General Has anyone done anything with Zykoca?

[King Midas]

For fun, I'm playing The Imperial Fringe, solo. What I'm doing is taking all the write ups of Spinward March systems and making each system my own.

My scout got to Zykoca/Aramis, and found a dearth of writing.

S4: X994542 6 Agricultural Non Industrial Red

Behind the Claw: "Local society is extremely xenophobic, and all off-world contact has been suspended by an Imperial Interdiction Order. In 1097, a local mob with government support broke into the starport, and only the action of the Imperil Marines allowed the traders in port to flee to space."

Trav wiki gives the system a K9 V star, Foreven changes that to a M9.

Discussion here puts the planet one day into the jump mask of the start, and that's it.

In four decades of gaming nobody has even noticed this planet?

Two questions:
1) Just being xenophobic is one thing. But how did it become so active as to cause riots against offworlders?
2)Independence is one of the few things the Imperium will not put up with. Why hasn't the local fleet put the rebels down? (In either sense of the word).

To answer #1, Haiti or the Boxer Rebellion seem to be the closest analogs. An imported slave class working under appalling conditions rebels, or Foreigners of strange manner are trying to change the traditional way of doing things. - Or maybe Dunsany: "Which are bad laws, but not to be changed by mere foreigners."

For #2, Maybe there are no megacorporations demanding re seizure of their confiscated holdings? And the jump shadow makes it not worth the effort of retaking? IMO this planet is a rare Ine Givar success story: "Hey! We are still part of the Empire! See, we have an Imperial Knight and are a Barony! Still counts, right?"

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

travellermap paints it as amber, not red, though that might be a retcon.

its possible the interdiction is the punishment, as cutting off imports might cause serious problems in the local enconomy, and the population is small enough it likely doesn't have much heavy industry. also, a dense, tainted atmosphere is barely habitable at TL 6, so i doubt they can do much more than try at stay alive.

 

[mike wightman]

It's one of the more interesting worlds in The Traveller Adventure:

Zykoca is an agricultural world under interdiction. Local society is extremely xenophobic, and all contact offworld has been suspended. Foreigners are distrusted and have no standing in local society. The world was interdicted after a local mob broke into the starport, killing several offworlders.

Note the differences between this entry and the Behind the Claw one?

Anyway, a planet a bit bigger than the earth with a dense tainted atmosphere, hundreds of thousands of people who focus on agriculture (the taint is probably linked to the plant life - filter masks required), a representative democratic government and very low law level...

there was a starport, is it still there and if so what class was it...

despite the red zone and interdiction there is no gas giant in the system, so jump 1 ships have fueling problems...

What roused the mob? Why were they not brought to justice rather than interdicted? Is it an IN interdiction or an IISS interdiction?

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

travellerwiki says

Zykoca has a hot climate and a dense oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere tainted by high oxygen partial pressure

I don't know how'd you compensate for that, short of a fully pressurised environment suit kept as a suitable pressure.

What roused the mob? Why were they not brought to justice rather than interdicted? Is it an IN interdiction or an IISS interdiction?

a thought occurred to me last night after i logged off:

What if the inderdiction was at the request of the Zykoca government? What if the riots were anti-foreigner, but not anti-imperial pre se? what if the Zykoca government is still a tax paying imperial member world, that just simply turned abound and said "we do not want any foreigners on this planet, apart form those on official Imperial business?"

taxes are collected, the locals don't see any bloody foreigners , everyone is happy.

the Navy sticks a few patrol curisers in the system diverted form anti-corsair patrols and calls it a day.

 

[Timerover51]

travellerwiki says:

Zykoca has a hot climate and a dense oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere tainted by high oxygen partial pressure


I don't know how'd you compensate for that, short of a fully pressurised environment suit kept as a suitable pressure.

All you would have to do it live at the higher elevations where the partial pressure of the oxygen would be lower. At it is a large planet with a lower hydrographic percentage, there should be a far amount of land surface at higher elevations. Denver, Colorado is a mile about sea level, along with large segments of the west. The Tibetan Plateau is close to three miles above sea level. Given the large size, 9000 mile diameter, it will have a slightly higher pressure gradient as the altitude increases. Stephen Dole, in Habitable Planets for Man, has oxygen toxicity at 400 millimeters of mercury at sea level pressure, which would equate to an atmosphere of 56 percent oxygen at sea level pressure. The larger planet will have a faster pressure drop with altitude.

Oxygen Toxicity is alos not something that is immediately lethal, it being much more of a cumulative effect. It would likely be possible to make limited trips to lower altitudes without major problems. Lower elevations would be at a much higher risk for fires, however. You would have to come up with some reason for that higher percentage of oxygen, given the high reactivity of oxygen with just about everything.

Also, living at higher elevations will also help deal with the heat, at average temperature drops as elevation increases, while the lower water percentage will reduce the humidity, with the dryer air feeling cooler and holding the daytime heat less. Dry air cools down much faster than humid air, which is why in the desert, you might have very high daytime temperatures, and still need field jackets at night. One problem in fighting in New Guinea during World War 2 was that while temperatures were brutal at the lower elevations, field jackets were needed in the highlands, especially at night.

I really do not see a problem with a Tech Level 6 society operating under those conditions. You would just have to pick your living location a bit more carefully.

 

[G K Zhukov]

Even though canonicity would be highly questionable, does anyone remember if Zykoca got a better than passing mention in the Megatraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients PC game?

http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com.es/2017/08/megatraveller-2-won.html

 

[epicenter00]

Two questions:
1) Just being xenophobic is one thing. But how did it become so active as to cause riots against offworlders?

There's all kinds of reasons why people are xenophobic. Rabble-rousing political/religious leaders, intellectuals who have created a body of "scientific" evidence showing why outsiders are bad, bad experiences with offworlders in the past, locals fed up with the indifference/contempt outsiders have for local customs, the settlers are exiles (perhaps even voluntarily) from some other world where they left due to persecution, leaving a cultural distaste of outsiders ("our ancestors left the galaxy to live here in our own way, not bothering anyone, but now they're here too? Enough already!").

2)Independence is one of the few things the Imperium will not put up with. Why hasn't the local fleet put the rebels down? (In either sense of the word).

I think a significant portion is about how invasive/controlling your Imperium is. This widely varies depending on the source material and author (as a general trend the Imperium becomes increasingly more invasive to member worlds as time goes on with the the Lorenverse 3I in GURPS being significantly more tightly controlled).

The Imperium has a strong (and open) interest in creating and protecting markets for trade. Trade and economic activity is the mantra of the Imperium; they don't espouse ideas like "Freedom" or "Unity" or "Rule by the People" or whatever. So if you look at the world in terms of interstellar trade:

X994542 6 Agricultural Non Industrial Red

That's why. TL6 is like a bunch of savages. There's no markets on a world like this.

Even if they wanted to, the locals can't produce much the wide Imperium wants.

Even if they wanted to, the locals can't afford much the Imperium would want to sell them.

If there's no markets, nobody has a significant economic stake on the world so the Imperium doesn't care very much.

Zykoca government is still a tax paying imperial member world

There's things that don't jive about the Imperium levying taxes from its member worlds. One of them being that the Imperium does not consider civil wars (those restricted to planets) to be necessarily a bad thing. I don't have the exact quote, but it's something along the lines that the Imperium sees war as an important social pressure valve. A civil war would be disastrous from a point of view of a tax-levying entity.

Again in the Lorenverse end of the 3I, Mssr Wiseman seems to have decided that this policy of non-intervention isn't a consistent thing. There's material that the Imperium gets involved in civil wars as peacekeepers/occupying troops. This again doesn't really jive to me - the more (possibly cynical) view that the Imperium is just going to contain the wildfire and let it burn itself out seems much more likely and sustainable as a policy to me.

IMTU, it seems logical to me that the Imperium likely has levels of involvement in some fashion. Perhaps split in various ways. A possible split I think is if the world was settled before the establishment of the Third Imperium (worlds with non-human sophonts fall into this category as well), or were settled after the Third Imperium got started. I think another split might simply be the desire of the world to be involved with the wider Imperial society.

Some worlds have multiple Imperial nobles and their fiefs on the world and even in-system where there's significant economic activity. These are the highly integrated high population worlds typically thought of as "Imperial."

But these TL0-TL5 worlds? There's a good chance the Imperium is very much like the Imperium presented in the early 3I materials: There's no planetary taxes - the Imperium likely places tariffs on off-world trade and if they have any presence on the world, these tariffs don't even cover the cost of this (but that's okay, the majority of the Imperium's incomes come from dividends from MegaCorporate profits and taxes on the well-integrated High Population worlds). The world doesn't have a single noble; there's likely some noble who is assigned a number of worlds in a subsector as their responsibility to know about - they don't "rule" the world and the local worlds certainly don't acknowledge that noble as their "ruler" instead the noble's job is to simply keep track of local events and serve as a point of contact for these worlds should they wish to take up some matter with the Imperium and vice versa ("Well admiral, it appears the Scout ship crashed on this world." "What do we know about it?" "Marchioness Soandso is the point of contact and is on the way to give us a briefing")

 

[Carlobrand]

Is this Amber Zone business a T5 thing? It hasn't been changed in the last CT errata, and both GURPS and Mongoose declare it to be a red zone.

High O2 partial pressure. Nasty place. Things burn easier. On the positive side, you should get more punch out of those chemical-fueled engines and power plants.

...That's why. TL6 is like a bunch of savages. There's no markets on a world like this. ...

Hey! I was born in TL6! We were (mostly) not savages! We had 3 TV channels, not counting PBS and the UHF stations! We even had pinball machines!

And we made all kinds of agricultural products that traded quite nicely, albeit to our neighboring TL6-and-below nations. Nonetheless, some things are just nicer grown rather than artificially produced. Zykoca may have no interest in trade with outsiders (my first suspect is usually religion) but that doesn't mean a TL6 agri-world can't have a nice export industry going.

A lesser point is this: trade actually matters very little in the Imperium. For most worlds with population above the size of a single smallish city, trade - even with A ports on the world - is only a couple of percent, very often less than one percent, of their overall GWP. Near as I can tell, in the vast majority of worlds, only the rich and maybe the folk lucky enough to live close to the starport are getting any imports, and not much is being exported either, not compared to what is being produced and consumed locally. If the Impies slap a red zone on you, the only people who care would be the Getties and the Rockefellers, and maybe a comparative handful of people employed by them, 'cause their source of neat toys and specialty foods would dry up.

 

[Carlobrand]

High oxygen partial pressure ... OOH! Megafauna! Giant arthropods! We hit 35% here on Earth for a bit 300 million years ago. They had dragonfly-like insects with wingspans of up to 28 inches and millipede-like things 2 1/2 yards long in that period.

 

[aramis]

A lesser point is this: trade actually matters very little in the Imperium. For most worlds with population above the size of a single smallish city, trade - even with A ports on the world - is only a couple of percent, very often less than one percent, of their overall GWP. Near as I can tell, in the vast majority of worlds, only the rich and maybe the folk lucky enough to live close to the starport are getting any imports, and not much is being exported either, not compared to what is being produced and consumed locally. If the Impies slap a red zone on you, the only people who care would be the Getties and the Rockefellers, and maybe a comparative handful of people employed by them, 'cause their source of neat toys and specialty foods would dry up.

And this point is where GT diverges sharply from the portrayals in CT, MT, and even, to an extent, TNE.

The opportunity cost of half-day shipping via suborbital vs 2+ weeks outsystem is the major variable. Steve Bloo, Chris Thrash, and JimV set that opportunity cost based upon current shipping times with near-instant communication. there's good data for near-instant comms with shipping times up to several months.

The most recent data for speed of ship comm was in the 1870's... and the manifests I've seen were largely port-auctioned speculative, rather than recipient owned. (I've not done a systematic search, tho' - when I worked for the National Archives, I was often tasked to find & copy genealogical data for paying customers. So I've seen dozens of such records.) Which implies a very different opportunity cost regime.

 

[King Midas]

S4: X994542 6 Agricultural Non Industrial Red

Oops, should be book S3.

(from the sig line) The beauty of CT LBB1-3 is that the ref is free to make such decisions for themselves.

travellermap paints it as amber, not red, though that might be a retcon.

The campaign is firmly LBB, with anything else as suggested optional additions. So I'm going with S3, which has it as red.

Is this Amber Zone business a T5 thing? It hasn't been changed in the last CT errata, and both GURPS and Mongoose declare it to be a red zone.

Got me. I've noticed that some zone changes have been made over the years, but changing anything from S3 is a last resort.

 

[King Midas]

its possible the interdiction is the punishment, as cutting off imports might cause serious problems in the local enconomy, and the population is small enough it likely doesn't have much heavy industry. also, a dense, tainted atmosphere is barely habitable at TL 6, so i doubt they can do much more than try at stay alive.

Punitive blockade? Now that is in line with Imperial policy.
"Send in the marines!"
"No, don't send in anybody!"

travellerwiki says
a thought occurred to me last night after i logged off:

What if the inderdiction was at the request of the Zykoca government? What if the riots were anti-foreigner, but not anti-imperial pre se? what if the Zykoca government is still a tax paying imperial member world, that just simply turned abound and said "we do not want any foreigners on this planet, apart form those on official Imperial business?"

taxes are collected, the locals don't see any bloody foreigners , everyone is happy.

the Navy sticks a few patrol curisers in the system diverted form anti-corsair patrols and calls it a day.

Now this is interesting! I don't know quite what to do with it, but there are intriguing potentials here.

There's all kinds of reasons why people are xenophobic. Rabble-rousing political/religious leaders, intellectuals who have created a body of "scientific" evidence showing why outsiders are bad, bad experiences with offworlders in the past, locals fed up with the indifference/contempt outsiders have for local customs, the settlers are exiles (perhaps even voluntarily) from some other world where they left due to persecution, leaving a cultural distaste of outsiders ("our ancestors left the galaxy to live here in our own way, not bothering anyone, but now they're here too? Enough already!").

<Starts humming the BattleStar Galactica Theme>

High oxygen partial pressure ... OOH! Megafauna! Giant arthropods! We hit 35% here on Earth for a bit 300 million years ago. They had dragonfly-like insects with wingspans of up to 28 inches and millipede-like things 2 1/2 yards long in that period.

Humn... The planet has a very eco-friendly culture, and they were furious at the harvests made by trophy hunters?

I've considered moving "Hall of the Mountain Grill" here, which would be...interesting.

 

[mike wightman]

I found my notes from my Traveller Adventure days...
this is the shortened and cleaned up version.
Zykoca - the taint in the atmosphere is due to the richness of the local fauna. Fungal spore analogues, pollen, airborne seedpods with crystalline husks that can shred your lungs if inhaled, all add up to requiring filter masks. The fungal spores can cause rotting diseases on the skin, in the lungs, the eyes, just about any warm, moist place a spore can grow...
During 'dust' storms it is advisable to stay inside shelters or wear whole body protective suits to avoid being shredded if caught in the open.
The local plant life makes extensive use of silicates to reinforce their outer layers as protection, some local animals have similar armoured hides, chitinous exoskeletons or even a silk like substance as strong if not stronger than Kevlar, all to withstand the abrasion, while others burrow or hide within shelters, caves or even the plants themselves.

Another feature of the local plant life is that some of it is mobile and predatory - think triffids ranging in size from clover to oak tree sized. The locals go about armed to the teeth and take plantation protection very seriously - hence the low law level.

The locals have managed to 'tame' some of the local predatory plants and use them to guard their farm/plantation perimeters, along with some of the massive herbivorous animals that can eat the triffids.

The local humans are very insular in their family groups, each family votes to elect their representative on the world parliament. Families distrust each other, the greater the distance between families the greater the distrust. Their collective distrust of offworlders is legendary, yet there are several Vargr families who own plantations/farms and are accepted as members of the world parliament.

The starport riot which lead to the closure of the starport facilities and the establishment if an IN blockade was due to a Tukera merchant crew on liberty who took a few too many liberties with the farmers sons and daughters. Rumours of rape and murder lead to several local families banding together and marching on the starport demanding justice. Shots were exchanged, people died, including a distant relative of the Tukera family.

The Tukera's demanded the IN send in the marines or bomb the plantations back to the stone age, the IISS investigation showed the locals had a legitimate grievance.
Never the less the world was interdicted, which poses problems for jump 1 traffic through the Towers cluster.

Free traders are advised to stay away from the world, but the IN will not actually shoot on trade ships who are willing to risk planetfall and deal with violent and xenophobic population, the native wildlife that wants to eat them, and an atmosphere that has the potential to strip an unprotected individual to the bone.

 

[King Midas]

I found my notes from my Traveller Adventure days...
this is the shortened and cleaned up version.

Cool! Thank you.

 

[khadaji2002]

I found my notes from my Traveller Adventure days...
this is the shortened and cleaned up version.

Nice write-up and a great reminder how to creatively address all the facets of the UWP. Thank you!!

 

[mike wightman]

Thanks for the compliments

One of the reasons I stick to my old battered copy of S:3 is the work I did on planets visited. I am glad that when they did The Traveller Adventure they left worlds like Zykoca for referees to flesh out.

 

[King Midas]

1) there was a starport, is it still there and if so what class was it...

2) despite the red zone and interdiction there is no gas giant in the system, so jump 1 ships have fueling problems...

3) What roused the mob?

4) Why were they not brought to justice rather than interdicted?

5) Is it an IN interdiction or an IISS interdiction?

1: C or D. I have trouble seeing a mob taking a highport, and one would presume there was some sort of startown, so E is out.

2: Well, Trav Wiki gives the system two asteroid belts. I suppose if one couldn't get to the ocean, one can chase down an iceball...

3: I like your abuse of extraterritoriality idea, but I think it would a final straw with other reasons as well.

4: IMTU, the Scouts are more powerful than the default, but I don't know as they would have the kind of ombudsman role that you chose. Possibly someone from MoJ?

5: Oh, most certainly IN. Though if the alternate of "This is a really really dark amber zone" is chosen, I can see the Scouts posting a "Go ahead, but don't say you weren't warned" beacon.

Thanks for the compliments

One of the reasons I stick to my old battered copy of S:3 is the work I did on planets visited. I am glad that when they did The Traveller Adventure they left worlds like Zykoca for referees to flesh out.

I agree. If I had chosen to go with just S3, I would have done the same thing. But I felt that thousands of people a lot smarter than I had already considered everything in the SM, and come up with brilliant answers (like yours) to the hanging questions. Rather than re-invent an inferior wheel, why not go with something better?

Zykoca was just the first overlooked planet that I hit.

 

[King Midas]

Note the differences between this entry and the Behind the Claw one?

Heh, I didn't really, until you pointed it out. I prefer the TTA "Land and take your chances" outlook to the BTC "We WILL shoot you out of the sky."

I think a significant portion is about how invasive/controlling your Imperium is. This widely varies depending on the source material and author (as a general trend the Imperium becomes increasingly more invasive to member worlds as time goes on with the the Lorenverse 3I in GURPS being significantly more tightly controlled).

The Imperium has a strong (and open) interest in creating and protecting markets for trade.

There's things that don't jive about the Imperium levying taxes from its member worlds.

Again in the Lorenverse end of the 3I, Mssr Wiseman seems to have decided that this policy of non-intervention isn't a consistent thing. There's material that the Imperium gets involved in civil wars as peacekeepers/occupying troops. This again doesn't really jive to me - the more (possibly cynical) view that the Imperium is just going to contain the wildfire and let it burn itself out seems much more likely and sustainable as a policy to me.

I suspect RealPolitik. If the government falls into the category of "He may be an SOB, but he's a pro-Imperial SOB, the marines go in. Otherwise, it merits a shrug: Unless "United Fruit Megacorp" rant makes a big enough stink, of course.

A lesser point is this: trade actually matters very little in the Imperium.

And this point is where GT diverges sharply from the portrayals in CT, MT, and even, to an extent, TNE.

IMTU I ruled that the Empire was a distant and not very involved overlord. The only reason there was a notable navy presence at all was to keep the Zho's honest. I suppose I should have paid more attention to the trade and active control policies in the various editions...

 

[mike wightman]

1: C or D. I have trouble seeing a mob taking a highport, and one would presume there was some sort of startown, so E is out.

I made it a C class port.

2: Well, Trav Wiki gives the system two asteroid belts. I suppose if one couldn't get to the ocean, one can chase down an iceball...

I only use CT sources, no wiki, no retconned Traveller map. My Spinward Marches remain S:3 derived plus what I write, or what my players do to expand on things.
Mining asteroids or even dwarf planets for ice to make fuel is going to take time. If jump 1 ships still have to travel via Zykoca then there is a gap in the market for a new 'truck stop' - there's an adventure waiting to happen tight there.

3: I like your abuse of extraterritoriality idea, but I think it would a final straw with other reasons as well.

Yup, I agree, which is why IMTU the mob killed a minore member of the Tukera family...

4: IMTU, the Scouts are more powerful than the default, but I don't know as they would have the kind of ombudsman role that you chose. Possibly someone from MoJ?

That bit is right out of canon, the IN interdicts worlds to cover up mistakes and as punishments, the IISS interdicts usually to protect the native population.

5: Oh, most certainly IN. Though if the alternate of "This is a really really dark amber zone" is chosen, I can see the Scouts posting a "Go ahead, but don't say you weren't warned" beacon.

Yup, IN makes more sense since it is a punishment of sorts.

[quote[I agree. If I had chosen to go with just S3, I would have done the same thing. But I felt that thousands of people a lot smarter than I had already considered everything in the SM, and come up with brilliant answers (like yours) to the hanging questions. Rather than re-invent an inferior wheel, why not go with something better?[/quote]
As I posted upthread I actually like filling in the gaps left to me by The Traveller Adventure. If an 'official' supplement comes along that changes details or does things differently to me then the 'official' supplement is worthless to me except for arguments online about how the OTU works
I own GT BtC and the MgT SM books, but I never use them.

Zykoca was just the first overlooked planet that I hit.

Zykoca is likely to be visited by the March Harrier during the running of the adventure considering it is in the Towers cluster.
Some key events from my running of it:
The crew decided that refueling at Zykoca was necessary because 'reasons'
they got as much info as possible about the world and made sure they landed well away from any populated area.
First trip - plant and wildlife issues
Second trip - storm
Third trip - distress signal from a crashed local plane. They investigated and found themselves in an interfamily dispute - eventually. Problem was the first group of natives they encountered were dressed in their weather resistant suits - thick hide, chitinous plates the lot - they of course mistook they for alien invaders.

 

[mike wightman]

Heh, I didn't really, until you pointed it out. I prefer the TTA "Land and take your chances" outlook to the BTC "We WILL shoot you out of the sky."

The former means the crew can take the risk and have adventures, the latter means you get blown up by the IN if you try and land. The Traveller Adventure makes more sense - aside would there really be Imperial Marines at every out of the way starport in the Spinward Marches (the BtC statement), IMTU they are a 'small' elite branch of the IN, not starport security guards.

I suspect RealPolitik. If the government falls into the category of "He may be an SOB, but he's a pro-Imperial SOB, the marines go in. Otherwise, it merits a shrug: Unless "United Fruit Megacorp" rant makes a big enough stink, of course.

I agree with you

IMTU I ruled that the Empire was a distant and not very involved overlord. The only reason there was a notable navy presence at all was to keep the Zho's honest. I suppose I should have paid more attention to the trade and active control policies in the various editions...

My two key quotes about the nature of the Imperium IMTU:

Imperium: The Imperium is a strong interstellar government encompassing 281 subsectors and approximately 11,000 worlds. Approximately 1100 years old, it is the third human empire to control this area, the oldest, and the strongest. Nevertheless, it is under strong pressure from its neighboring interstellar governments, and does not have the strength nor the power which it once had.

and of course:

Traveller assumes a remote centralized government (referred to in this volume as the Imperium), possessed of great industrial and technological might, but unable, due to the sheer distances and travel times involved, to exert total control at all levels everywhere within its star-spanning realm. On the frontiers, extensive home rule provisions allow planetary populations to choose their own forms of government, raise and maintain armed forces for local security, pass and enforce laws governing local conduct, and regulate (within limits) commerce. Defense of the frontier is mostly provided by local indigenous forces, stiffened by scattered Imperial naval bases manned by small but extremely sophisticated forces.