Traveller 2025

Milieu

You are in the "Golden Age" of Traveller. Year 1105 of the Third Imperium (AD 4677).

The action is taking place in the Querion subsector of the Spinward Marches sector. This is the junction between four groups: Third Imperium, Sword Worlds Confederation, the Zhodani Consulate and the Darrian Confederation.

The Imperium is the biggest human political organization. It is a feudal confederacy where member worlds agree to pay taxes and obey a few fundamental laws (the High Laws). In return, the Imperium agrees to patrol the space between the worlds, to protect interstellar trade, to encourage travel and commerce, and to arbitrate diplomatic relations between worlds. Beyond this, individual worlds are left to their own devices.

All of Traveller takes place in Charted space, which is that little red dot on the map of the Milky Way.

Milky Way Galaxy

Zoom in to "Charted Space"

One hex in this final map is 1 parsec (pc) and that is the size of one star system, planets and all.

A parsec is a unit of distance, and it is 3.3 light-years = 206,000 AU = 3.1E16 metres =  31 trillion kilometres or 31 million million kms (31,000,000,000,000).

The yellow circles are indicators of population. The red and blue borders are the different political regions. Red to the right is the Imperium. Blue to the top is the Zhodani Consulate. Blue at the bottom is the Sword Worlds Confederation.

Jump Drive

The jump drive was invented on Earth 2500 years ago (AD 2088). It is the main way for travellers to move around Charted Space. Traveller follows the Star Wars hyperspace model:  A ship slides into "Jump Space" and travels there for one week, then slides out in the destination system. This trip always takes exactly one week unless something goes wrong.

The distance the ship can travel in that week is dependent on the engine size. A Jump-1 engine will travel one parsec in the week, Jump-2 two parsecs, right up to Jump-6 which is six parsecs. Jump-6 is the maximum jump with onboard fuel tanks. (Bigger jump drives do exist, but they need external drop tanks for the fuel. Like with the rocket equation, the weight of the fuel diminishes the load you can carry, and you eventually end up with all fuel.)

The jump must take place away from strong gravitational fields. 100 diameters is the recommended distance. (E.g. Earth is 12,000 km in diameter, so you'd need to jump at 100 x12000 = 1.2 million km, three times the moon's distance, about L2 where the James Web telescope is. To fly out to 1.2M km at 1G takes almost 6 hours)

You can try to jump closer than 100, but then you take a risk of a mis-jump. That means the ship can fail the jump, or end up somewhere random up to 6 parsecs away, or ... just explode.

To execute a jump, the jump fuel is burned which charges the jump capacitors - this takes an hour. It is the discharging of the capacitors powers the jump-drive.

The actual slide into hyperspace only takes a few seconds. The jump-drive field generators make a timed Einstein-Rosen bridge and the ship slides into Jump-space with the current movement vector (universe absolute). This is an incredibly complex set of calculations to time it right, so must be done with the Jump computer. 

The jump capacitors are lossy and can not hold their charge for too long, so the jump must go ahead within 30 minutes of full charge, or else they discharge too much to power the jump. If this happens, they need to be topped up with more fuel, or discharged. It takes an hour to dissipate all that energy safely.

Jump fuel can be on board, or stored in drop-tanks. Drop tanks are jettisoned after draining (and must be more than 100 tank diameters away before the jump engine is engaged.)

When a ship enters or leaves jump-space into real space, there is a huge electromagnetic pulse which can be detected within one light-hour (7AU). Plus the arriving ship's transponder will be pinging anyway.

If another ship is within 100,000 km of a jumping ship (and in line-of-sight), it can work out (by the "angle of entry" into jump-space) where the destination will be.

Note: Without jumping, interstellar travel not really feasible. Light takes 3.3 years to travel one parsec, of course.  For a non-jumping space-ship to make the same trip, travelling at 1g, turning half-way and slowing at 1g (and ignoring fuel concerns), it would get to 93% of light-speed and, because of time dilation, would take 3.2 years for those on board. For remote observers, the trip would appear to take 4.8 years.

Ancients

Scattered throughout known space are the ruins of a civilization that once dominated this region of the galaxy. We call them "the Ancients." The sites have been dated  about 300,000 years ago. 

The Ancients lasted less than 20,000 years in total. Their civilization was destroyed in a cataclysmic war. Over a period of about 2,000 years, they fought with such ferocity that archeologists today work under a severe handicap trying to piece together the bits and fragments that remain.

The Final War was fought with technology far beyond that available to the Imperium, or to any civilization extant. Estimates place the resources used at tech level 25 or greater: a level virtually incomprehensible to those investigating the war. Compare this to Earth 2024 which is TL 9. The Third Imperium is currently on TL 15.

The weapons they had were brutal in their power. They were capable of great destruction; entire planets were reduced to asteroid belts by what must have been planet-buster bombs. In other cases, planetoids and small moons were seized, moved, and directed toward planets to obliterate what must have been bases, cities, and installations. Many worlds still bear the marks of such attacks.

The weapons of the Final War were also sophisticated. Some worlds appear to have escaped unscathed from the war; only when an Ancient site is discovered does it become apparent that that particular site was the target of an attack. There is no evidence of misses, no pattern bombing, no random attacks. What was attacked was hit; high technology controlled the attacks.

This Ancient civilization was wide-ranging. Confirmed Ancient sites have been found in every sector of the Imperium, as well as throughout Vargr, Aslan and Zhodani territory. The total number of confirmed Ancient sites visited by the Imperium is more than 200.

After the war the Ancients just vanished. Whether they were utterly destroyed, morphed into something else, or ascended to another dimension, we just don't know.

The Ancients are responsible for scattering humanity around Charted Space. While humanity evolved unmolested on Earth without Ancient involvement, the Ancients certainly sourced their humans from Earth to do the scattering. All the traveller human-type races are from this origin. The Ancients also uplifted wolves, lions and lizards from Earth, and this is the origin of the non-human races Vargr, Aslan and Keerens.

Solomani were the humans left on Earth. They developed the jump drive in AD 2088, got to Barnards Star in 2097, and explored ever since. Vilani were humans taken by the Ancients and shifted to other star systems. They discovered jump drive themselves.

Items of the Ancients that survive are akin to magic.

Chemistry & Physics

Fusion exists and is used.

Antimatter exists and is used.

Transparent aluminium exists.

So do carbon nano-tubes, nano-wire, and mono-filaments.

Some planets have nano-tube orbital lifts, other planets use skyhooks.

Quantum computers

Dark Energy (LCDM) was abandoned when MOND was discovered to be correct.

And Dark Energy was discovered to be a side-effect of Doppler shift on observations of moving galaxies.

Zero point energy and vacuum energy turned out to be nonsense.

Hawking radiation does not exist, nor do point singularities.

Gravastars turned out to be a more common fate for collapsing stars than black holes.

 

Grav Drive and Grav Plates

Grav plates and grav drive as per the Traveller canon is TL 10. Grav plates make spaceship interiors behave like Star Wars and Star Trek. There are miniature point-source graviton generators which can be ducted to warp space-time to form gravity surfaces. They do use a colossal amount of power.

Because of the grav plates, space-faring ships can not enter the atmosphere of planets,  nor land on the surface. So spaceships dock at orbiting space stations.  Air-rafts, other kinds of shuttles, space elevators and sky hooks are used to ferry passengers and cargo to and from the ground to the orbiting space station.

Drones

Drones were not around in 1977 Traveller, but they are wide-spread in this Traveller universe. There is even a dedicated skill for them.

A.I.

Like with AI in Dune (the Butlerian Jihad), the Traveller universe has had its psychotic AI problems too. So, sapient (self-aware) AIs are strictly banned. Some places will allow them up to the intelligence of a dog, but you won't get AIs like 2001's HAL9000, Avenger's Jarvis, HGttG's Marvin, Blake's Seven's Orac, or the Matrix's Architect.

Air-raft

Air-raft is a craft that can take off from the ground, reach orbital speed and go into orbit. Air-rafts can ferry cargo and passengers from the ground, between moons or between two space ships.

Air-raft is spelt with a hyphen and not as "air/raft" as per canon. Spelling air-raft with the slash is a capital crime in all cultures and creeds, and is enforced rigorously. Just like the universal restriction on grappling hooks, shoe buckles, camp-stretchers and soot.

Scanners

Visual-range is short in space terms. Visual-frequency on-board, 10m focal-length cameras can see 0.01 arcsecs. (10pt text,1mm pixel @ 20km, or ship-ID (5m pixel) @ 100,000km). Image-processing techniques can give you a five-fold resolution increase. This is the only form of silent running.

Short-range scan is used for most navigation and identification. It has a range of 1 light-minute (18 million km). 

Medium-range scan will spot any ship-size object within 1 light-hour (7.2 AUs).  Medium-range scanning radiates a lot of energy so is forbidden within a few million km of a space station or planet. Nav buoys do this. And this is how you detect jump-drive signatures.

Long-range scan scanners can see any ship in a light-month by sending out a powerful ping, but it is directional, so you can only "see" things in an 5 degree cone, and of course it is not very useful if you want to get the information back in a reasonable time (who wants the reply two months later?).

Ships Transponders

All ships have transponders. They are running all the time: a ping transmitted once per second showing ship name, origin, ship serial number, current owner. For redundancy, every ship carries three different systems:

1. Active - omni-directional one-second ping on 2.3GHz and 8.4 GHz. 
2. Passive - A quartz window that, when illuminated by a 704nm transponder laser, will transmit the normal transponder data both back down the beam and on radio (2.3GHz band). It gets its power from the beam so works when the ship has no power.
3. Writing on hull, like a QR code. Can be read at Short-range scan range. This is last resort if the ship's internals have been totally destroyed.

The transponder can not be turned off, and in fact it is an offence in all jurisdictions to switch them off; you will get shot out of the sky. 

Transponders can not be faked, but they can be changed - all three transponder systems need to be changed and the hull repainted. This is also highly illegal and can't be done in any system Tech 9 or greater because you will be spotted by diligent Space Control ("Where did that new ship come from? Ye Fairy Queene was not registered arriving in this system, nor was it built here, and we detected no arrival jump pulse".) 

Mechanics: Engineering roll to get at the Transponder. Then a Computer and Electronics roll to change it. Final Engineering roll to finish it.

Psionics

No psionics