Holy, it's been a week since I posted anything. Time flies when your life gets crazy. Still, you're here to read about Traveller, right? I did a post recapping the first book, Characters and Combat, so I'm going to do the same with the second book today. Bear in mind, this is the original version from 1977, not the revised book from 1981, or any of the later editions of Traveller.
So, the first thing I noticed about starships in \Traveller is that they are...small. You can recreate the Millennium Falcon with some work, but forget the Starship Enterprise, let alone a Star Destroyer. Capital ships are outside the scope of these rules. You could do an Enterprise shuttlecraft, but not the ship itself.
So, this lends well to a small-group style of play, such as a single ship's crew and their adventures across the galaxy. And, if you treat the Death Star as a planet, you can get away with recreating a good chunk of Star Wars, at least the original movie. I haven't gone looking, but I would be completely shocked to find that no one has recreated any of the iconic Star Wars ships for Traveller.
Math in Starships isn't an exact science; there's a good chunk of handwaving and WAGs to keep the game running smoothly. And while I'm sure there are people who would enjoy a game where distances and ranges were calculated with scientific accuracy, I doubt any of them live near me. Because I'm the type who does like that stuff. But most players don't.
I'm still creeped out by the passenger coffins (low passage berths) that come complete with a death lottery. That's just...wrong. Where the heck did they get this from, anyway? In fact, I'm not sure what's worse: The lottery itself, or the fact that there are always going to be people whose lives on any given world suck enough that they're willing to pay a full thousand credits for the privilege of participating in this lottery just to get off the stinking mudball.
The rules allow for a custom-built ship that weighs 5,000 tons. Unfortunately, the resulting ship is going to be as slow as a beached whale, with its top performance engine running at a maximum jump (or maneuverability) of 2. And while it's theoretically and legally permitted to put a Z-drive into a 1000-ton ship, the engine compartment isn't big enough to hold a jump drive that size and still have room for a power plant or a maneuvering drive. The math just doesn't work. Which means custom hulls will be the way to go.
The most dated piece of technology in the book is, of course, the computer. Now, I understand that in 1977 computer technology wasn't anything remotely close to what we have today. In fact, people back then couldn't even visualize what we would have today; Star Trek thought flip phones and tablets were a 23rd-century dream. But the computers of Traveller are just so antiquated compared to something as simple as a cell phone, or a iPod. Ten to twenty minutes to switch out programs? We've got hard drives today that can hold petabytes of data, but these computers can only hold a dozen or so programs in memory at a time.
As for starship combat, it is, of necessity, an abstract exercise for the most part. Every planet is going to have its unique facets, which will affect starship combat. I do like how the system takes planetary gravity into account, and if you're not careful where you aim the ship, you might end up caught in the gravity well and sucked in.
The last two sections of the rules are the ones that don't really fit in well with starship rules; they should have gone into the first book (especially the Experience rules). But, they are here. Drugs are the usual collection of pharmacological wonders that do weird things to bodies; some of them are psionic-related, whose impact will be seen in the last book.
Experience doesn't really give you much to work with; basically, the character you start with is the character you get for the rest of the game (until they die horribly, of course). It's very, very difficult to improve your skills in this game, to the point of it not being worth the effort. What you roll is what you get.
And that's a quick overview of the second book. I get the sense that, while the game obviously wasn't influenced by Star Wars (it came out shortly after the game was published), the movie certainly would have given players some very effective material to work with. Small ships, a mix of professions and abilities, from the hard-bitten, experienced Han Solo to the wise and weary Jedi Obi-Wan, to the young farm boy and princess just getting started on their journeys of adventure.
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