Solo Traveller - Aloin's Saga #4

The Iridium Queen lifts off from Golus

Day 132-1107 dawned clear and cool with a light breeze from the north-west. At 0933 Local Time, as the heat of the day was beginning to build, the Iridium Queen lifted off from Golus Downport. Climbing over the Jakabsan range, the ship went supersonic at an altitude of 15 kilometres.

To Aloin, his rangy frame wedged into the Scan station at the rear of the small bridge, it was the greatest ride of his life. The dun-coloured dune lands and burnt-umber farm plots scattered around Golous Downport fell away beneath them like patches on the fabric of the planet. Through the bridge’s port-side window he could see the little white smudge of Tartesh, his home town, twinkling in the morning light and beyond it the green/yellow of the Aldesarn Valley and the thin black line of the canal marching southward, bringing meltwater down from the pole.

Captain Elera Lukk had the helm, guiding the ship spacewards with almost casual indifference. Navigator Miska Ilurrin was riding co-pilot, running Nav plots for the Jump on her terminal while keeping an eye on Lukk’s control settings. In her forties, the taciturn Navigator was a Celephaizon like her Captain.

As the colour drained from the sky, fading from pale blue to black, and the first stars began to appear, Ilurrin tapped her ear bud. “Thank you, Golus Down,” she said. “See you next time.” She paused. “Affirmative,” she acknowledged. “Clear on heading 271, Azimuth 67. Iridium Queen out.” She tapped her ear bud again and glanced at Captain Lukk. “Hand off from Golus Down,” Ilurrin said. ”We cross their horizon in two minutes. Golus Highport will rise on 180 in seven minutes. We’re to switch to Channel 7 for COAC.”

Captain Lukk grunted and stretched. “As if we’ll need them,” she said, “now we’ve got Aloin on Scan.” She winked at Ilurin. “You awake back there, lad?” she snapped in Aloin’s direction. Aloin started, tearing his eyes away from the whirls and chords and harmonies of stars that filled the windows of the bridge.

“Yes, Captain,” he said.

“Scan clear?” Lukk asked and grinned at Ilurin, her left hand tapping a command on her console.

Aloin’s quickly looked down at the Scan screen in front of him. Golus’ icon filled the bottom third of the display, Golus Downport’s ID and call sign slowly drifting below the horizon. An ID that identified the Highport was slowly crawling up over the arc of the planet. Then, suddenly, the screen began to fritz and static. Frantically altering the signal filters, Aloin tried to compensate for the interference. “Ma’am,” he said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice, “we’re being jammed.”

“Did you see anything? Any ship that might be jamming us?”

“Uh, no ma’am, Downport’s below the horizon and the Highport’s … uh, I think the Highport was above the horizon. I didn’t see anything else, Ma’am.”

“You sure?” Captain Lukk asked. “What about that Suaryan freighter on the in-bound?”

Aloin shook his head. “I’m sorry, Ma’am, I didn’t see it.”

“And that bulk hauler? Did you see the bulk hauler?”

Aloin shook his head again. “No Ma’am. I’m sorry, Ma’am,” he said miserably.

Lukk swivelled her chair around and glared at Aloin. “Do you know what happens to a 100,000 ton bulk hauler when it runs down a 200 ton freighter?” she demanded.

Aloin shook his head and stared at the static on his scan screen.

“Nothing, “ Lukk said. “It might, if it is unlucky, get its paint scratched as the freight blows itself to pieces.”

Pulling her pipe out of her belt pouch, Lukk clamped her teeth on the stem. “Bit tough on the freighter crew, though,” she added. “Especially if they were depending on Scan to keep them safe.” Tapping a button on her consol, she hopped down from her chair. Aloin gasped in astonishment as his scan screen abruptly cleared. He quickly checked the plot and the near-time archive.

Captain Lukk patted his knee as she hobbled towards the bridge hatch. “Don’t worry, lad,” she said. “There’s no Suaryan out there, and there’s no bulk hauler.” She paused and looked up at him. “This time,” she added.  Aloin flushed. “Good work on knowing where the ‘ports were, even if only at a glance,” she continued. “Sometimes you only get a glance at a screen, but you need to recall everything.”

“Take us out, Miska,” Lukk ordered, casting one last glance across the boards. “You have the helm until Jump. And you, lad,” she said to Aloin, “will watch your Scan until Kiir comes up to relieve you. And I will ensure that Kiir goes through Scan with you from screen to nubbin, until you know jamming from faulting and can fix either.”

Nodding to herself, Captain Lukk left the bridge. Two hundred and forty minutes later, and a little over 480,000 kilometres from Golus, the Iridium Queen Jumped Outsystem, bound for Miazan with a cargo of 50 tons of petrochemicals.

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Commentary:

As I was writing this, I checked the speculative trade table in a pdf copy of Classic Traveller Starter Edition Book 2 Charts I picked up from, I think, DrivethruRPG during a sale. I was astonished to see that Petrochemicals are only available in 1d6 ton loads. So how had Captain Lukk scored 50 tons?

I checked the speculative trade table in my copy of The Traveller Book (1983 edition) and found the same notation – 1D tons of Petrochemicals. Then I pulled out my Little Black Book Traveller Book 2: Starships (1977 edition) and found Petrochemicals 6D * 5 tons. Wow! That’s quite a change, though Mongoose Traveller has Petrochemicals being available in 1D * 10 ton loads, Mega Traveller, as is its want, complicates things further by having three class sizes of cargo, with the cargo size further affected by the population of the originating planet. I like what my LBBs are serving me so they have become my Spec Trading table of choice.

Sector Fleet

Sector Fleet
by Martin J Dougherty
Mongoose Publishing

Marc Miller first examined the Traveller Imperial Navy in detail in MegaTraveller’s Fighting Ships of the Shattered Imperium. This book expanded on the Classic Traveller Supplement 9 Fighting Ships, which was purely a collection of ship stat blocks, to include a small section on the Fleets of the Imperium, and how they were organised. It also examined how this organisational structure had adapted to the Imperial Civil War era of the MegaTraveller setting.

In 2006, Martin Dougherty published Grand Fleet, the first comprehensive work on the Imperial Fleet, its composition, mission, and organisation, through Avenger Enterprises. In 2010, Martin expanded upon his earlier work and released Sector Fleet for the current version of Traveller from Mongoose Publishing. As Sector Fleet is about twice the page count of Grand Fleet, it is obvious that Martin has given the subject of the Imperial Navy, the way it recruits and functions, its facilities and resources, and the way it interacts with the Imperium, considerable thought.

Sector Fleet gives a Gamesmaster a comprehensive picture as to how an institution like the Imperial Navy might function – not as a deux ex machina, but as a series of systems that follow their own internal logic and traditions based upon experience and the demands placed upon them by the government that they serve.

As a bonus, Martin provides a pretty comprehensive breakdown as to how the Spinward Marches Sector Fleet is deployed just prior to the 5th Frontier War, and what its structure looks like. Even if you don’t game in the Spinward Marches, or use the 3rd Imperium Background, this section is invaluable for the insight it provides a Gamesmaster with an interest in running a Naval campaign. From Martin’s baseline numbers, it is possible to extrapolate upwards or downwards, depending upon whether you favour a small ship or a large ship campagn, or even just compare Trillion Credit Squadron-derived budgets against.

This supplement is well worth getting, even just as another tool in a Traveller Gamesmaster’s toolbox.

“Version – we do for the love of it”

Since its release in 1977, Traveller has been through a number of versions – Classic Traveller; MegaTraveller; Traveller: The New Era; Mark Miller’s Traveller (also known as T4); GURPs Traveller; Traveller T20; Traveller Hero; and Mongoose Traveller. Mark Miller’s legendary T5 is still in development.

Mongoose Traveller is the current, officially supported, version of Traveller and along with a slew of excellent titles, Mongoose has been quite supportive of third-party publishing groups, such as Spica, who have published adventures, supplements and ship deck plans.

I started playing Classic Traveller in about 1980 and, to me, the core mechanic is roll 2d6 and score 8+ to succeed – this covers so many situations, with the GM able to add or subtract DMs as required that, like the paper clip, it seems impossible to understand why we haven’t been using it since the Egyptians began playing dice to while away the hours between pyramid builds.

What put me off MegaTraveller was DGP’s Task Roll mechanism. To me, they had taken an intuitive system and attempted to reduce it to a formula, reduce it to something that the GM had no control over. Looking back now, this was probably a mistaken assumption on my part.

DGP did do a lot of amazing stuff for Traveller, but they did have this completist streak that extended from quantifying the Task Roll to mapping the Universe. There is always this desire to know what’s ‘over there’. DGP took this to its illogical extent by mapping the entire Imperium, but otherwise providing little or no data on what they had mapped. So, creative wandering within the Imperium was effective curtailed, but hundreds of worlds, now with basic stats, were left hanging with no further development. Fan groups, like HIWG, did do a lot of work backfilling in what DGP had created – expanding the tables of stats into worlds with their own populations and cultures but, at the end of the day, most of this work was never picked up by DGP, as the licensee, or GDW, when they took Traveller back in house. This illusion of completeness did have people complaining that the Imperium, as a setting, was boring.

And then there was the Imperial Civil War story line, started by GDW and carried forward by DGP. A war can add interest and uncertainty to a campaign as the players work their way around the edges. The Imperial Civil War tore down what, to a number of players, was a viable setting, but did it in areas that had been poorly described beyond the broad brush Imperial Survey. Consequently, there was this feeling of frustration at the loss of the background, but little attachment to the places of conflict (the Core Worlds and Ilelish, for example).

I missed T:NE completely. I read the blurb on one book that talked about a sentient computer virus called, drum roll, “Virus”, and said, ‘Nah!’

I nearly missed GURPs Traveller as well, but saw the main, 3rd Edition Rule Book and bought them, probably out of a feeling of nostalgia. I was very impressed with what Loren Wiseman did in converting Traveller material to GURPs. I subsequently collected a number of the supplements and support books. Love GURPs character creation and the character templates, love the supplementary material that came out, and collect it purely to mine it for ideas, I’m just not keen on the GURPs combat system. As I get older, I have less time for gaming and so want simpler systems. I therefore bend back towards Classic Traveller because it is so simple in that regard.

Of the later versions of Traveller, such as T4, T20, Hero, and the 1248 setting, I’d never heard of them until my interest in Traveller was rekindled by the release of Mongoose Traveller. I have generated a number of MongTraveller characters, but have yet to play, or run, a game purely under those rules. I find that, in places, MongTraveller is so similar to Classic Traveller that I might as well generate the characters in MongTraveller and run the game as per Classic Traveller to prevent confusion.

So, which version of Traveller is the best? The one you, as a player or referee like, and feel most comfortable with. I’m fortunate in that I love Classic Traveller and like Mongoose Traveller and love the background material for GURPs Traveller. I also like Pocket Empires for T4, a lot of the MegaTraveller material, and Path of Tears for T:NE. In fact, there is always something one can lift from any of these sets of rules to add depth and breadth and height to your own game, no matter what version of Traveller you use.