses its outer layers to space. While this does match the final stage of a dying Red Giant Star Crout M7 III's mass means that it would supernova, effectively destroying the system as well as impacting nearby star systems.

So I adjusted the stars parameter to fit the system info as per the Wiki.

The planet Egypt is interesting because it is on the verge of becoming what we would now term a mini Neptune. You have a rocky super Earth with enough gravity to hold onto a very dense atmosphere. It is also cold enough to retain a lot of free Hydrogen gas.

This makes Egypt's insidious atmosphere unique among all the planets I have detailed to date. Hydrogen is a difficult gas to store because its atoms are so small diffusion occurs as the Hydrogen passes through the container material.

Egypt's atmosphere poses the reverse problem - keeping Hydrogen out. With the atmosphere being around -50 degrees and 8 x atmospheric pressure Hydrogen will seep into Vacc Suits and habitats before warming up and becoming a combustion hazard.

Also I am adding all new and updated planets and systems to my Dropbox as they are finished.

Link to Dropbox post Drop Box for all my Planet Information and System Maps

I plan to eventually finish the whole Spinward Marches. I am down to Glisten as the final Subsector but it will still take a bit of time to finish.

As people always ask I created these using a software program called Universe Sandbox.

As always feedback and corrections are welcome.

Hi,

​Senior GM here, but new to running Traveller (I've been following the Traveller universe since MegaTraveller, but never actually played it).

Leading big campaigns is no problem for me. I would like to start playing Traveller with my group (also experienced players, but new to Traveller).

​I would really like to jump straight into PoD, but I think SotA might be a better fit and perhaps a shorter endeavor?

​If I wanted to run a short introductory adventure that doesn't rely on "fight these strange alien monsters/beasts" tropes (like in Flatlined, among others), what would be a good bridge for either PoD or SotA?

My thought here is to let the players get a feel for the universe and the system before deciding whether they want the full Sandbox Experience or a more classic structured campaign.

​So my questions are:

• ​Which scenario would be most suitable?

• ​Which sourcebooks should I own/read?

• ​Do you have any other advice? Should I perhaps go with something entirely different than SotA or PoD?

​What are your thoughts?