Let's Read: Traveller, 1977 Edition, Starships, page 8

I'm back after a brief hiatus; hopefully, I didn't lose too many readers in the meantime. Back to the game at hand:

We continue with passenger transport as a way to make money as a starship captain. Passengers pay a pretty penny for the privilege of hopping on board; 10,000 Credits for a high passage, 8,000 for middle, and 1,000 for low. Distance to the port doesn't matter; it's just how you're traveling. The wording in this passage is a bit ambiguous; I'm not sure if I'm reading that last part correctly.

And then the next paragraph clarifies it. Distance doesn't matter, indeed. So, no matter how many jumps it takes to get to the destination, the passengers pay the same amount. Well, that sucks if you have to make multiple jumps, because it costs more than 10 grand to refuel on a bunch of jumps.

Now we get into mail; FedEx on the Final Frontier. It's actually profitable to carry mail; 25,000 Credits per ton of postal cargo. But you can only carry five tons; can't have starship captains actually making profit, now, can we? And those five tons have to be dedicated to postal service all the time; you can't put postal in there once, then grab a cargo of gold-pressed latinum in its place. Oh, and the ship has to be armed and manned to be a postal runner. I guess there are bandits and Indians on the postal trails in space, too.

Of course, private mail can be carried as well; it doesn't pay much, but it can lead to other adventures and contacts, which is never a bad thing. Private mail is usually handled clandestinely, and it might not be the captain who gets asked to carry it; any crew member might get the call. There's lots of adventure potential in that idea; secret messages carried by crew who don't even dare tell the captain what they're up to? Goody, goody...

Cargo, of any kind, is delivered in the same way it's picked up: If you loaded up in orbit, you drop off in orbit. Planetary pick-up means planetary delivery. It makes sense. And shuttles can be used to get from orbit to the surface and vice versa. These would be local shuttles, not shuttles carried on board the ship; you pay a fee to travel on them, 1% of the normal freight or passenger cost. I assume the passengers pay the shuttle fee themselves.

Well, we're moving right along, aren't we? Next up...I'm not sure until I turn the page. But I shall return, hopefully tomorrow.

On the writing front...well, the frantic pace of getting ready for a move has thrown off my writing schedule very heavily, and there is no book release in August. I am sad. And I don't know how much time I'll have to write in September, what with us still getting ready to move. But I'll keep at it as best I can. In the meantime, I still have other books you can read. For you sci-fi fans, it's Bard Conley's Adventures Through the Solar System. Check it out, and enjoy.

Phase One is Complete!

 Our house is no longer ours; we signed the offer sheet tonight, and as of the 25th of September we'll no longer be legal residents of Ontario. Off to the East Coast!

It's been an insane roller-coaster of a ride for the past month. We started seriously discussing a potential move about a week into August. We looked at some potential properties (online; we can't travel to the Maritimes until we're actually residents) and found the perfect home, half an hour from where I was born. We put in our offer, and it was accepted. So, we had to sell our own house, and fast. We brought in the real estate agent, told him what we needed to do, and he told us just how much work we would have to do to get the house ready.

We did it, in ten days. The house was nearly empty, staged like something out of a YouTube video and ready to show. When he came back to see us and take pictures of the house, his jaw dropped before he even got out of the truck; he couldn't believe we'd actually gotten it done.

So, we moved out temporarily and went camping while our house was on display for a week. It was tense for a while; we had no offers despite our agent's assurances that it was a seller's market and we could expect a bidding war. It didn't happen, but we did get a fair offer that met our needs and those of the buyer. We reviews the offers we did get tonight, and picked the best one.

Now we've got twenty-six days to sort through all the stuff we have and decide what we're going to keep and what's going to be sold or given away before we leave. Since we are back home, I've got regular internet access back, so the blogging will continue. I won't go into a lot of detail about how our preparations are going; I'll save that for when it's time for us to leave.

My wife has already informed me that this will be our last move; the stress of the past month has been almost unbearable, but we made it this far. We'll get the rest of the way as well.

Still Around, Honest

 Another brief check-in; there's no internet access where my family is staying, so there's not much opportunity to update. But, our house is up for sale and there have been several showings already; living in a seller's market is great.

I'm going to get back to the Amazing Stories reviews as well as the Traveller Let's Read once we're back home. Obviously, I'm not getting two books done this month, either; I'll be happy if I can get the time to get one done.

There isn't much else to say, though, so I'll keep it short for now. It's a whirlwind, but we're riding it. Keep reading, and have a fun remainder of the week. And if you've been checking out my books, please review them and tell your friends about them. Indie publishing is fun, but it takes longer to get the word out.

Almost There...

Another day, another pile of stuff out of the house. We're beyond making a dent in it; we've beaten it to a pulp. We've got this weekend to finish it off, and we'll get it done. This move is happening, baby!

I don't really have a lot to say tonight; I'm tired, and it's late, and I would dearly love to sleep in for a while. But that's not going to happen, since there's still more to do. In the end, the house is going to look like a million bucks. Well, maybe not that much, but quite a bit, anyway. I've had my differences with my mother-in-law, but she can definitely make a bedroom look swank. Even I was ready to fork out cash when I saw what she'd done with them.

Shout-out to my buddy's girlfriend, who came in tonight to help out with the cleaning; she and my wife got the kitchen almost finished, and there's not much left to do now. We've got until tomorrow afternoon to get the house looking good for the realtor to take pictures, then we've got until Sunday night to clean this place to within an inch of its life.

After that, we'll be camping for the week to get out of the way of the real estate agents bringing potential buyers through. So, my posting will be sporadic, at best. When I can get internet access, I'll keep going with the Traveller Let's Read, since that seems to be a popular series with my readers. Other than that, though, there won't be much opportunity for posting for the next week or so.

Feel free to read something else I've written, though; you can find lots of my books on Amazon right now. Just look me up: Glen Sprigg. There's going to be something there to get your attention, rest assured. In the meantime, have a great weekend, and keep on reading good stories.

Let's Read: Traveller, 1977 Edition, Starships, page 7

 Okay, so we’ve figured out to spend tons and tons of money on running a ship. Next up, how to make money with one so you can pay all those exorbitant bills. There are three basic commercial uses for a starship: Passengers, cargo, or mail.

We start with cargo; random rolling will determine how much cargo is available at any particular place, depending on where the cargo is bound for. Roll one die for each point of population on the destination world. The number of dice is the number of cargos going to that world; the roll per die is the weight in 5-ton increments for the shipment in question. This is important, because you can’t break a shipment into two parts if it’s too big for your ship to carry. So, if there are three thirty-ton shipments, your 85-ton cargo capacity freighter can carry two of them, but not the third.

You get paid 1000 Credits per ton of cargo carried; that ship I mentioned above can earn up to 85,000 Credits for a full load. If you want, of course, you can buy your own goods and carry them to another world, hoping to get a decent payoff.

Next up, passengers. You can carry both cargo and passengers; in fact, it’s suggested that you load up on cargo first, then passengers ‘will present themselves.’ So, if you fill it, they will come. There’s a complicated table to determine how many people actually want to take a trip across the stars with you. The higher the population, the more people will want to ride. And the population of the destination world might modify the number of passengers; people want to go to the higher population planets; the lower ones don’t get as much traffic, obviously.

This section continues on the next page, so we’ll get to that next time. I apologize for the slow posting rate, but packing takes a lot of time.

Slowly but Surely

It's amazing how much crap you can collect over the years. It's even more amazing how you can stuff most of it in a 20' x 8' x 8' steel container. Part of moving across the country is getting to play the ultimate game of 3-D Tetris. It's an exhausting process, which is why my writing has suffered; I just don't have the time to do it right now. There's still so much stuff to get out of the house, and we've only got three more days to do it. Still, it's coming along. It's keeping us busy, and my wife is now collapsing into bed every night, but it's going to be done in time.

Ironically, I'm so very, very grateful we had that flood a few months back that forced us to clean out the crawl space under the house. Sure, we lost a bunch of stuff, but we kept most of the important stuff, and what's best of all, we already sorted it all out. Some of it's going to be sold in our ultimate yard sale, but a lot of it is ready to pack up and go. So, that's a huge, huge time-saver now. God works in mysterious ways.

I almost didn't take time out to write this blog entry; I feel like I should be packing up dishes or something. But, everyone needs a break now and then, and writing, even just on a blog, is relaxing. Once we get this mess sorted out, I'll be back to writing more steadily, and I'll get at least one book done this month. It's another Cameron Vail mystery, and it's coming along nicely. It would be coming along better if I wasn't busy tearing the house apart, but you can't have everything.

So, a short entry tonight, and back to work. Keep the faith, faithful readers, and go check out my books on Amazon while you're enjoying the isolation of Coronamania.

It's a Big Job, but Somebody's Got to Do It

My family is weird. My immediate family, that is. My wife, our boys, the dogs, and me. Weird. Our family motto is 'We Don't Do Normal.' Or, in the Latin translation, 'Non Facies Normalis'. I'm going to actually make up a family crest with that motto.

Of course, having seen what passes for 'normal' in today's society, I'll not only take 'weird,' I'll embrace it with my whole heart and soul.

One of the things we're doing that qualifies as 'we don't do normal' is moving across the country in the midst of Coronamania. Instead of sheltering in place, we're packing up and moving out. And we bought the house before we even listed our own for sale. Normal people, of course, sell their house, then start looking for the one they're going to move to. But we just don't work that way. We knew what we wanted, and we found it. Of course we jumped on it with both feet!

The other thing we're doing that falls under our family motto is trying to clean up, declutter and stage a four-bedroom house, including finished basement and yard, in just over a week so we can get it up for sale and sold in time to close the deal on the house we bought. It helps that we're in a place that's a hot market; houses are going for much more than you might expect here, because they're still cheaper than what people are paying in cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Seriously, those places are insane for housing prices.

So, I get to do things way, way out of my wheelhouse. Lawn work, for example. I'm what's known as a 'sedentary' person. I come home from work exhausted that I've been on my butt all day. It's tiring work, really. Oh, sure, not as much as other people who are working outside in the hot sun, but still. I do my thing, they do theirs. They signed up for it, so they can't complain.

Except now, I'm the one who signed up for removing debris from the back yard and replacing a gutter on the roof and all that other fun stuff that goes into making a house look nice. I must be out of my mind.

But it's going to be so, so worth it when we get it done, because we're going somewhere beautiful. Close to being off the grid, too; internet isn't exactly up-to-date where we'll be. Their version of 'high-speed' doesn't quite measure up to today's standards, if you get my meaning. I'm just grateful they've moved on from dial-up.

So, I'm still going to post, but there may be days that I miss out, simply because there's so much to do. I'll plan to avoid that, of course, because daily posting is good, but life's what happens when you're busy making other plans.

Cheers, and check out my newest book, Bard Conley's Adventures Across the Solar System, available now in ebook and paperback format at an Amazon website near you.

Let's Read: Traveller, 1977 Edition, Starships, page 6

Just because I'm moving soon doesn't mean I can't continue doing this, right?

Page 6 continues the expenses involved in flying a starship. I get the feeling that the costs are going to be more than can be expected to be earned from a typical merchant voyage, which will give the players a good reason to use that ship to go adventuring and find more money somehow. Of course, even going on these adventures will cost them money, so they'll have to go find even more. It's a vicious cycle, one GMs around the world dream about every night.

We have another fuel formula, this one telling how much fuel is required per jump. The bigger the ship, the more fuel is required. Divide the mass displacement of the ship by ten, then multiply that by the jump number of the engine, and you'll know how much fuel you need. I haven't got that far yet, but I get the feeling the mass displacement numbers are going to be really high.

The example given is a 'type 200' ship, which means 200 tons. With a jump number of one, that means the ship needs 20 tons of fuel, at 500 Cr per ton, or 10,000 credits for one single jump. Yeah, that's going to get expensive in a hurry. Is a 200-ton ship big or small, though? I'm used to modern space opera like David Weber where ships are measured in the 10,000-tons for the tiny ones. So, Traveller ships are either going to be tiny, or insanely expensive to fly. Or both. And you thought fuel prices were high now.

Life Support costs 2000 credits per stateroom per voyage. Crew members' quarters count as staterooms, too. Low passage (aka suicidal) passengers cost only 100 credits per trip. And the captain has a decent chance of collecting that back anyway with the betting thing going on. Who would ever use Low Passage?! And it's one person per stateroom, regardless of how many people are in the traveling party.

Routine maintenance is next, at only 1/1000th of the ship's cost per year, so...crap, ships are going to be insanely expensive to begin with, aren't they? If it takes 40 years to pay the darn thing off, that's not encouraging. So, maintenance is going to be expensive, too. At least it's only once per year, unlike the fuel costs.

Crew salaries; you gotta pay your people to run the ship, or they'll run away. There's a cost list for the typical crew; pilots are the most expensive at 6,000 Credits, and that's per month. Medics and gunners are the cheapest, but it's still a monthly cost. Oh, and if they've got high skills in their job (more than a +1 DM on the skill), they get an additional 10% of the monthly cost per +1 over the first. It might be worth hiring onto a ship at those rates, to be honest, especially for pilots and navigators.

The last one is berthing costs, which bleeds over onto the next page. It's the cheapest expense, at only 100 Credits to land the ship; if you're there for more than six days, though, they charge an additional 100 Credits per day after that. Some places, of course, will be more expensive; the 100 Credits should be considered a low-end berthing.

And that wraps up another page of Traveller. Stick around; there's more to come.

Time to Move On

Well, that was fast. I haven't been posting much lately because our family's been prepping for something big, which meant less blogging time available. Now that our families all know what's going on, though, we're ready to announce that we'll be leaving Ontario for greener pastures at the end of next month. Nice birthday present: A new house far, far away in the Maritimes.

It's funny; for more than thirty years I've wanted to move to the United States, because I believed there would be better opportunities for my children there than there are in Canada. And, for the most part, that's true, although the political climate down there at the moment is more than toxic; it's deadly. Saying the wrong thing can get you ruined, and your family in hot water. Not to mention, the red tape of getting across the border in COVID-mania would be virtually impossible to cut through.

But the nice thing about the Maritimes is that while their economies aren't as robust as, say, Alberta's might be, they're quiet. And quiet sounds like a great idea right about now. I'm looking forward to some peace and quiet, far away from the craziness that's infecting the rest of the continent. I've been active on several political discussion boards over the years, and my opinions are quite well known to those who know me. But I'm tired of the same old song and dance that never ends. I'm going to be putting that part of my life behind me, and moving on to something new.

I'm still going to write, of course; in fact, I expect I'll have more opportunity to really lose myself in the writing, since there's going to be a lot less hustle and bustle around us. And I can publish my books from anywhere; the internet is always helpful in that regard. And, since I've been busy collecting old, family-friendly multimedia files from the Internet Archive and elsewhere, we'll have plenty of entertainment to occupy us when we need it.

Moving isn't as big a deal for me as it is for my wife; as I mentioned last week, I've moved a lot in my life, whereas she's spent the vast majority of her life in the same town. So, she's going to have quite the adjustment period, and she's quite emotional about it. This was her first home purchase, so there are a lot of deep ties in this house. It's not going to be easy, but she's most definitely excited about the move. The new house is exactly what she wants, with land for a hobby farm far from the crowds.

So, we've got a lot of work to do to get this house ready for sale. I'm still going to post when I can, but it might be a bit sporadic for a couple of weeks. We'll see how it goes.

Of course, if you want to hear from me in the meantime, check me out on Amazon, where you can find no fewer than ten of my books online, all of them in ebook format and three of them in paperback. I'm sure you'll find something enjoyable in all of that.

Let's Read: Traveller, 1977 Edition, Starships, page 5

 Alright, so now we know all the things that can go wrong when you’re flying a spaceship. Now we can find out how to actually get the spaceship, assuming your character didn’t get one mustering out of the Scouts or Merchants. And so, we now come to a brief economics lesson via the far future.

Purchasing a starship starts with a down payment of 20%. Well, that’s pretty extreme, depending on how much the ship costs in the first place. I doubt it’s going to be something you can afford on your mustering-out benefits, no matter how good your rolls were. And, over time, you’re going to pay more than double the cost of the ship in interest payments over a 40-year period. That’s a lot of time for a mortgage. Hopefully there’s anti-aging technology so you can enjoy the ship before your funeral in space.

Oh, and you get to submit a payment plan before you buy, as in explain to the lender exactly how you’re going to spend your time over the next forty years earning money to pay them back. Oh, joy. Traveller meets actuarial tables.

The nice thing is that the government might subsidize you if it’s a really big ship. A type 600 hull or better qualifies, although I don’t know what that number means yet. Still, these subsidized merchants are running predetermined routes, so it’s basically a job where you’re working for the local government as their own personal cargo ship captain. You still have to pay 20% down, but the rest of the payments are taken care of by the government in exchange for 50% of whatever you earn. Well, that’s not a terrible deal, I suppose, although you’re still responsible for all expenses and costs involved in running the ship. So, you’re screwed either way.

Even better, as a subsidized ship, you’re at their beck-and-call if they need you to serve as auxiliary military, maybe as a transport or cargo ship. But if you survive for forty years you get the ship. You’ll be eating your meals through a straw and wearing hi-tech Depends, but at least you’ll have a ship of your own to do it in.

So, what are these aforementioned operating expenses? There are five of them, although only one of them is mentioned on this page: Fuel. It’s not that expensive compared to some of the weapons you can buy; 500 credits per ton for the good stuff, or 100 for the cheap, unrefined stuff (which can also be sucked up for free from the local gas giant. There’s a name for a Traveller fueling station: The Local Gas Giant. It’s an unrefined place.

Okay, you need a power plant to use that fuel, and there’s a formula for how much fuel you’ll need: 10Pn, where Pn is the power plant size rating, which will be explained in more detail on a later page, I hope. The amount is in tons, so if you have a power plant with a rating of six, you’ll need 60 tons of fuel, costing 30,000 Cr. Alright, that’s a bit pricey. Fully fueled, though, the power plant will allow you to maneuver in combat even as you’re heading out to the nearest jump point.

Tomorrow, more expenses. In the meantime, though, check out my science-fiction debut, Bard Conley's Adventures Across the Solar System, available on Amazon right now in both e-book and paperback formats.

Let's Read: Traveller, 1977 Edition, Starships, page 4

Well, we have a few other inconveniences on this page. Contaminated fuel, lack of maintenance, drive failure, and misjumps. Yes, those would all be bad. Some of them would appear to be linked, too.

Contaminated fuel means unrefined fuel, ‘often forced by circumstance,’ which suggests that sometimes you have to use whatever’s available, and it might suck. ‘and about as often the result of false economy by a captain,’ which means cheaping out on the costs and hoping you get away with it. Either way, using unrefined fuel means you’ve got a 1-in-12 chance of your drive failing while you’re using it, which would definitely be bad. Oh, and every time you jump without cleaning the drive, your odds of failure go up by a DM of +1. So, eventually it’s going to blow your engine.

Oh, that’s interesting: Unrefined fuel can be picked up by simply skimming a gas giant. The good stuff can only be gotten from a starport, though. So, systems with gas giants become more useful than others, even if it means you’ve got a chance of your ship’s engines dying in the middle of nowhere.

Lack of maintenance is next. It’s simplified to an annual thing, but if you don’t do it, your drive might fail. And then we get a description of what happens when the drive actually fails: All three sections are affected, those being maneuver, jump, and power plant. They can be jury-rigged in an emergency, needing a high roll to succeed, but once you get to the starport, the dockworkers can handle the rest. So, you could be stranded for a while if you don’t have a trained engineer on board. Actually, considering the penalties for not having a skill, having no engineer on board when your engine blows means you’re effectively dead, because you can’t fix it, and no one’s likely to ever find you again. Moral of the story: Have an engineer on board.

Misjumping is next, and it’s described as ‘the most interesting event which can occur’. There are three reasons for a misjump; two are described above. The third is when you jump too close to a planet or star (100 diameters, remember?), and a misjump means you’re going in a random direction and for a random distance.

Those are some nasty modifiers, too; in fact, you can misjump even without those earlier factors, but it’s reasonably rare: 12+ on the throw. If you’re too close to a star, it’s a +5 DM, bad fuel is a +3, and lack of maintenance is a +2. So, if you’ve got all three factors going, you’re automatically getting a misjump no matter what you roll. If you’re using refined fuel, though, there’s a -1 DM, so assuming you’re far enough away from the nearest heavenly body and your ship is full of shiny new parts, you’ll never misjump.

If you do misump, you’re going in a random direction; roll a d6 to figure out what direction. You also roll a die to find out how many dice to roll to calculate your jump distance. So it’s possible that your misjump could actually take you as many as 36 hexes away. Good luck getting home after that.

And of course, all of these things can happen to starships owned by PCs as well the ones they are just hitching a ride on.

Let's Read: Traveller, 1977 Edition, Starships, page 3

On to page 3. The Traveller’s Aid Society gets another mention, then we move into some of the fun things that can happen during space travel, such as hijacking, piracy, accidents, and misjumps. We are assured that space travelers are always worried about these things. Okay, then.

Hijacking is done for fun and profit; starships can be useful anywhere in the galaxy, so there will always be lazy and bad people who want what someone else has built. Therefore, starships will generally have protections against such people, including anti-hijacking programs, personality profile scanners, armed guards, etc. And if you’re on someone else’s ship, hand over your weapons.

That still doesn’t stop the hijackers, of course; there’s always going to be somebody who thinks they can beat the system and take the really expensive ship over. In fact, there’s a 1-in-216 chance that someone will do that every time you board a ship; roll an 18 on 3D and there’s a hijacking attempt.

In that case, you get to create a hijacking party and figure out how they’re going to do it. I would imagine it would be a lot easier to roll up a potential hijacking party and have them ready to go on the chance that you do roll triple-sixes. Planning ahead is a good thing. If you do it right, you can run your own little Die Hard scenario on board, too. Those are always fun.

Next up is ‘skipping,’ which means not bother to make your monthly payments on the starship that you definitely don’t own outright. And that happens more often than hijacking, apparently; roll a 12 on 2D, or 1 in 36 odds. And best of all, the person stealing the ship is already flying it, which makes it more difficult to stop them.

Of course, if someone does skip out, they’re going to have collection agencies after them. And these ones don’t stop at nasty phone calls; heavy artillery will be available to them if necessary. That should spice things up. Hey, there’s an easy adventure idea: Hunt down the guy who stiffed your boss on seven million credits in owed payments and bring back the ship. Maybe you’ll get to take over the payments yourself; wouldn’t that be special? There are rules and modifiers included for determining if someone is going to repossess on any particular world, too; the farther away you get from the real owner, the more likely it is that you’ll get away with it.

Next up, piracy. We just get a brief discussion of that; everyone knows what pirates are, but it also includes customs agents and blockades as similar scenarios. More details will come later in the book. I can’t wait.

And of course, accidents happen in space. No details are given yet; maybe on the next page.

If you're enjoying this Let's Read, don't forget to check out my first science fiction anthology, Bard Conley's Adventures Across the Solar System, available now on Amazon in both ebook and paperback formats.

Mini-Break

 I haven't posted frequently lately because my family's been on a short vacation, and I'm a little under the weather. It's not COVID; it's just a cold. No temperature spikes, no dry cough. It happens pretty much every year around this time, so it's not like it was unexpected. I hope it's gone by Sunday, though; I don't plan on missing work.

I said 'mini-vacation' because our plans for a bigger vacation have been put on hold thanks to the COVID panic. In particular, we were hoping to take a trip out east to Prince Edward Island, where I was born. Unfortunately, that's not an option at the moment; nobody outside of Atlantic Canada is allowed to enter any of those provinces yet. So much for a free country.

I haven't been back to Atlantic Canada for decades, except for a summer a few years back when I worked there. Other than that, it's been over forty years since I set foot in either New Brunswick or PEI, and I've never been to Newfoundland in my life. I'd like to go back and see them, if only to reminisce about some of the fond memories I have.

I find there are two kinds of people: Those whose parents served in the military, and those who didn't. Those who didn't often spend their entire lives, or at least their formative years, in one place, even one house. They grow up sleeping in the same bedroom their cribs were in, they have the same group of friends from kindergarten through high school, and they are as much a part of the community as their parents.

For us military brats, it's a bit different. I attended four elementary schools and four high schools because of moving all over the place. I lived in eight different cities or towns before I graduated high school. Some of that was after Dad retired from the military, but we were used to moving every couple of years anyway, so when he switched to another company, we just packed up and moved again.

In the military families, your friends were transient; your best friend in second grade might be living on the other side of the country in third. Just when you thought you had a good feel for the town you were living in, you were hustled off to another province because Dad got transferred. I didn't live in one place for more than four years until I was a father myself. So, it's been weird to live in this same house with my wife and realize that my twelve-year-old son has never lived anywhere else.

It's an interesting perspective, and one I still struggle to understand. I'm a tumbleweed by nature; my wife is a small-town girl who's happy to remain so. I've always felt the pull of adventure, exploring a new place and meeting new kids. She's always wanted that sense of security, that stability that I just never had growing up. It's a unique sort of personality clash, but we make it work.

So, here's hoping that the governments of Canada finally get over the COVID panic and let us be Canadians again, instead of Ontarians, or Westerners, or Atlanteans or Quebecois. The sooner that happens, the sooner we can get our lives back to normal.

Let's Read: Traveller, 1977 Edition, Starships, page 2

On to page 2. Interplanetary travel is mentioned again as being infrequent, but possible with small ships (boats, cutters, pinnaces, etc.). Interplanetary trips have to be charted, and the price is set by the ship’s owner (who might be a PC).

Interstellar travel, however, is less flexible. We get High and Low Passage again, but there are two other kinds mentioned on the page: Middle and Working Passage. High Passage is your typical first-class travel, and it’s pricy at 10,000 CR. You can bring up to a ton of stuff with you (no word on whether that includes weapons), and it’s basically a cruise ship idea.

Middle Passage is coach, or close enough. It’s still pricy at 8,000 CR, but you don’t get nearly as much value for your money. For some reason, that extra 2,000 CR really makes a difference. Maybe the 8,000 is just the bare minimum to keep the ship flying. You also get a baggage allowance of only 100 kg, and you might get bumped, as per today’s airlines, if someone more important than you (i.e., someone who pays more) shows up and takes your spot. Some things never change.

Working Passage is just what it says: You can hire on as a ship’s worker for a short term to get from System A to System B. But if you stick around for more than three jumps, you’re treated as being a hired worker with standard salary, whatever that may be. Obviously, you have to be useful to get this option; if you’re training is in gunnery, don’t expect to get the navigator position to work your passage. Oh, and you also get to bring a ton of stuff with you, so it’s like High Passage, without the cost. Or the entertainment.

Finally, there’s Low Passage. Again, I would never, ever use this. Seriously, it sucks. You’re in suspended animation, and while it’s cheap and you don’t age or otherwise interact with time, there’s a chance that you’re not coming out of it. And it’s not a tiny chance; it’s a roll of 5 or better to survive, unless there’s a well-trained medic present (skill level 2 or more), which makes it 4 or better. If you’ve got low endurance, you’re at -1 to your roll. Quite bluntly, that is Russian roulette with a laser pistol.

Oh, it gets better: If you die, there’s no refund, and your heirs can’t sue the transport for your death. Basically, you know what you’re getting into. And just in case you don’t, the last paragraph on this page makes it clear: It is actually customary, as in normal behavior, for the captain to have a betting pool as to how many Low Passage passengers are going to come out alive. And it’s the Low Passage passengers who are making the bets! And best of all, if you guess right about how many survivors there are, but you’re not one of them, the captain gets to keep the money himself. Isn’t that special?

Seriously, why in the hell would anyone EVER use Low Passage unless they were beyond desperate? It’s insane. I’m not familiar with the Traveller source material, but this has got to have come out of some sci-fi book from the 1950s or 1960s.

Alright, that wraps it up for this page. If you are a sci-fi fan (and if you’re not, why are you reading this?), please check out my new sci-fi book, Bard Conley’s Adventures Across the Solar System, available now on Amazon in both ebook and paperback format. It’s action, adventure, and fun, and best of all, there’s no Low Passage anywhere in the book.

The Muppet Movie (1979) Review

Yeah, this one's a classic by any standard. If you haven't seen it yet, you are definitely missing out. I remember seeing it when I was a kid; it might have been in the theaters, but maybe not; I was in northern Quebec at the time, so we didn't go to the movies very often. I didn't even see The Empire Strikes Back in theaters; I was a deprived child.

So, this movie gives us Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Rolf, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker, and the rest of the cast of characters that gave us so much entertainment for decades. The Muppet Show was must-see television for kids and adults; we loved the puppets, the adults loved the sly humor that went right over our young heads. Watching old episodes now, I get a lot of the stuff I missed, while still enjoying the stuff from my youth.

But what's it about? Well, Kermit's a swamp-dwelling frog who happens to play the guitar and sing (no, seriously, he plays the guitar in this movie. He also rides a bicycle. Not bad for a green felt Muppet). He's discovered by a talent scout lost in the swamp and is persuaded to take his act to Hollywood. On the way, he meets Fozzie, Piggy, and the rest of the band, and they eventually make it to Los Angeles despite the efforts of the nefarious Doc Hopper, who sees in Kermit the perfect spokesman for his French-fried frog legs' restaurants. And he doesn't care if Kermit's legs are still attached to his body or not. He's not a nice dude.

There are cameos galore, as there are in every Muppet movie. Except A Muppet Christmas Carol, which didn't have many cameos, at least not from humans. But this one started them all, with appearances from Dom DeLuise, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, James Coburn, Elliot Gould, Bob Hope, Madeline Kahn, Carol Kane, Cloris Leachman, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Telly Savalas, Orson Welles, and Paul Williams. Seriously, that's a Who's Who of comedians and entertainers from the 1940s to the 1970s. The Muppets were BIG back then, folks. Way more than they are now. The recent iterations of the Muppets have proven to be quite lackluster compared to the originals, and this movie makes that crystal clear.

This movie even got nominated for two Oscars, back when the Oscars meant something. They were both for music; the score and the hit song, The Rainbow Connection. Yes, it was a hit song, reaching number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November, 1979. I told you, the Muppets were a big deal.

So, needless to say, you have to watch this movie. Seriously. Go find a copy and watch it. Even if you've seen it before, watch it again. I don't care if you watched it last night, watch it again; you probably missed something, because the movie is chock-full of subtle humor that can fly right by you. You won't regret it.

Let's Read: Traveller, 1977 Edition, Starships, page 1

Alright, now that I’ve released my first science-fiction book, I’m going to celebrate by diving into the second Traveller book, Starships. This is the first time I’ve ever even opened this book, so it should be an enlightening experience.

So, we begin on page one, which is an excellent place to start. The first paragraph informs the reader that this book deals not only with the design and construction of the starships themselves, but interplanetary and interstellar travel as well. Excellent.

And we start with the travel. We get a helpful chart of how long it takes to travel interplanetary distances. And those times are pretty slow by what we today would consider ‘typical’ travel times for those distances. 45 minutes to travel 10,000 miles? Ah, but it’s less than two-and-a-half hours to go 100,000 miles, or ten times the distance. Hmmm…time for some quick math.

Or not, because there’s a travel formula in big bold type on the same page. T (the time, measured in ten-minute chunks) is equal to twice the square root of the distance (in 1,000-mile increments) divided by the acceleration used. Or, T=2√(d/a). So, the ‘typical’ travel times aren’t necessarily going to actually be typical, are they? After all, acceleration isn’t always going to be the same. Unless you’re running a passenger liner company, and the travel times are set to a specific acceleration.

The assumed acceleration given is 1G, which makes sense if there’s no gravity technology available to keep people stable regardless of the acceleration achieved. 1G is going to be pretty slow, but it will work. For interplanetary travel, that is. And in that case, even a trip of one billion miles is going to take a little less than 10 days.

Still, since I’m the kind of person who likes to check the math, I ran the travel formula for a 10,000-mile trip. According to the formula, that’s T=2√(10/1), which works out to 6.32, or 63 minutes, not 45 as the table says. In fact, to do that trip in 45 minutes would require an acceleration of 2Gs.

Alright, that’s not important right now. What is important is that the paragraph introducing Interplanetary Travel states that since most stellar systems only have one major world, interplanetary travel doesn’t happen very often. Well, that’s not so much fun. Of course, there’s plenty of opportunity in the word ‘most,’ isn’t there? ‘Most’ doesn’t mean ‘all.’ So, there can (and should) be systems where there are multiple worlds of interest for PCs to adventure. Rival governments, a greener world enslaved by a desert one…lots of opportunities to bring interstellar travel in. Besides, if they mentioned it, then it should be used, at least sometimes.

So, on to interstellar travel, which introduces the ‘jump drive.’ There’s a space limit on jump drives, as in you have to be a certain distance away from a planet to use it. 100 planetary diameters from the nearest world, in fact. So, if you’re near Earth, you have to be 100 times 8,000 miles, or 8,000,000 miles away. That puts you well away from the Moon, but nowhere near Mars or Venus, which never get closer than 25,000,000 miles for Venus, and more than twice that for Mars.

What? I took astronomy in college. It was a cool course.

Anyway, the distance between systems in measured in jumps, between one and six. And the jump drive on the ship determines how far it can jump at once. So, if you’ve got a jump-drive with a strength of one, you’re not going to get very far, especially if you’re in a sparsely-populated part of the galaxy. And it takes about a week to make a jump, not including the twenty or so hours it takes to get far enough away from the planet to actually do the jump.

Commercial starships are good for about two trips a month. This includes five or six days in port on each trip for recreation, which in game terms means adventuring, of course. Oh, and loading cargo and passengers, sure. But adventure is the real point, isn’t it?

Alright, that will finish this first page; so far, I like what I see, even though the basic assumptions don’t really work in terms of travel times. But that’s a minor point anyway. Let’s see what the next page brings.

Here it is!

That was fast! Available right now at an Amazon site near you, it's Bard Conley's Adventures Across the Solar System! It's 366 pages of science fiction action and excitement in a pulp style. Click on the cover image to go directly to the site. Here's an excerpt for you to chew on.

“I’m approaching the target,” said Conley.

“Confirmed,” said Titania in a clipped voice. “Start being careful, Bard.”

“I’m always careful.” Her answering snort was eloquent. Conley stopped before the designated ore. “Time to gets your attention,” he muttered. “Stand by for cryonic deployment.”

“You’re a go, Sarge,” confirmed Liam.

Timing was crucial; he needed to cool the ore enough to draw the creature’s attention, but still keep enough cryonic fluid to stop the creature once it arrived. His suit’s cryo-deployment was minimal, only for the most dire of emergencies.

“Ten-second burst at twenty-five percent capacity,” he reported.

“Timer ready,” replied Titania.

“Activating.” He pointed the metallic hose at the featureless ore, spraying it with a strong dose of the cryonic fluid. The hot metal hissed and sparked as the cryonics played over it, and for a moment there was a patina of frost covering the expanse of wall. The natural heat of Mercury returned, only a moment later, however, and the frost disappeared. Within thirty seconds, the wall’s temperature was back to its normal levels.

“Knock, knock,” muttered Conley. Nothing happened.

“That’s one minute,” reported Titania. “Still no contact.”

“Another ten-second burst, forty percent capacity,” said Conley.

“Be careful,” warned Titania. “You won’t have enough left if you do it three times.”

“Then we’ll have to hope it takes the bait this time. Activating on your mark.”

“Stand by…Mark!”

Conley sprayed the wall again, opening the hose a little wider. The spray coated the wall again, freezing it faster. He heard a beep in his helmet, and shut off the spray to admire his handiwork.

“Temperature rising again,” reported Titania. “Five hundred Kelvin...Eight hundred Kelvin...One thousand Kelvin...HOLY—SIX THOUSAND KELVIN!” she shouted. “Power up your resistors now!”

Conley mashed his thumb and ring fingers together and felt he hum of the suit’s built-in cryonic field. The improved version would last him at least five minutes, based on the readings received from Titania’s encounter with the creature.

But that had been only four thousand degrees Kelvin.

Even as he activated the suit’s heat resistors, he saw the white-hot glow of the heat-creature emerge from the wall he had been spraying. Despite the tremendous bulk of the cryonic tank, Conley dodged to the side as the creature lunged at him. Slowed by the tank, he nevertheless avoided being engulfed by the monster. He stumbled over an iron protrusion in the floor, but kept his feet even as the creature attacked again.

Conley felt the suit’s hum of power as the creature poured its heat into the suit’s cryogenic system. The temperature was already rising dangerously high, and he knew that he wouldn’t have nearly as much time as they had anticipated.

“Get out of there!” shouted Titania, but it was too late; the creature had engulfed him. Despite the suit’s heat resistors, he was already starting to sweat.

He tried to bring the nozzle of the cryo sprayer to bear, but the creature extended an energy appendage and melted the hose, sealing it up and keeping the coolant inside the tank.

Check it out and tell your friends. Science fiction action and adventure await!