If Zhdez society isn't built around, let's be honest, men wanting reliable sex and women wanting reliable support for themselves/childen, the family unit is going to look different.
Oh gosh, it's gonna be polycules, isn't it?
I mean, joking aside, it kind of would be: a cohort of adults, forming a household. Almost certainly multigenerational, and not particularly built around sexual partnerships at all (though possibly built around parenting).
Trav's Droyne have family units something like this and while I haven't decided if my Ancients do the same (gotta decide how that works with the hive mind), if they do I might make it model the Ancient style a little more closely.
No sex please, we're Zhdez.
Trav has anagathic drugs, which I think I'm going to make mostly a Zhdez thing, and more widespread than it was in Trav. With a lower death rate (not quite the functional immortality of Culture, but something close), there will be a correspondingly lower birth rate. What I'm saying is, compared to Terrans, Zhdez are ace. They see Terrans as angry, horny brutes, Terrans see Zhdez as sexless weaklings.
With the aforementioned casual attitude to, and expertise in, body modification, Zhdez are pretty genderfluid, and think absolutely nothing of gender-mixing crews and everywhere else. It's the logical outcome of not having to protect people from predatory men, and of having a wide variety of gender and orientation such that you can't just separate people into groups on the assumption that it will prevent sexual attraction. (It's always been a mistaken assumption anyway.)
The three branches of humanity
While the motives of the Precursors are inscrutable, there is probably a good reason for seeding (at least) three homeworlds with human beings. The Zhdez are clearly the "improved psionics" test population, but there isn't a big difference between Solomani and Vilani in Trav, so I don't really have one between Terran and Inukari.
I'm tempted to make it gender. Specifically, Terran men. Inukari and Zhdez have less average size difference between the two primary genders. Both historically leaned much less "gender roles are biologically determined" as medical knowledge and technology made childbearing less of an all-encompassing differentiator. Which in turn happened earlier in both Inukari and Zhdez history, given that childbearers had more of a say in medical knowledge and technology.
Without the handicap of treating half the population as unable to contribute to the advancement of technology and unworthy of much medical consideration, they entered their Industrial Ages much earlier, but also with a much more gentle slope. Terrans argue that without Great Men, they didn't have the competitive drive to succeed; the others argue that without Great Men, they didn't rush headlong into ultimately destructive, polluting technologies. Or nearly as many wars.
Inukari probably need a differentiating factor beyond "not improved psionics" and "not toxically masculine," I guess.
Mass, or displacement?
The first(?) decision one has to make about starship design is "how big is it?" Which means I have to decide how to measure it. I've touched on this before.
Mass
The biggest pro to mass as the limiting factor is that one can easily afford larger open spaces inside ships. I've mentioned that Trav ships are cramped on paper but definitely not reflected that way in deck plans.
The con is calculating it. In the game-design end of things. I'd have to look up the weight-to-volume ratio of airplanes and ships and figure out some kind of middle ground. And more importantly, it's more variable than volume. Encumbrance rules for starships?
Volume
The pro to volume is that it is easy to calculate and stays (mostly) stable.
The con is that, as mentioned, it leads to cramped spaces, but also it leads to weird player behavior like "what if we filled the lower passages with cargo?"
What if both?
The problem I have created for myself is that my stupid starships are limited by stupid both. Realspace travel is mass-based, jumpspace travel is based on the volume of the jump field. Good job, me.
(Semi-tangential: Trav ships have realspace "maneuver drive" ratings of 1G, 2G, etc. Which is a reasonable way to measure acceleration except technically a 1G ship can't get off a higher-grav world.)
Back to starship construction rules
I've made my life difficult in that I kind of want each major power to have its own style of not-necessarily-compatible starship, which means at least four variations on construction rules.
I just finished reading C.J. Cherryh's latest, Alliance Unbound, which I feel like touches on a bit more of the starship details than previous books have. In particular, there are a lot of little mentions of ships being upgraded (including from pre-FTL "pushers"). And that's a thing I kind of want: Trav starship generation was very static, though there was some improvement across tech levels.
I think I will dial down the number of actual "can construct a starship from scratch" shipyards, or more accurately the number of drive manufacturers. I'm thinking a sort of airliner model: the engine makers are separate(ish) from the airplane makers.
But on a broader level: the custom starship construction rules in Trav are interesting, because obviously it takes a moderately long time to build a starship (I forget the exact time frame in the rules), and every game I ever played that had a custom ship, the player came in with it. (Including, once, a player who tried to bring in an active Navy guy with three ships under his command. He was the owner of the BBS so when I, as GM, vetoed it, he kicked me off the BBS and that, folks, is how the Old Phoenyx Bar & Grill, eventually phoenyx dot net, came to be.)
Anyway.
I feel like more often it's going to be a Firefly situation: "here are the ships that are available in your price range." Which sort of means the gamemaster needs to design a ship now and then, but those rules are a little faster and looser because the ship is just whatever the campaign needs it to be, not what a minmaxing player is trying to design.
Robots
I was thinking Book 8, Robots, came out much later in my Trav career but in fact it was out just a year after Merchant Prince. Maybe I just saw it/bought it much later, since that was before the Internet-mediated instant spread of game publishing info.
Again, thirds: a fairly detailed addressing of robots in a lot of different polities - not just the six Major Races, either. Skimming through the Hiver view of robots, that's probably closer to what my Zhdez view is: all in. (In fact, overall the Hivers are a lot more of a Culture vibe than the Zhodani are.)
And then, robot construction, very much resembling starship construction. Not sure I'll want a detailed system for my gameworld.
Lastly, all kinds of charts about incorporating robots into a game. Random encounters, random reactions, skill rolls, and such. There's a brief bit on roleplaying robots PCs which is kind of funny, boiling down to "be careful not to be creative." Uh... okay?
(I somehow haven't acquired Book 9 yet, so I guess this is the end of the mini-thread.)
Merchant Prince
I didn't initially set out to contemplate Little Black Books 4-9, but why stop now?
Merchant Prince... is less than great. I had forgotten how much it squeezed the character generation into the military-career mold. After that it's a dry list of merchant companies (having completely given up on "no canon universe"), and then a revised economic system (which may be fine; I don't think I played an extended campaign that made use of it).
On the one hand I have a special fondness for Star Trade Simulators, which were a huge part of BBS door games (look it up, kids!) and pre-graphics computer games. But on the other, I'm not sure I have the skill or inclination to build an entire mini-game inside a roleplaying game, so I don't think I'll have much in the way of trading rules.
