Update: There is now a wiki entry for Anchor Blue, which supercedes this.
Anchor Blue, the highport above Carlentia 1322, is the first entry into The Ring from both the Imperium proper and, in theory, the Solomani Sphere. Lorbaugh, the military station, sits at the only J-3 access point between the three regions. Commercial traffic refuels at Lorbaugh without shore leave, so ships that arrive at Anchor Blue have crews and passengers who've been bottled up for weeks.
Anchor Blue's business is thus ship resupply... and open spaces. That's a surprising feature for an orbital.
Anchor Blue's massive spherical shell was created by the Ancients, in trade for Carlentia's deposits of hydrocarbon-included quartz. It's unknown what the Ancients see in the quartz, but it was clearly valued: the shell appears to be similar to one for an Ancient worldship, and is indestructable by any means its new owners have attempted. At its core is a power plant, which provides electricity, heating, and cooling, as if by magic.
The decks inside are human-built, and widely spaced (so far). There are forested parks, conventional soil-based farms, and more.
The Carlentia Equitable Pioneers Company strictly controls permanent residency, but it's not the typical corporate world. The company is a worker collective, and there's functionally no distinction between it and a democratic government. It's nominally governed by the onworld Carlentia government but since both are elected by essentially the same group of people, the two are in lockstep.
Psychic wars
The existence and behavior of the Ancients has got to have a huge impact on the human (and Vargr) societies. A semi-godlike species that mind-controls people? The conspiracy-theories (and theory-theories) have got to be out of control. The three homeworlds have each taken it a different way.
The Vilani (I gotta get them a new name) are the most "normal" about psi, since the Imperium/Ring are probably the base PC-type area. Psionic use is well-legislated around; reading someone's mind without consent is assault and so forth. There are Psionic Institutes but they're of variable quality: some are government-run (on-world or Imperial), others are scams, still others are Zhodani plants.
The Zhodani, of course, are all-in on psionics, the Ancients are our idols, etc. etc. Everyone else just rolls their eyes and says, "if you like the dinosaurs so much why not marry them" and ohhhhh, I might have to make them genetic engineers as well. I'm also sort of inclined to make them the fully automated luxury gay space communists, and kind of like Culture but instead of having happily given all the control over to the AIs, they've given it all to the Ancients. And everyone else is "yeah, fine, it clearly works and everyone's happy but it still ain't right," which is the vibe the canon Zho have.
The Solomani are knee-jerk reactionaries when it comes to Zhodani (and probably everything else, I think) so they are absolutely anti-psi, anti-genetic engineer, anti everything that isn't "real human." But they are also "know your enemy" so they have excellent testing abilities and scoop up tween psis like a dystopian YA novel. In fact, I think the definition of them is probably "a mashup of dystopian YA novel stuff." If piloting (or nav) is psionic-related, that will definitely make spacers an out-class, or else a strictly-controlled one.
More influences
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
I've been thinking about psionics, and the details of the interactions between Ancients and the different empires, and in particular about there being a psionic component to star travel. There has to be a reason why you need a human pilot, if you need a human pilot. Psionics gives a hook to hang that on, if you borrow something like the alchemical(!) star flight from Five-Twelfths of Heaven.
I'm on a reread of Consider Phlebas, and a "warp beast" plays a bit part in it. That, and voidmoths from Machineries of Empire, have me wanting biological starships. Also a la Farscape, which I'm roughly familiar with though haven't actually watched myself.
If you don't need a human pilot, on the flip side, you can end up with bot pilots hauling things without humans on board at all: Murderbot Diaries. Or the Minds of the Culture, for that matter. I don't think I like that, because my archetypical PC group remains "crew of a tramp freighter."
Moreover, of a tramp freighter with rivets, so probably not a space whale (or bug). But my inclination is toward "space travel needs an organic brain for something" just to prevent bot ships (and to allow for the occasional rule-breaker, like Murderbot: a robot ship that can pilot itself through jump).
This still doesn't solve the problem of "what do ship's crew do during jump?" Which may mean I need to unpack the bundles of later Journals I think we've got, and see what people have retconned into that space. Or reread some Cherryh, though my TBR pile would be teetering if it weren't ebooks.
Deck plan thoughts
I've been noodling around with deck plans, because they're fun, but it really just points up some decisions I need to make.
Traveller's limiting factors for ship design are cost and "displacement weight" (i.e., volume). Traveller ships are claustrophobic; they're supposed to evoke Age-of-Sail ships but really they're more like submarines. You get four displacement-tons for a stateroom, which is supposed to encompass the room itself and all its life support, access hallways, and any other passenger space.
That's eight one-point-five-meter squares per passenger (and half that for most crew who are expected to double up). The staterooms on my little sketch there take that much on their own. And sure, I could drop that to six and remove the second desk area, which gives me enough space to... make the passage that connects them. Sorry, gonna have to remove the bathroom ("fresher"). Which, granted: that's a five-by-five-foot shower stall, it could certainly be sized down. Fitting things to the grid does make everything take up a lot more space - passages are five feet wide as well.
Ship's boats, in Trav, don't take up any extra space whatsoever in smaller ships. In large ones it's assumed they need launch tubes, but in smaller ones they can be mounted next to the hull. But you still need some space if you're going to access the boat - at minimum, a passage to the cockpit hatch. Given that some cargo cans don't have that forward hatch, I foreclose on some adventure possibilities if the cans aren't accessible during flight.
Most Trav deck plans get around this by just... basically ignoring it. And that's fair: all that really matters 99% of the time is what the relative arrangement of everything is, and if the "real" staterooms are a little more crammed together, and the "real" passages are a little less perfectly right-angled and wide, that's fine.
But the limiting factors required back-filling what the actual jump mechanics are. Later Trav magazine writers (not sure of the current canon) posited a "jump field" that encompassed the ship, and drive ratings were based on how much volume they could wrap with their fields. Which is fine, if you don't stop to think about how a spherical ship has so very much less surface area than one with a "dispersed" structure.
But if volume isn't the limiting factor, then mass probably is. I'm going to have to think about the ramifications of both approaches.
Batoid Class
I have always liked the imagery of the Safari Ship.
The Batoid Class is a 300-ton deep trader built for frontier world service, carrying two modules, one in a Modular Cutter, plus a half-module. Fuel tanks are in stubby triangular aerofoils, providing the silhouette that gives the class its name.
300ton hull
Jump-3
2G Maneuver
Modular Cutter
4 Staterooms
3 Hardpoints
Module Bay (30t)
Half-Module Rack (15t)
Crew: Pilot, Navigator, Engineer, Medic, Cutter Pilot
The bridge is on the upper deck, with two staterooms for bridge crew and engineer just behind it. The crew lounge/kitchen, small medical bay and main (only) lift are wedged just forward of engineering.
Below, two crew staterooms are just off the lift. These are nominally for the cutter pilot, stewards, and/or medic, though on cargo-only ships these staterooms are sometimes let out to steerage passengers. The lower deck is minimal, mostly consisting of the grappling mechanisms for the cutter and cargo modules.
There is access to the module hatches during jump, with the expectation that they will sometimes carry dual stateroom modules for a passenger complement of twelve high-passage or twenty-four middle-passage.
In service, the half module is often used to hold at least a small wheeled ATV or anti-grav "mule." Some even carry wheel sets to mount to the half or full module, though most worlds with large enough roads to accommodate it already have on-world module transport.
Expanding the multiverse-idea
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
I seem to remember Trav's "Solomani" term being of uncertain (in-game) origin, with a dispute over whether it meant "man of Sol" or "sole man." I'm definitely leaning into that: Terra is, according to them, the origin of all intelligent life. Which, clearly it is: the Ancients are Terran dinosaurs, humans are humans, Vargr are uplifted canines, Aslan (if they exist) will be uplifted felines, and so forth.
But. Jump drives, I have previously established, cross into alternate universes to solve the FTL paradox.
In most cases, no one has found any astronomical evidence of similarity between the universes - there are no galactic "landmarks" to indicate that they share even adjacent realities.
The exception, so far, is Terra, Zhodane, and Vland. These three worlds - including their universes - are near-triplets, with slight variations in continents indicating a divergence in, probably, the Mesozoic era. Their night skies are all but identical. The assumption is that the homeworlds of the Ancients and Vargr also share a universe-ancestor, but the Ancients don't acknowledge questions and the Vargr are evasive - none of the known Vargr worlds matches, but they have made oblique references to the lost world of "Lair."
The time frame of the divergence means that it happened long before the rise of mammals, much less human life, and there's disagreement about how and why three distinct yet interfertile "species" of humans arose. The rest of the planetary taxa parallel closely, but none to the level of humans. It is almost certainly the result of Primordial action, but whether they steered three different ancestors to the same destination or cross-seeded them in prehistoric times is unclear.
War where
Pretty sure there has never existed a time in recorded history where there wasn't war going on somewhere. So where are they happening here (beyond a single-world level, anyway)?
Definitely a civil war happening in/between the New Worlds (nominally) of the Solomani Sphere. In fact, maybe two of them. I'm seeing the Solomani region as someplace characters can fight against The Man, a repressive government a la Star Wars Empire or Firefly Alliance, though I haven't nailed the exact flavor down. But definitely they're having trouble keeping it together after the Departure.
I'm going to drop Terra in as one of the two A's in the Terran Cluster, so the Dalsatia Provinces are in the direction of expansion. The rift between Solomani and Zhodani space is J-5 to J-6, which means the Zhodani, who are Chirper-friendly, can cross the rift, but the Solomani, who are Humans Only, can't. (Yes, there is a Chirper bridge in Terran space, but they're deeply resented even while being economically/militarily necessary.)
Solomani are all-in on anti-psi, and are deeply paranoid about invisible Ancient/Zhodani influence. Their paranoia is not entirely unfounded - the conflict in the back of the New Worlds is being egged on by Zhodani agents, trying to keep Solomani settlement to a minimum against the time when they break the J-3 barrier and can settle it themselves.
They are also in open warfare in the Ring/Zhodani Frontier, and have occupied several Zhodani-settled worlds.
