The thing that touches me inappropriately in my pedant place about Slug-Thrower is that it's usually used in Sci-Fi, and then misapplied.

There are Sci-Fi weapons that are slugthrowers.  Gauss/Rail weapons for example, where the bullets are literally thrown at you, ie. the gun is the force mechanism.

A guns that fires chemically propelled ammunition isn't throwing anything, it's just the aiming and loading mechanism for ammunition that throws itself.  Gyrojets, Bolters and good ol' fashioned guns fall into this category.

I've seen games make the distinction, but a lot of times "slug-thrower" just means "not-energy".

Ok, I got my Sheldon out, continue.

The Imperium is not Traveller.  It is just a setting made up by a few people.  When I ran Star Wars, it was in the Star Wars universe.  Same with any other fiction or something made up.  The Imperium setting and Traveller are two separate things.  Rarely used the Imperium. It would be like saying Greyhawk is D&D, and D&D is Greyhawk.  A lot more to D&D than just that one setting.  It is a shame that I find myself saying this yet again on a forum.

Quote from: Kuroth;856865The Imperium is not Traveller.  It is just a setting made up by a few people.  When I ran Star Wars, it was in the Star Wars universe.  Same with any other fiction or something made up.  The Imperium setting and Traveller are two separate things.  Rarely used the Imperium. It would be like saying Greyhawk is D&D, and D&D is Greyhawk.  A lot more to D&D than just that one setting.  It is a shame that I find myself saying this yet again on a forum.

That's my own view, but there have long been groups with otherwise very different interests -- different sub-games -- connected only by the Third Imperium framework. That goes back before MegaTraveller jumped on the bandwagon of game lines heavy with setting canon and meta-plot. If you read JTAS, "Traveller News Service" was a regular feature presumably because people liked it.

I have played/ran about every version of Traveller since there has been Traveller. It is pretty much hard sci fi. These days my go to game is Stars without Number. I find it is as hard or not as I need it and I tend toward sandbox gaming anyhow. But that is just me.

Quote from: Kuroth;856865The Imperium is not Traveller.  It is just a setting made up by a few people.  When I ran Star Wars, it was in the Star Wars universe.  Same with any other fiction or something made up.  The Imperium setting and Traveller are two separate things.  Rarely used the Imperium. It would be like saying Greyhawk is D&D, and D&D is Greyhawk.  A lot more to D&D than just that one setting.  It is a shame that I find myself saying this yet again on a forum.

Separate paragraphs and a mention of the Imperium by name in the first sentence isn't enough separation for you?  Yeesh!

If Greyhawk isn't D&D then why do all the other D&D settings have elves, dwarves, and orcs in them huh?

Still, it's all the pet peeves people endlessly harp on that drive people away rather than their presence in the game.

Traveller V is what you get when you try to address everyone's pet issues.  It's got alternate drives and alternate tech and endless details but it's less approachable than GURPS Space at this point.

Back in the day we weren't too concerned about whether our Traveller game was set in the Third Imperium or not. We made up planets and subsectors, plotted X-boat routes, and used bits of the Imperium background, but we weren't concerned with following a particular canon.

The Imperium served as a kind of default setting, but not more than that.

Quote from: DavetheLost;856884Back in the day we weren't too concerned about whether our Traveller game was set in the Third Imperium or not. We made up planets and subsectors, plotted X-boat routes, and used bits of the Imperium background, but we weren't concerned with following a particular canon.

The Imperium served as a kind of default setting, but not more than that.

That's better than how most people play Traveller, which is Spaceballs 2.

Quote from: dungeon crawler;856870I have played/ran about every version of Traveller since there has been Traveller. It is pretty much hard sci fi.

No such thing as hard sci-fi.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;856908That's better than how most people play Traveller, which is Spaceballs 2.

And if they are enjoying themselves without bothering anyone, why the fuck should you look down your nose at them you elitist fuckwit?

Quote from: Phillip;856828When have you seen anything go from one  point to another at hundreds of times the speed of light?

Accelerate at 1 gee or more for days on end?

Never mind  the WAY too big  payload ratio, that comes from magically hand-waving conservation of momentum out of existence.

Lasers focusing on distant targets without huge lenses? Oh, that's just the artificial gravity and anti-gravity magically hand-waved into existence.

These are vastly more fantastic than unicorns and dragons. Conan's Hyborian Age adventures are 'realistic' by comparison.

Jumpspace is a very well pointed out violation of known physical laws for the point of playability, because very few people actually want to play a game taking place within a single star system (at least fewer than want to play something else), or deal with relativistic aging.

It's not clear that lasers don't use huge lenses. Either way, if it does state that, it can be readilly replaced with descriptions of lenses without changing the basic game premise.

Conservation of momentum absolutely exists in Traveller. Long range STL travel involves accellerating halfway to an object, turning around, and then decellerating.

Gravatics, while unrealistic, are merely a simplification. The game plays the same if you declare the reactionless thrusters to be highly efficient plasma torch thrusters (the fuel consumption of which is simply outside the scope of the game).

There's a difference between being (semi-) hard science and being 100% realistic. It is fiction, after all. To compare it to unicorns and dragons is reaching.

I've tried to build a 100% conforming-to-science-as-we-know-it RPG. It used GURPS 3e, especially the vehicle building. Probably not too far from their Transhuman Space books, except not quite so optimistic on computer sentience or quite so dark a setting. Found that truly realistic sci-fi loses much of sci-fi's appeal.

Quote from: Shawn DriscollNo such thing as hard sci-fi.

There is because people say there is. Words are social constructs. The definition might be a little nebulous, but the term is used, and therefor it exists.

Quote from: flyingmice;855541The meaning of "hard" in Hard SF has changed in the last thirty years. None of these books would be considered Hard SF now. At best (Hal Clement for example) they would be considered "firm". Using this term has been the source of a shitload of on-line arguments, along with another phrase what has radically changed meaning several times - "Space Opera". Two people using the same word or phrase with different meanings makes communication a mite difficult.

I'm not saying anyone is wrong, mind you, but please be wary, and understand the difference.

Definitely second that.

Back when I was in high school - early 70's - "hard" meant the tech was in the fore-front of the story, whereas "soft" implied psionics or more psychological based focus.  "Space opera" was over-the-top swooshing around stories.  Most Star Trek episodes were hard; Forbidden Planet was soft, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica were space opera.

What I like about Classic Traveller, or Mongoose Traveller which is really a cleaned up CT with extras, is that the rules are so simple, it is easy to vary them to create a "harder" game or more "space opera".  If you don't want artificial gravity, just leave it out and perhaps add a simple mechanic to get rotating ships.  You want light-sabres (or flexblades or whatever), cobble them together from existing weapon stats. You want 3D subsector maps or in-system maps, just add layers.

It really isn't that hard to do and I don't design games...

And regarding the computers, I do like a lot about the way they are modelled.  In Star Fleet Battles, energy management is a key feature of the game; in Traveller book 2, Computer management is a key feature of the combat and I rather like that.

Now, are there issues?  Well, yes.  A lot of the way they are presented is based on an outdated view even in the 70's.  They are really based on early 60's computers or earlier.  A base model mainframe CPU in the mid 70's was about a meter high, meter long, and half a meter wide and cost about $250,000.

Now in a starship, one would need to add storage, a shock-mount, and uninterruptible power supply.  And since it would all be rack mounts, you have to leave access space to work on them.  So 1 ton for a base model is not out of the question.

My own preference on computers would be:

• Drop the absurd "bis" models
• Change the base Model 1 to have 3 or 4 CPU, and 15 to 20 Storage slots
• Change the base cost to 250,000 Cr
• Scale higher model based on those values, and adjust the costs downward by 15 to 25%

One thought on book II.  Big ships always suffered from the damage system where a hit would reduce a drive by one point whether you had a fighter or a cruiser.  T5 fixes this by simply reducing the drive letter from the vehicle design system.  So the first hit will very likely produce as one point reduction but it will usually take several hits to get the next reduction on larger ships.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;857016Conservation of momentum absolutely exists in Traveller. Long range STL travel involves accellerating halfway to an object, turning around, and then decellerating.

And all that acceleration action is accomplished without any mass-energy reaction. (Even with some slipped in, the gaffe is far beyond any stretch by which "the computers are too big".)

Way back in early development, the concept was some sort of gravity drive with the reaction being on planets, but that was inconvenient for deep space.

Of course, it's inconvenient only if one doesn't abracadabra the rapid decrease of field strength over distance. That seems to me a less radical hand-waving, but sometimes the bigger load of baloney is easier for audiences to swallow.

I think you could get some mighty compact spaceships with antimatter drives. Assuming engines tough enough to take necessary increases in heat, the difference for a wide range of missions is not propellant mass but rather so many grams (or micrograms) of antimatter. Hand-wave a mirror for gamma rays, and you've got a "photon drive" that's about as good as rockets can theoretically get.

Traveller never explains how the crew can survive the superheated jumpspace bubble being created in the engine room.