Traveller Pirates - Hard Copy

The hard copy showed up earlier than expected. It is nice, but a little larger than the original LBBs by maybe 1/8 to 1/4". I've not measured it.

I can't say if the black is off - my copies are a few decades old. The font is close, but still there is enough of a difference that I can tell. It seems more italicized than the originals. The cover feels about the same thickness though and does have a nice feel. 

Inside, the pages are brighter of course. The pages are slicker, and the paper of course is different. The font seems a bit smaller to me compared side by side, and again, it not quite the same font. And the tables still have that not-quite-right feel to them. I feel the typesetting was more meticulous in the classic books, and people just use the electronic tools without giving them a lot of thought as it is so simple to make changes. 

Overall, though, it is a good effort at recreating the original style of the LBBs. I am saddened that it is a bit taller than the original books by a bit, but happy that there is a new classic book out there!

Is it worth it? If you love Traveller, and want the extended Pirates career, then yes. Though I think there are close variations in a Cepheus book or two (and one I've seemed to have misplaced, as well as the T5 ship deck plans. They are somewhere in here!) I'm even hoping to get my group to play Traveller gain, this time maybe as pirates. Last time they seemed too constrained and were so very leery of breaking any rules. Even though each planet has its own laws, and there are few Imperial-wide laws out there. Just no nukes is the main one I can recall. That and do not mess with trade, though that may be more a product of countless discussions I've read through and not actual Imperial edicts. 

And again thinking about Traveller software. I got what I wanted done in the Traveller world explainer, and of course, not being able to distribute it, and people naturally hesitant about downloading an installer from an unknown source, kinda put an end to that process. But I did get the World Builders book from Mongoose in PDF, and oddly the Perilous Void book as well. And I could make a web site but again, I've no idea about how to host such a thing. What I can do though is make the source code open source and people could run it locally. It would work on a Mac, Windows or Linux machine. That way they could see the source code as that is what they would be using.

The idea is to use SQLite as a backend to keep track of data, and I'd go way overboard with a similar architecture as I use at work, with repositories and all that. Anyway, thinking about it at any rate as I really like writing code, I really like Traveller, and they go hand in hand. But I'd start small: start with a system generator. You could create or open a system. It would be API-oriented, and at the moment no graphics. But in theory (!) I could also start using the TravellerMap API again and you could actually generate a subsector and plop that into the API and get that map. I know how to do that, though the details in generating the correct files would be a little tricky in some ways as it is a fixed-width file vs a nice JSON or XML file which are simple to do. But I've got that hankering again. Which would make this probably the 20th or so project that I get started on and never complete. But I am thinking about it.

For those who want to see all the incomplete projects, my GitHub repo is here. The Traveller one has several under it. Most are Windows-based but a few I started messing with web applications, and those, if written in .NET core, will run on Macs as well as PCs. Which is what I am doing for work as it will actually get deployed on a Linux box. Microsoft has changed a lot over the years....

If there is interest, let me know! I may even start this weekend as I have time for some reason - no gaming Saturday, my wife is out of town, so I may get a prototype of something. Between scaffolding and AI assistance, I am getting faster at web development finally.