Stuffed Crocodile

I am preparing for a Traveller game, and so here are a few conceits that bear repeating for understanding the setting and the rules properly. In a lot of cases those are truisms or commonplaces, but I think it helps to keep them in mind.

Space is vast

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

People seem to forget it, because encounters happen at all. But space is vast, and outside of the 100D limit barely anything can be encountered unless you know its there already. Sizes and distances in space will be bigger than what you expect.

Techlevel isnt what you think it is
Yeah, i know its cool to think about going to planets with knights or steam trains from some high stellar post-singularity society. But people aren’t dumb, and there’s no reason that people would use lower tech for everything if better stuff could be ordered and delivered in a month.
Now if they have the money for that is another question, but tech level doesn’t mean there only is technology of that particular level present. It merely means this is what people can produce on this world. A world of a few thousand people with tech level 3 doesn’t mean they will only drive around in horse carts, it means they have to import higher TL stuff.

There is in fact FTL communication
People always claim that there’s no FTL communication in Traveller, and then they immediately go and discuss FTL communication.
There is no instanteneous FTL, yes. But if you send a handwritten letter to the next star system via ship and it arrives there in 3-4 weeks, that still is FTL.
But that sort of FTL communication scales weirdly because of how it works. Thanks to the way jumps work (they always take a week no matter the distance, even if you jump in place), you only can communicate FTL if your recipient is at least a light week away.
Meaning inside a solar system you are limited to communication at light-speed at best.
That also means significant delays between communications from one planet to another. If you are skimming fuel from a gas giant and you get contacted from the system’s main world, there should be at least an hour between messages back and forth (that is if the distance is similar to the distance Earth-Jupiter).

Interstellar Communications don’t work the way you think they do.
This is an extension of what I was just writing about: how do people actually get news and/or messages?
For some reason a lot of people assume it’s gonna be not unlike 21st century earth, and you’ll get live TV transmissions or video streams from one side of the galaxy (or at least the sector) to the other. The problem is of course that the average player of Traveller lives on 21st century Earth, and even thinking about how it would have been when Traveller was written seems like a stretch. It used to be there was no video streaming, and even live transmissions on TV were an event. And that before you got your news delivered by postal mail on a newsreel or in a foreign paper. Considering the distances involved a lot of it has to be something like that. News are made somewhere, and then they are disseminated over the rest of Charted Space mostly by X-Boat transports, with outlying systems touched on only by subsidized or even just independent traders (i.e. the PCs).

I always assumed it works something like Usenet: messages, news, and electronic mail, are created on one world, then sent via transmission or simply data containers to the ships that transport them on. At the next stop (a week after leaving) all the new messages not yet in the system are brought into the message queue, batches of messages are created and sent, again via transmission to X-Boats, or data containers, onward to the next goal, disseminating around the Imperium and Charted Space jump-by-jump. I also assume not all the messages manage to make it everywhere. There likely is a priority mechanism that expires all but the most important messages after some time or distance. The Imperium might have future storage tech, but sifting through the messages generated by Trillions of sophonts might be impossible.

I wanted to write something about that network and scenario ideas for it at a future date.

Fun fact: Classic Traveller came out before Usenet was a thing, originally mail transported by ships was implied to be actual literal mail.

Most people are not Travellers

One thing people notice about the careers available in the Traveller character generation is that a lot of them are kind of military, or at least some other government service. People actually who likely already were working in between planets for the most part, or who had some reason to work in space before. And that makes a lot of sense, because most people in the Traveller universe are likely never going into space in the first place. There are often multiple planets with billions of sophonts in each subsector, who live their whole life never venturing out of their atmosphere, or if at all maybe for a trip to some moon. Some more affluent people might have space cruises looking at the rings of the gas giants. Wealthy people, or those who are doing it as a once-in-a-lifetime trip might travel around space for a bit, going to a neighboring system or maybe the subsector capital. Few of those ever would even go farther than the next subsector. Sure, their ancestors came from somewhere among the stars, but now they live here, and why should they travel the stars when they haven’t been to their own planet first?

Jump travel is not trivial

A jump takes around a week. A week where you can’t go anywhere, and where the only thing you see outside the windows is jump space (which is implied to drive you mad if you stare at it for too long). Also it’s expensive even for a low passage (in addition to being potentially deadly). Even a quick trip to the next system and back will have you cooped up in a spaceship for three-four weeks with in-system travel. You either spend an arm and a leg to be thoroughly entertained or given drugs so time flies (high passage), are bored out of your mind (middle passage), or get frozen and might never wake up (low passage).

Zero-G is the norm in space
It’s a bit hidden because in Traveller tech levels grav-plates come about roughly the same time that jump-drives do, so there’s not really a reason to experience 0g on a spaceship, except when the power is down. But most of space is in fact 0g.

This should come up way more often than it actually does.

Planetary classifications are inaccurate by nature

For some reason people have the tendency to see UWPs as holy writ, trying to explain how an unlikely classification actually works, instead of reasoning out that there must be some mistake. And I get it. It’s fun. Trying to come up with an explanation how a TL3 civilization manages to survive on an airless rockball does bring out ideas.

BUT the data is supposed to be in-game survey data. And data that is at least 40 years old (the last survey having been published in 1065). Stuff might have changed in between. Governments might have been toppled, population might have risen or fallen, atmospheric data might have changed. But also: maybe some scout 50 years ago was in a hurry and misinterpreted something.

Planetary Classifications are in-game data

A lot of this particular aspect of the game now is being downplayed. Mongoose Traveller 2e doesn’t use the UPP anymore (although it at least has a sidebar to explain what it is) and UWPs given often are expanded out at least in some way.

But in the beginning, at the time of the original Classic Traveller, the idea was a simple one: space is limited on a spaceship and on a spaceship’s computer. So even having a Library program to request information from was a significant investment in the early rules (even having a computer at all was a significant investment in money and space on a starship, although one that Travellers could not do without). It was implied that booklets like The Spinward Marches and the barebones information it provided, the two Library Data booklets, and the Atlas of the Imperium, were RL copies of in-game artifacts. Someone plotting a course for a ship might have no other information about the neighbouring systems than the hardcopy of the old survey data they got from the scout service for a few creds, and part of the game was to make sense of this information, to find and collate information about those other worlds, and plot the most profitable and least dangerous route for the Traveller to take.

This of course became less and less realistic the more computers started to become a staple of real life, and with much more power than players in the 1970s might have ever expected. It didn’t make sense anymore that a few lines of sector data was the only thing available, when it now is possible to just download the whole of Wikipedia for your own use. And to do calculations of complex orbital mechanics on the side.