Book 1 is reviewed here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
And decided to continue my overview of Traveller 5.10. And just like Benny, I do like spaceships!
Star Systems
Book 2 starts with star systems, what our starships are travelling to and from. Unlike the original Classic (though Book 6 Scouts greatly expanded it) that covers just the main world, we get an overview of distances, Oort clouds, Kuiper Belts, and some definitions for inner, outer and remote systems. To quote Douglas Adams:
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
Even a single system is immensely, mind-bogglingly huge. And of course, we start with an image of the inner system, and like a lot of programming languages, the orbits start at orbit 0 (Book 6 did the same thing, and I do wonder why they start at 0 though it is natural to me due to my software background).
Then we have charts, lots and lots of charts. Orbital distances, decimal orbits and habitable zones for the inner, outer, remote and Oort cloud and beyond systems take 2 pages apiece. It is interesting to see that some stars surfaces are way out there to Jupiter's orbit (if I am reading that chart correctly, which is not always a given as I've previously noted that a lot of T5.10 I think makes sense to Marc but he had a hard time getting it out in a way that makes sense to others). A nice chart also gives the habitable zone by stellar type, and I'll admit I've been relying on Heaven & Earth to do all that for me, based off of book 6.
We get more charts on close satellites, our moons or in rare cases, our main planet orbiting a gas giant. And 2 pages for far satellites.
No details on generating worlds (that is Book 3) but details for where they all go. Not entirely sure why it is here rather than the worlds book, but then things in these books are often placed in what I think is not the best place. It would help if there more in-situ references in the rules as to where to reference these charts, but alas, that is not the case.
Starports
We have several pages detailing starports. I have at least a couple supplements and things on starports, and I think these can and should be a lot more interesting than they usually are in play. For me, a larger starport is really a city-state, in the case of the Imperium, something that is part embassy and part a planting of the flag. The GURPS Starport book is actually a very good book, though it uses the big ship/high traffic GURPS Traveller universe so I often just divide those numbers by 10.
Not a whole lot has changed: the definitions of the class are the same, and we also have the book 6 spaceports. We do have rules now for the chance of a high port based on the class and population. And they note that an asteroid main world has a beltport rather than a starport. Something I will have to remember! And a small chart indicates that it takes 2d hours to refuel at a class A or B, and 4D at a C or D class starport. Which honestly: it should depend on the size of the tanks to fill up cross-referenced maybe with the starport type. Well, at least that is what I think!
There are, of course, some charts but it is more full of some long-needed definitions. The terminal may have the concourse, freight docks, customs and immigration, cargo market, accommodations, data terminals, message center and emergency medical. The peripheral facilities can include the SDE (starport defense establishment), auxiliary traffic control, scout and/or naval bases, the consulates, system defense field, shipyard, repair shops, transport hub and possibly some industry.
Some overview of the starport authority (also covered in the TJAS article by John Ford, which has always been one of my favorite articles), the port warden and regulation enforcement. I think an entire book (in the classic book series sense of book) could have been written for starports and included the SPA character generation. Of course, I do have at least 2 SPA character generation rules, so I feel several people have thought this over the years. And Steve Jackson Games did publish an entire book as mentioned above!
We have a listing and description of a few non-official facilities such as the Scout Lounge, the Lone Star and TAS (and the Travellers Aid Society itself could have an entire book devoted to it as well! I vaguely recall there were rumors about that at one time. And for some reason I thought Mongoose may have been considering it as well, but I may very well be misremembering).
External to the starport we have the local world or system government, interstellar government, ship owners and operators, passengers and shippers.
The last two pages cover a typical stay at a starport, the various ambiences you may have depending on world type, the special cases of the Depot (Navy usually) and Way Station (Scouts), and some notes on high volume worlds.
The last page has a typical class E port. Seems like there used to be this very same picture, but it evolved to cover the upgrades all the way to the class A port. And I also know way back when COTI had a really good thread on starports, and somewhere (!) I saved off a lot of the images of the port going from a class E to A.
Next overview post we actually start covering starships!
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