How do PC's Get Mail?

[lord irial]

Here's a question for the forum: in your Traveller Universe, how do the PC's get messages, mail, and packages? I've been wondering how largely itinerant folks, such as the crew of a Free Trader without a regular route, would get news from home, et al.

Anyone got any ideas?

 

[Rover]

I admit I haven't thought much about this...

Physical mail must be directed to a Planet/Starport and the recipient must report to a local post office to collect it. In most of the Traveller games I played we had a planet that we used as a base of operations, so if someone sent us mail we, in theory could collect it.

Electronic mail could be sent in a similar manner to physical mail, or propagated throughout populated systems.

If email is propogated the mail should be encripted by the sender and the recipent should have some prearranged key to decode the email.

This mail should have an expiery date whereupon it will be deleted from the system. In a case like this the recipient could pay a small fee to download the mail. This would cover the costs of the storage systems.

 

[sandman]

Just imagine...

Coming to a new world, plugging into the datanet, logging on into IOL (Imperium On-Line) and getting "You've got 221654242 Mail"

Hell, an Imperium full of SPAM!!!

 

[Stormraven]

One that I've seen in the Mageworlds series, by Debra Doyle and James MacDonald, seems most likely to work with a Traveller type universe.

Simply, if you're on planet for any length of time, it's normal. Otherwise, people send mail c/o you to General Delivery, and you pick it up. You can have people send it to any planet, but it usually just goes to the Sector Capital, and waits there for you.

 

[hirch duckfinder]

every starport has a " post restante " for travellers for physical mail , this must be sent to that specific starport , and an alert sent around by e-mail to tell the recipient to collect . the poster pays for a certain period of storage .
e-mail comes in by x-boat and is distributed on local networks . small e-mail messages can be spread over a large area quite quickly by copying onto all x-boat routes . these are bought in " generations " i.e. the number of times the message will be copied on all routes at a junction . a message can be sent to a specific junction before copying commences .
in a few months , at an alarming cost in credits , you could theoretically have an e-mail at every major starport in the imperium .

 

[travalv]

Originally posted by Stormraven:
One that I've seen in the Mageworlds series, by Debra Doyle and James MacDonald, seems most likely to work with a Traveller type universe.

Simply, if you're on planet for any length of time, it's normal. Otherwise, people send mail c/o you to General Delivery, and you pick it up. You can have people send it to any planet, but it usually just goes to the Sector Capital, and waits there for you.

Be kind - at least send it to the subsector capital! At Jump2, the sector capital is an average of about two months away...

 

[Stormraven]

Originally posted by travalv:
Be kind - at least send it to the subsector capital! At Jump2, the sector capital is an average of about two months away... [/QB]

::Shrug::

I don't have any sector maps easily available to me, so I wasn't sure of the distances. But yeah - subsector works, too.