Archive for 2025 week 38
- Rivets - 15 Sep 2025
- Goldilocksing - 16 Sep 2025
- Imperial titles - 17 Sep 2025
- Using your Model 2/bis - 18 Sep 2025
- Demapping - 19 Sep 2025
- Nailing down rules - 20 Sep 2025
- How starships work: real space speed - 21 Sep 2025
I have earlier described Trav canon as "Age of Sail" and "starships with rivets" and I should probably think through that a little more thoroughly.
I guess what I came up with yesterday is that there's a Goldilocks situation with the three human empires, where the Vilani are "juuuuust right" on things. At least, where "just right" refers to setting adventures there, not necessarily ideal for actually living in. Increasingly, I think the Zhodani will have the best standard of living.
Update: There is now a wiki entry for the Union, which supercedes this.
I had a TRS-80 Color Computer, not an Apple ][ (because I wasn't made of money - yes, Apple products have always been like that), and I can't remember whether I converted this or just wrote my own from scratch. The fact that the character, world, and language generation algorithms were written in the next best thing to pseudocode absolutely cemented my fascination with Trav. I still have a sector map that's sixteen taped-together pieces of dot-matrix paper (with the perforated pinfeed strips removed).
All right, I know I said I had really strong attachment to Traveller sector map aesthetic, but I think I'm moving away from them. In large part this is because the random Universal Planetary Profile just doesn't do it for me. I want a Firefly aesthetic of mostly shirtsleeve planets, though I don't think they'll all universally have a Hollywood climate.
I feel like I should nail some things down more, in particular starship capabilities.
Speed in real space assumes starship interactions, which I think is a given. Space opera calls for space pirates and boarding actions and so forth.