Update: Dessonia now has a wiki entry, which supercedes this.
I've been doing big overviews, so what if I zoom down to a single world?
1211 is the J4 bridge between the Imperium and the J2 cluster of otherwise-isolated systems toward the Vargr Extents. It connects to four Imperial worlds and three Cluster worlds at J4... and nowhere else closer than that. The randomly-generated version of it is:
Dessonia 1211 B545223-6 Lo Co 614 Na
Translated, that's a port capable of building spaceships (no jump drives), and a small primary world with a Thin, Tainted atmosphere, 50% ocean. Population 600-699, participating democracy, low law level, and atomic-age tech.
Only six-hundred-some residents and a B-type port? That's an excellent candidate for a mining settlement assigned a bunch of Chirper supply vessels. And a good place for Chirpers to have leverage post-Departure: "start conscripting our ships, or experimenting on them/us, and we will cut off trade to/through Dessonia!"
Fine: that's the Chirper "homeworld." Not the planet, which has ore processing and a minimal downport for bulk shuttles and fuel tenders and not much else, it's mostly pass-through traffic. But it's the home port for every Chirper ship in Imperial space, even though most only go there for social reasons. The transient population outnumbers the permanent one by two or three times.
I'm not sure a shipyard makes sense here, and Chirper ships don't need/can't have repairs, so the B classification only refers to the general quality and traffic level of the port.
Dessonia is certainly not self-sustaining, so its residents are all citizens of other systems, making it effectively an Imperial system although it is independent on paper.
Zombietown, USA
Okay, this is going to seem like a weird side path but bear with me. One of the big influences here is a GURPS Horror/Autoduel supplement called Zombietown, U.S.A. For real.
Zombietown is not exactly an adventure module and not exactly a setting module, but somewhere in between. It details a buttload of NPCs and sets up a whole bunch of adventure seeds. If memory serves (I'm not going to dig out my copy and look at it again so I'm going on decades-old memories here) there's a primary plot, but also one could run a lengthy campaign in the town as the PCs keep everyone from being turned into zombies but then have a zillion side plots to track down in each session.
Coming from "you'll never run out of worlds to have an adventure on and then never see again" Traveller, this was a revelation to me. The idea of setting up a fantastically detailed pocket-empires setting, or a tiny neighborhood in a fantasy city, and turning PCs loose to either try to keep the gears turning or throw sand in them, depending, has always had its hooks in my brain. (Of course, just try to keep an ADHD brain fixated on all the little details of a single setting long enough to finish it. And that's why I've never published one in all the years since. Will this be the one? I doubt it!)
The Imperium
Update: There is now a wiki entry for the Union, which supercedes this.
(Or whatever it ends up being named.)
The different scale of this map really comes into focus with the Imperium, which is... about thirty worlds. It might run as high as fifty, including all the outlying bits that are not going to be part of the Imperium but which have to go through it to get to anywhere else so they're certainly Imperium-inflected.
There's a twenty-system J2 cluster. I am not sure yet exactly how long the J2 limit was in effect, but I'm thinking at least half a generation, time enough for that to solidify some econonomic and political bonds. And if Chirper ships were the only connection outside of those clusters, how each polity treated them after the Departure is probably important.
I realized I've been unconsciously thinking of the Ancients as being more active along the map edges, specifically in the "north." There are a five J3 singlet systems out there, which would have been wholly dependent on Ancient/Chirper ships for interstellar trade/transport... and initial settlement. (This is of course true for nearly all of Charted Space, barring the J2 clusters around the four respective homeworlds.)
They'll have appeared everywhere, I think, because I have felt like their psionics use is a strong influence on [my take on] the Zhodani. And even where they don't pop up often, they have an outsized influence: humans know they've been manipulated in obvious ways ("armed ships disappear in jump" was a fact pre-Departure), and suspect less-obvious ways everywhere. Everything gets second-guessed, especially once everyone realized the Departure was not permanent: was the Solomani War triggered by secret Ancient influence? Is the Emperor secretly controlled by a worldship hivemind? And so on. (The lack of trust in institutions is probably staggering across Charted Space, and looking around at the world today: oh, that's probably bad.)
Aaaaanyway, the Spinward Marches equivalent is just five worlds, which is a definite different vibe. A PC ship will not be "welp, we'll never come back to this world," and there's much less of a feeling of novelty. Which is silly, because there's an enormous amount of novelty in the single world we're sitting on right now, but I'll grant that it feels different when things aren't separated by a starship trip. Flying an interstellar ship around to different airports on the same world seems... weird.
Map nomenclature
Update: There is now a wiki entry for Charted Space, which supercedes this.
I'm going to continue to use Traveller terminology, but it doesn't make sense for the in-universe name of the map to be a "sector." Tentatively I'm naming the J2 clusters as in-universe "sectors" though I might drop that when things get too confusing.
I should probably rename the Vilani/Solomani/Zhodani bits since I am only roughly going to parallel those in the sense of "default," "repressive," and "psionics-forward."
More on the timeline
Update: There is now a wiki entry for Dragons, which supercedes this.
Chirpers are moderately common in human space, though almost exclusively in Startowns or on stations. They usually live on a family/tribe ship, though some are crew on human ships and others captain (or at least pilot).
I think having Chirpers turn into their own thing (closer to Trav-standard Droyne, I think) happen plus some Vargr assimilating into human worlds means I want a small but definite number of generations since the Departure and the subsequent war. There will have been brushfire wars off and on ever since, and probably a little upheaval the first time a worldship showed up again, and Vargr groups going a-viking, so players could run either Chirper or Vargr characters as well as humans. They'll be pretty well accepted in starfaring community, though if nonhumans try to visit worlds outside of starport areas things may get awkward.
The Ancients
Update: There is now a wiki entry for the Ancients, which supercedes this.
As noted, the Ancients are dinosaur-descended. Humans didn't really figure that out until the Ancients had largely disappeared because the current form has gone through (apparent) uplift plus millions of years of genetic drift and deliberate editing, and they sort of frowned on humans Area 51-ing them. But once Chirpers lost their jobs and full medical coverage, they were very happy for humans to start figuring things out about them.
The Ancients themselves come in a dazzling array of made-for-purpose forms, with wide ranges in apparent intelligence - though as part of a hive-mind, that's hard to pin down and may just reflect the amount of attention the group mind invests in that unit.
Most of the human contact is with the "Sports," a catch-all term humans have chosen for the diverse group created to perform liaison and similar tasks. These are generally more or less distinct individuals, separated out from the worldship mind so they can communicate on a human level, sometimes so much so that they find their own species as incomprehensible as humans do. Some were fairly humaniform, so they could use human equipment, while others were closer to the original therapod lines.
Ancients don't particularly distinguish them from their human servitors, which can be nearly-autonomous or folded entirely into the hivemind, depending on need. A typical worldship visit involves appearing insystem, usually at a world with substantial bulk-mining operations. The Ancients will land a shuttle and request individuals, by name, implying detailed knowledge of the power structure of the planet. The individuals - high-level corporate employees, port authorities, sometimes political leaders - will be taken back to the worldship for a period of time, and return as part of the hivemind to direct the loading of the desired cargos.
The Ancients do not negotiate, but they do use the knowledge of their servitors to determine how best to reward their vassals' service. Aside from the loss of the humans taken as servitors (who leave with the worldship and are never seen again), it is, or was, often a fairly beneficial arrangement. In the period of regular "trade," there was seldom resistance: if the specified individuals were not promptly provided, an example would be made. The retribution was swift, merciless, and disproportionate. Given the choice between turning over a few key personnel and raw materials and being paid in Ancient technology, or permitting an official to flee and having an entire neighborhood leveled and the raw materials taken, uncompensated, most communities took the first option.
After the Departure, the remaining Sports had no more explanation than humans did. The ones left behind were ones with tenuous or no connection to the worldship minds. They only knew human (or Vargr) worlds, and simply assimilated as best they could.
With the worldships gone, some Sports began developing reproductive capabilities, and began coming together into communities, albeit usually ship-based since humans, especially non-Zhodani, were distrustful of them. Their offspring tended toward what was presumably the baseline form: a recognizably theropod form somewhat smaller than humans. They settled into three main genders (male, female, and non-binary) and five true castes (Leader, Technician, Drone, Worker, and Warrior) plus unclassifiable Sports.
They became known as Chirpers because they generally (with the exception of some descendants of very humaniform types) have syrinx rather than larynx and their natural vocalizations are birdlike chirps - albeit very, very loud, piercing chirps. They can speak human languages in much the same way as some birds can, usually very understandably. There is a Chirper language, though not all Chirpers speak it and it is very simplistic - it appears to have been used by Ancients only when telepathy was not possible, possibly only by/with children.
The Ring
Update: There is now a wiki entry for the Ring, which supercedes this.
I'm still not sure what I'm going to call it, but the J3 ring of worlds has a neat little cluster. I think that's the subsector I generated with Standard instead of Backwater, thinking I might make it the origin point for settlement. I'm not keeping the random world profiles (again: shirtsleeve), but it did make for a higher concentration of shipyards: three type A's just in the J2 cluster.
The canon Trav setting does make use of ~~dilithium crystals~~ lanthanum as the designated Rare Starship Drive Component. I'm leaning toward there being a psionic component to star travel (I have Melissa Scott's Five-Twelfths of Heaven on my re-read queue), so maybe it's the proximity to the Zhodanis that makes them good at it?
The random tech levels make the shipyard distribution look like this.
Vilani: TL 8 (2), 10, 12
Solomani: TL 10 (2), 11, 12
Zhodani: TL 11, 14
Vargr: TL 9, 14
Ring: TL 8, 9, 12
Trav kind of merges everything together, like the TL on the world reflects both the general standard of living as well as the technology of any industry and I am not going to feel particularly bound by that, but it's interesting that both Zho and Vargr have the TL14 worlds (the highest on the map). I feel like the Vargr's backstabbing nature make cooperation for higher techs difficult.
The other three worlds in the cluster are D or E starports. Two of them are off the Ring path (assuming a J2 or J3 ship), very much backwaters. The other would be a necessary stop for a J2 ship and seems like "Poor Quality. Only unrefined fuel available. No repair facilities" would be unlikely. Any ships going beyond this cluster are J3 by definition, so there are probably private facilities for the regular J2 ships that service that world. Everyone else just hops over it.
Getting in from the Solomani side involves stopping at a D-class world, though. So either there's not much general traffic, or something happened to a better facility. That will probably depend on decisions I make about the timeline.
