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.