Dammit, Jim!
BTW, has anyone ever tried to run an actual original Traveller starship combat, with the planet gravitational field discs and the adding vectors? It seems to me you’d need a really big unimpeded space but it could be chaotic fun.
Dammit, Jim!
Published
Tattered Remains of Tartary 
also, 1 steward for every 8 “high” passengers vs. 1 medic for every 120 persons plus the 10% bump for chief steward/medic suggests endemic labor and bargaining power advantages for (unskilled) stewards in general.
Are the medics mass-produced replicants, or the stewards all runway models/entertainers/courtesans?
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also also Trav computers seem to be like Vancian casters – they can have several programs in their spellbooks but can only cram a couple in their CPUs at once, so you have to keep loading/overwriting them in combat.
Ah, the 70s. Tear this ship apart until you find those tapes.
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I like to believe that it’s an author’s prejudice about the well-to-do being high maintenance pains-in-the-ass.
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Yep, you need a massive expanse of empty carpet to be able to play, with each player separated by thirty feet. Eventually some bugger accelerates off the floor anyway…
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YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL TRAVELLER CAMPAIGN IF STRICT GRAVITATIONAL FIELDS AND VECTORS ARE NOT ACCOUNTED FOR
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Maybe they have to use crappy giant 70s tape deck jetsons-esque computers.
The alternative is to use the region-locked subscription-based product-as-service hypercomputers manufactured by Googapple.
There’s a free version of course, but only if you agree to elective surgery that lets them see out of your eyes and track your exact movements and location. For advertising purposes, naturally.
The paid version still tracks all that but they’re less obvious about it.
For your roguish vagabonds on the edge of space, that shit’s untenable! So they’ve got to use computers that were designed before every microchip had a wifi connection.
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Supply and demand.
Having travelled by ship in the early 70s this is largely accurate, in that the skillset of stewards seems unchallenging but the reality of “herding cats” and the on-call nature of “high passage” type service is likely a significant disincentive.
Medics on the other hand are largely monitoring the panels of low passage “passengers”/human freight and dealing with crew health matters.
High passage passengers will (infrequently) be accessing the ship’s doctor, who will presumably be drawing a salary similar to the Captain or Chief Engineer in addition to being typically drunk in the ship’s lounge, playing gin with “Elephant” and “Bey”.
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Kevyn Winkless so “steward” is like “project manager?” That’s a really appealing and tendentious bit of rule writing – that there actually is a steward skill in the rules but the job’s really an endurance test.
And of course it’s the one job every PC can get “working passage,” and it’s explicitly stated that they’ll get moved onto another ship after 3 voyages so we know that the steward’s cushy salary is really a sham: 99% of all stewards are un-unionized, unpaid refugees.
Sadly though the ship’s doctor still only makes 2200Cr a month – I blame the standardized fare scheme, that pays no attention to distance or route popularity. There are no incentives to improve service.
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James Young you’ve reconstructed the Marcus Garvey out of Neuromancer in my mind’s eye. That’s excellent!
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Thus the gins and tonics, surely – also: willingness to join as an NPC.
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The whole ex-military thing is also snapping into focus. So the expected career path of the Traveller PC is they spend 20 years suppressing revolts and brawling, then one day they’re out on their ear with a blade and one low passage (which might kill them but definitely won’t get them home) and the only job they can get is wiping up after the rich on nameless, uniform x-boats. No wonder 1 in 216 voyages end in hijack attempts and 1 in 36 ships is running from the banks under false papers. Oh and the Low Lottery is run by the steward. Always.
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Traveller is how I actually learned to add vectors. I could not get it in high school maths, but when a starship depended on the outcome, I learned to tactically add vectors to get results.
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Traveller: post mobbed out British Empire colonial forces…in spaaaace!
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Kevyn Winkless I’m not so sure about ships doctors having a lot of time on their hands. There will be plenty of allergies to deal with, people with a level of income to travel are frequently older, and there arealways the “jump sickness” worries to deal with.
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As a maritime analogue, ships doctors are ones thrown out of a planetary gig for malpractice. They could not get a job anywhere else.
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Justin Akkerman Barber-surgeons of the High Frontier.
Really it’s surprising they never got their own Little Black Supplement. Maybe because in 1982 the Aubrey-Maturin books still weren’t that famous internationally.
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I have always suspected, but not verified, that the rules around staffing for passenger ships in Traveller were taken from staffing ratios on-board early to mid-twentieth century luxury liners.
Heck, staffing levels on today’s airplanes should give a strong clue that this is necessary — all planes that I’ve flown on carve off a generous portion of their flight crew to attend to “first class” passengers.
My guess is it’s all about ticket sales — the elevated staffing levels are there to cater to the intangible quality of the myth that first class passengers pay for: they are exclusive, important, select. Being catered to immediately is all part of that narrative they’ve purchased.
On-board medical talent, on the other hand, is not about preserving the exclusivity narrative, or level of service, so much as it’s preventing lawsuits… (unless there’s some way the shipping line weaves the medical staff into the sales narrative, and then I suspect the medical staff has their attentions strongly segregated along ticket level boundaries, just like the cabin crew).
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Viktor Haag I’ve been learning a bit about early 20th century Dutch-operated liners and that seems a bit different (more lip service given to medicine, strong Asiatic Articles bias for stewards) so I think there might be something specifically American going on here, but I think you’re onto something.
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My guess is that in Europe, the staffing on board public transport was all about not disrupting the experience people of means had at home; one does without one’s own staff, of course, so it can’t be expected to be as good; in fact, it might be titillatingly degraded or different, enough to convey a thrilling sense of adventure while travelling.
The US expectation seems more likely to be founded on the simple equation that people with money deserve to get what they want, how they want it, and when they want it, without delay, and with professional levels of service in the transfer. The seats cost more, therefore they must be worth more, and that worth needs to be measured in levels of service and attention to detail, where the more one pays the more exclusivity one has to the attention of the overall machine that caters to one’s momentary needs and desires — those in “economy class”, poor dears, can’t afford anything more than the momentary attention of a harried employee — they’re not worth more than that because they can’t afford to pay for more than that.
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yup, also I’m looking at colonial routes to the Dutch East Indies, so that’s different. There’s a colonial style emerging through the late 19th century, where the “rough (business) frontier” gives way to Dutch families settling on Java, the shift from Calvinist black cassocks to Colonial White uniforms and pith helmets and eventually selling tourism on the Asian Riviera. By the time passenger liners start plying that route the myth of Tempo Doeloe (the Dutch Raj, if you like) is already well established and I guess the stewards (even the Dutch ones) never behave quite the same because of race relations. They’re really keen to establish ideas of multi-generational service and secure employment – at least that’s the ideology.
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I feel the ideal route for Traveller would be something like Shadowrun, with a “classic” openly and gloriously dated edition, and one updated for more modern SF sensibilities. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
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….I’ve just got to the bit in Black Sails where Charles Vane lays out his whole philosophy of war as a mode of existence (that freedom exists only in war and that peace exists only through capitulation) and it strikes me Traveller has an equally strong bias under it, of the business of war as a mode of existence. Wars in Traveller are not things for the PCs to begin or end, they simply bubble on because obscure, unreachable powers wish it so. It is the lot of the Traveller PC to opportunistically make what they can of the chaos of endless war, like Yossarian in Catch 22.
The Imperium is decisive when it wants to be, but where’s the profit in that for you, mercenary/smuggler/gun-runner? For you, a slow-simmering rebellion means endless opportunity.
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Gustavo Iglesias Mongoose clumsily(?) attempted to open the door to something like that by having a core set of rules and sourcebooks that was effectively Classic Traveller: The Rewrite, and then using the core rules as the engine for “other campaign lines”, some of which could feel free to be more up-to-date in their context. That was my take on things, anyway.
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Viktor Haag yes they did! I used to think it was a great idea (with Mongoose characteristic haphazard execution). But sometimes I wonder whether Traveller is the all-purpose spacefaring SF engine I want, or whether I should treat it like I treat D&D (a game I love to death that has been modded to do a ton of different things but I mostly play straight. Tempted to do a whiskey analogy here).
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Oh yeah, and as far as CT rewrites go, Cepheus does an even better job than MgT1’s fantastic, bang-up job. Not crazy about what I’ve read about MgT2.
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I have indeed run old Trav space combats with vectors and gravity fields but after a few crap attempts with bits of A4 paper taped together and rolls of surplus wallpaper I programmed my old ZX Spectrum to keep track of it. And yes it is chaos with more than a couple of ships per side, and that chaos increases exponentially with fighters and missiles added to the mix.
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Barry Blatt I find myself wondering more and more just how much Elite was a self-conscious implementation of Trav. I’m beginning to suspect it was in every aspect.
Gustavo Iglesias looking back at Trav again, I’m convinced it’s not a general purpose SF game at all. These days if I wanted such a thing I’d probably adapt BRP or just go back to playing GURPS. I don’t know where I’d get the ships from, though. That’s the point at which you have to give up the pretense of generic SF and make some creative decisions.
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I read a series of articles on the webz a while back where someone deconstructed the CT core books to talk about what exactly the design of Traveller implied and why it worked as well it did. I can no longer remember where that was. 8P
In the BRP end of things, M-Space does a pretty creditable job of doing an implied-setting SF game, using the Mythras Imperative rules as the core engine. It’s obviously intended to be Traveller-like.
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Richard G it’s certainly not a generic SF game, any more than D&D is a generic fantasy engine. But crafty designers have tweaked D&D into dozens of different games (including the Travelleresque Stars Without Number) and I really wish I could make the Traveller core engine to sing and dance like these enterprising gentlefolk have made D&D.
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Viktor Haag I like the idea of BRP SF but I’ve found the two implementations that made their way to my hands (River of Heaven and M-Space) lackluster for assorted reasons.
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Alan Peery Ah, but that’s what the Stewards are for. The doctor will have “surgery hours” of course, but most of the routine things like allergy/adjustment treatments would be handled through the dispensery – a request from the passenger is passed via the steward and more or less automatically delivered (for comparison: the doctor at a luxury hotel dispenses things like headache medication, cough syrup, and other over-the-counter type medications without ever seeing the guest, via the front desk).
Surgery hours would handle normal complaints – on a modern cruise ship that means a couple of doctors and a team of nurses serving the equivalent of a small town (assuming the big ships that carry up to 5000, including crew). Since Traveller type ships aren’t really cruise liners in the modern sense, but cargo ships with possibly significant passenger capacity the actual risks to passengers are limited, and on most jumps the doctor probably never has to see any passengers, so the main function will be ER type response to crew injuries and largely faceless (if desired) dispensery functions. Naturally, it would depend on how you want to play it – a real modern ships doctor would take the job very seriously and function just like a small town hospital doctor, but is that the kind of doctor you get out on the frontier?
Jump sickness will again depend a bit on how you play it. I usually just assume it’s like sea sickness – disorientation and nausea ranging from mild discomfort to complete incapacitation. The doctor might personally see those in worst condition, but in most cases will probably just dispense the usual palliatives via the stewards.
As for age: well yes, but those with the funds to travel are also likely to be able to afford good medical care as well, so will be in generally good health. The doctor will probably see the highest profile passengers on request, but if the job is a serious one the doctor is too busy for frivolous house calls, and if not the doctor will evade house calls entirely if possible.
I’m imagining seedy frontier “liners” that have a ship’s doctor mainly because they’re expected to and make do with the cheapest applicant they can get.
Richard G Personally, I don’t use the Imperium setting, preferring something more akin to Vance’s Gaean Reach. But then, I really only played much of it using the original CT rules where the setting was still very much implied. I know the later editions made the Imperium explicit, and I’d guess that changes how things work a bit.
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