The Implications of Jump Drive

 The Jump Drive is the technology in Traveller that allows for FTL travel. We play Traveller, We know this. But have you thought about what that means?

The Jump Drive moves the PCs from hex to hex, yes. But how?  You look at the jump rating, which is a cross-reference of the size of the ship and the letter code, A to Z, of the drive. These give us the ratings from 1 to 6. Still telling you things you already know.

The point is this: a jump drive is not rated by how fast it can go. Any jump “takes about one week” (TTB, p. 49) whether you have a tiny type-A in your Free Trader or a mammoth type-Z in your super-cargo freighter. 

A jump drive rating tells you how far it can go in that one week. A jump-2 drive is not twice as fast  as a jump-1 drive; it has twice the range of the jump-1 drive.

There is no real-world comparison for this distinction. We rate vehicles, from bicycles to Blackbirds in rate of distance per unit of time. Faster vehicles cover the distance in less time. Not so in Traveller. A jump-1 drive takes as long as a jump-6 drive to do a one-hex transit. End of story. 

The difference is of vital importance to Travellers. Why? Because of a hard-wired fact of the Traveller setting, whether the 3^rd Imperium or my own Church and Empire setting. Information, in order to propagate, must be carried. In ships, that all take a week to jump. 

From Supp 8, Library Data: Another central fact of interstellar travel is that no method of information transfer faster than jump drive transmission has been discovered. Ships can carry messages, but radio still lags at mere light speed. Communication is always restricted to the speed of interstellar transportation.

The distances between worlds is a fixed and unchanging quantity. If you want information about a world 6 hexes away, how long will it take for that information to reach you? Answer: either six weeks, or one. If you get your information delivered express, you get to act a month and a half before the other guy does, who’s waiting on a jump-1 courier to bring it.

The same goes when Travellers decide to, well, travel. A ship with Jump-4 can get a Traveller from Holtzmann to Stavanger in one week. A Jump-2 ship will take 3 weeks to make the same trip. Look at the map to figure out why. If your PC and his competition have a goal to reach on Stavanger, what is the essential play?  Securing the ship with long enough legs to get you there in one week.

Add to that this complication. Not all planets have the same access to the information delivery network. TTB page 89 says: 

Within the subsector, local governments will have established communications or trade routes connecting some (but not all) worlds.

AND

Communications routes should be carefully drawn so as to avoid making all parts of the subsector accessible; a subsector should reserve some areas as backwaters for exploration and adventure.

Depending on where you are, it may take even longer for the Big News to reach you.

The Traveller who wants to do big things and make a name for himself needs information, and needs it faster than his competition. Knowledge is Power. The Jump drive is the key to that power. 

Image credit: Pixabay

World Mapping

I enjoy making maps, and have made Traveller world maps for years, for many worlds of my TU. But within the game universe, how do the characters and governments make these maps?  I think the common answer to that question is by using survey/scout ships and orbiting satellites. I have read recently a few things about real-world satellites and their capabilities that prod me to consider them in more detail for gaming.

It is simply impractical to park a Donosev survey ship and its crew in orbit around a planet for a few years while it does the surveying. Unmanned satellites are the more economical and reasonable option. However, sat surveys have limitations too. At high altitudes, a sat with optical or visible light cameras can see a lot, but not in any useful detail. The standard Traveller world map is a good representation of the problem.

Look at the map of Earth as presented in the game Invasion:Earth. The area of the continental United States is covered in four hexes. Three thousand miles in four hexes?  Each hex is 713 miles in width. There is, for all practical purposes, NO detail of the surface available from that map. Even the hex that represents the Rocky Mountains is so vague as to be almost useless. Humans don’t live and act at that scale. The continental US has almost every type of terrain found on this planet, from swamps to river deltas to deserts to mountains, foothills and coastal plains. None of that is depicted on the I:E map.

See what I mean about lack of detail? Can you tell where the Appalachian mountains are from this photo?

That is the kind of representation that a high orbital satellite provides. It’s quick and easy to do but provides the most meager information.

The reverse is true as well. A camera sat might focus on a single square kilometer, or 10 meter square of the surface, and produce a very detailed image. But only for that one square. What is adjacent to it?  What terrain must be crossed to get to it? How long did the sat take to find that one spot – a week, a month, years?  Satellites orbit, and for this reason, are able to look at any one spot for a limited time each time it goes around. Maybe not much changes from one orbit to the next, but maybe something does.

Shaking Up my Traveller Universe

One of the more enjoyable aspects of creating your own Traveller Universe is that you can change it if you want.

Back in 1997, when I first began to sketch out the map that would become my TU, I left everything to the roll of the dice. Book 3 showed me the procedure, and I followed it verbatim. All the star nations that inhabit my TU do so because they were adjoining one another on the map as I rolled for the presence of systems.

Was that wrong? No, I do not believe that it was wrong. But it was short on imagination. I had missed out on one of the more important rules – as the Referee I had final say in how my TU took shape.

Looking Back to the Beginning, Heading for the Future

Here's a scan of my original map, about six subsectors worth, on a sheet of graph paper. Compare this with the map of my TU now, and you can see it still lines up. I had forgotten that what is now the Talaveran Empire, and my most developed star nation, I first called the Star Kingdom of Adair.

You'll have to blow it up to see much of anything. Sorry.

Before long I began color-coding the planets, and the various star nations took shape. 

How to Create Striker Battle Maps

Op orders will be distributed from Company HQ at 1730 hours.

 I have really enjoyed digging into Striker. The hard part about Striker, though, is all of the prep work that has to be done - there's no example map, or troop sheets and only a handful of example vehicles. However, if you're willing to sink the effort into creating units, vehicles, and maps, Striker is ginormous fun.

I hope that these suggestions take some of the labor out of the mapping part.