This is an example of the kind of thought I get all the time, that prevents me from making a new Traveller campaign:
Start out with real-world fact: a .50 caliber sniper rifle can be manufactured very easily by an apprentice machinist. A college chemistry student could make the necessary propellant. In the U.S., range for .50 cal sniper rifles has been estimated at 2 km and they were getting popular among the shooting community until BATF made some questionable extensions of its authority.
Now, in Traveller terms, this means that one would need a machine shop, some steel, a few chemicals (which might be tightly regulated, as nitric acid is in the real-life U.S.) and a person with skills on the order of Mechanical-1, Chemistry-1. After less than a week of work, one has produced a .50 caliber rifle. Market value might be considerable, especially if local law enforcement does not shut you down immediately.
But why stop there?
Why not consider how relatively easy it might be to manufacture RPGs?
This is the point where I stop and tell myself, "But Marc Miller never imagined that players would think of creating their own arms. He would crack down on such behavior. Gunsmithing would have to be illegal, in order to preserve scarcity..."
But the major reward system in Traveller is money. So if the party has a good mix of manufacturing skills and takes some machine tools to a frontier outpost, they could conceivably start an arms factory. Depending on the campaign, this might be a starship with a sizeable factory onboard that manufactures arms and sells them in the systems that it visits.
That in itself might not wreck the whole Imperium, but it's typical of small loopholes that I don't think were foreseen -- simply because they are based on real-life politics rather than space opera. (Also, this may be an unfair criticism, but I think Miller's military background made him always think of being authorized and supplied by a state, rather than establishing a homestead.)
I've said before that if I were to update Traveller it wouldn't have a recognizable Imperium when I was done.
However, even if the material-goods scarcity is taken out by having the party be economically self-sufficient, one could still have a very different basis of adventure -- one could do frontier adventures without an Imperium. Call it "Little Pressure Dome on the Asteroid" or "Wagon-train-starship" or "Have Machine Shop, Will Travel." Basically the campaign motivation would be to portray the virtues of the American frontier before the state got fattened on income tax and socialism.
If you're fond of Ayn Rand, you could have a large buffered asteroid hull -- large enough to have a small village of capitalists. Call it "Galt's Gulch in Hyperspace." The real-world libertarians have fantasies of voluntary states where taxes are basically rent paid to the state, which is a landlord.
Start out with real-world fact: a .50 caliber sniper rifle can be manufactured very easily by an apprentice machinist. A college chemistry student could make the necessary propellant. In the U.S., range for .50 cal sniper rifles has been estimated at 2 km and they were getting popular among the shooting community until BATF made some questionable extensions of its authority.
Now, in Traveller terms, this means that one would need a machine shop, some steel, a few chemicals (which might be tightly regulated, as nitric acid is in the real-life U.S.) and a person with skills on the order of Mechanical-1, Chemistry-1. After less than a week of work, one has produced a .50 caliber rifle. Market value might be considerable, especially if local law enforcement does not shut you down immediately.
But why stop there?
Why not consider how relatively easy it might be to manufacture RPGs?
This is the point where I stop and tell myself, "But Marc Miller never imagined that players would think of creating their own arms. He would crack down on such behavior. Gunsmithing would have to be illegal, in order to preserve scarcity..."
But the major reward system in Traveller is money. So if the party has a good mix of manufacturing skills and takes some machine tools to a frontier outpost, they could conceivably start an arms factory. Depending on the campaign, this might be a starship with a sizeable factory onboard that manufactures arms and sells them in the systems that it visits.
That in itself might not wreck the whole Imperium, but it's typical of small loopholes that I don't think were foreseen -- simply because they are based on real-life politics rather than space opera. (Also, this may be an unfair criticism, but I think Miller's military background made him always think of being authorized and supplied by a state, rather than establishing a homestead.)
I've said before that if I were to update Traveller it wouldn't have a recognizable Imperium when I was done.
However, even if the material-goods scarcity is taken out by having the party be economically self-sufficient, one could still have a very different basis of adventure -- one could do frontier adventures without an Imperium. Call it "Little Pressure Dome on the Asteroid" or "Wagon-train-starship" or "Have Machine Shop, Will Travel." Basically the campaign motivation would be to portray the virtues of the American frontier before the state got fattened on income tax and socialism.
If you're fond of Ayn Rand, you could have a large buffered asteroid hull -- large enough to have a small village of capitalists. Call it "Galt's Gulch in Hyperspace." The real-world libertarians have fantasies of voluntary states where taxes are basically rent paid to the state, which is a landlord.
