The Millionfish class, then, gets pared down to some basics:
A very small Terran freighter
Pilot, navigator, engineer, optional cargo super or passenger steward
Four-stateroom block
Lounge/kitchen - passengers use the same facilities as crew
Small medical bay + two suspension coffins
One cargo can in a rack, plus a half-can worth of cargo hold.
One antigrav mule, adjacent to the hold.
It will not outrun much in realspace, and is a bit of a wallowing tub in atmo.
It can make jump-3, and make probably ten hexes between refuelling.
It can usually support a crew of four on legal cargo, provided it can stay pretty close to a two-jobs-a-month schedule.
On the Cypher "inexpensive, moderately priced, expensive, very expensive, exorbitant, priceless" scale it is Very Expensive.
Minimalist starship design
Leaving out all the possibilities for Trav deck plan borrowing, the important questions a gamemaster needs to answer are:
What class of ship is it? ("Small freighter," "tiny scout," "city-sized capital ship," etc.)
How many crew (and crew staterooms)
How many passengers, and how luxurious (or not)
How many cargo cans (or equivalent loose-storage or tankage space)
What vehicles/small craft
How fast in realspace
How far in jumpspace
And then, if that's dissimilar to the stock ships I will presumably be providing:
How economical is it?
After that, one can just build deckplans based on Trav modular stuff (YATB geomorphs or whatever), and assume that the drive pack on the back end is as big as it needs to be, a la Alliance/Union books (which once mentioned a ship having the drive pack cut off the back and a new one glued on, more or less; new vanes might have been involved too).
Cypher System
Update: There is now a wiki entry for Cypher, which supercedes this.
Spouse's RPG publishing plans currently involve Cypher System, which makes me wonder if I should look at that when it comes time to put down some real rules. We've backed the Kickstarter and somewhere we have PDFs (of the soon-to-be-outdated version) but for now I'm just poking around in SRD versions.
Cypher isn't exactly a generic system, so I don't know if it's going to work out. One interesting thing, though, is that the starships are pretty vaguely defined. Prices are just "Very Expensive" or "Exhorbitant" or whatever, and maybe that's all I need? Gamemaster just decides how many cargo pods, staterooms, small craft a ship has and that's it, no design rules beyond some examples. A GM can go "This is a stock J-2 ship, it is Very Expensive. Something that size with a J-4 drive will have half the space for cargo and whatnot, you'll be regarded as a Half-and-Half and people will assume you're a pirate because you're clearly not economical at honest shipping rates."
Racism and classism
So let's try this out: For geographic/economic reasons the Inukari didn't have the massive trauma of Earth's Atlantic slave trade period, nor a tendency toward colonization. Their continents are better-connected, and had more parity of technology/resources in their medieval-to-industrial equivalent period, so "expansionism" was more a function of improving food production to make unproductive areas of one's own region more livable. What they did have was deeply stratified social classes across most societies, against which there was a general backlash about the time they discovered star travel. They're still struggling toward egalitarianism (heyyy, maybe they do have Trav-style Social Standing stats), but there isn't a racial component.
Zhdez also do not have the deep-seated colorism the Terrans do. They do probably have some serious telepath vs. non-telepath divides and discrimination in their history instead, something like the Zhodani caste system. As with the Inukari, it probably didn't reflect inter-cultural behavior as much as intra-, and they too are trying to put that behind them. With less success, since being a telepath does naturally lead to some advantages, which Zhdez have trouble unpicking from systemic classism.
If Terran ethnic/political/religious groups settled different regions of their space, the same should probably be true of Inukari and Zhdez, though the latter two will have had less animosity driving the segregation.
I'm going to have to give all this more thought; it's important to have a gameworld that's a nice place to play in for players of all colors.
A third rail
In Trav, the Zhodani started out as indistinctly Arabic/Southeast Asian, with turbans and fortune-teller beards and other "mentalist" trappings. Definitely a product of the 70's, a bit yikes in spots. I am certainly not going that direction (and I think modern Trav does not? I can't remember now) but I suppose I need to think about what skin color and ethnicity means on the other two human homeworlds.
I'm assuming both worlds have Earthlike climate variations and so forth, so the same opportunities for variations in melanin. But also, I've already established that there was a lot of ongoing transfer of populations or at least genes, so it would be possible to have the same set of ethnicities if that's what the Precursors decided was a control in their experiments(?) or a completely different set if they didn't. If they are roughly the same, it does make character art a lot easier.
It also answers the "are they all one species?" question. Yes, with evidence of meddling right up to the start of recorded history.
Empires fall
While there's a star-spanning government in at least three of the four territories (the Wolves, like the Vargr, are a little more chaotic than that), I haven't quite nailed down what it looks like. Even with an extremely democratic/consensus government type (Zhdez), you need some form of executive hierarchy at least for rapid/emergency decision making, and the nature of humans tends toward concentrating more and more power if only because it's so convenient. Not quite empire, but sometimes close.
The Inukari Union is very much a federation of planets, and I think I'm going to give it a parliamentary government with a separate head of state and head of government. There's a whole bureaucracy around regulating interstellar commerce, and around defense (from pirates and hostile states), and while in theory it allows each planet to self-govern, in practice it's just like the US: regulating commerce ends up more and more micro-manage-y.
The Terran Republic uses somewhat the same model, but is a lot further down the road of controlling planetary governments. It's also a lot less successful: while it puts on a brave face when meeting with outsiders, it really only controls the Terran Cluster. The rest of the "Republic" is more or less in a state of rebellion, fragmented into various groups of planets mostly by ethnicity/religion.
The Zhdezplier is much less formal in general; the Zhdez zhdi ab vopl means government is more about organizing the Zhdez social impulse. Zhdez regard systems as being expected to contribute to the whole just as individuals are, so there is a moderately organized navy (more of a merchant marine), and organizations who establish standards and regulate commerce. There is a head of state but no real head of government; emergency decision making falls to one of several organizations depending on the nature of the emergency.
Zhdez "religion"
The concept of zhdi ab vopl literally translates to "share one's candlelight" but is more often translated "do the needful." The metaphor is, roughly, that one does not receive more benefit from a candle by shielding others from using its light. It is not a religion or philosophy, but a metaphor for the foundation of all Zhdezi society.
Zhdi is why individual Zhdezi contribute to society without coercion. Zhdez governments are usually classed by Inukari as "Civil Service Bureaucracy," because they chiefly exist as organizational structures to coordinate efforts and prevent duplication.
Zhdezi are more inclined to cooperate than to compete, and are fairly appalled at Terran concepts like "state monopoly on violence," and "zero-sum game." The notion that one treats one's family specially as a Darwinian instinct to preserve one's genes strikes them as a singularly animalistic, primitive behavior. The universe is a hostile place, and one treats all others as family.
This has not, needless to say, gone well in contact with non-Zhdezi. The lack of reciprocity causes the Zhdezi mind to classify non-Zhdezi as either mentally defective, or as animals. There are Zhdezi who "do not have the candle," and if the condition cannot be treated (with Zhdez telepathy-enhanced psychiatry), they are placed in groups with the telepathic training to effectively impose societal norms on the person. Non-Zhdez regard this as coercive mind control. The use of this approach with non-Zhdezi living in Zhdezi society is divisive, even among Zhdezi.
Non-Zhdez perceive zhdi as a religion or philosophy rather than an inherent part of the Zhdez psyche. Some Inukari and Terrans have adopted a form of it, to the bemusement of Zhdez.
