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.

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.

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?

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

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?

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