Tell me about Promethers....

[plop101]

Prometheus 2027/0407 A785969-F S Military Rule G

The ESA colonized it apperantly, but does anyone when they arrived. Also, was the ESA the only people doing sublight ships to Prometheuis, or where there
others, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, etc etc

Are there planet names for the system. We know the stars, Alpha Centuri A, Alpha Centuri B, Proxima Centuri, and the system I guess is Prometheus. But I haven't seen any planet names. Clossest stuff would be borrowing from T:2300 and the Colonial Atlas, but I really want to see if there is something OTU.

Anything else I might not think off about Prometheus?

 

[kafka47]

There might be something in the HIWG documents, if anyone has a complete set...they did a whole slew of things that was IW milieu...maybe, SJG will highlight the nearby worlds in a PDF e23 Traveller release bringing some of that old Traveller goodness back to life...that is if Loren has those things in his Cold Storage.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

GT:Rim of Fire covers this.

 

[Maladominus]

Originally posted by plop101:
Prometheus 2027/0407 A785969-F S Military Rule G

The ESA colonized it apperantly, but does anyone when they arrived. Also, was the ESA the only people doing sublight ships to Prometheuis, or where there
others, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, etc etc

Prometheus (Solomani Rim) is written up in Steve Jackson's GURPS Traveller book "Rim of Fire".

In Rim of Fire, Prometheus (aka Alpha Centauri) was colonized by the Earth's most stubbornly ethnically independent peoples... the most traditional peoples of Earth, many of these wanted to preserve their old cultures.... otherwise it would be destroyed because the Terran Confederation would homogeonize and mix up everyone in time:

The Amish
The Rom (the Gypsy Peoples)
The Parsees
The Masai

And probably other really ancient traditional cultures such as the Bedouins, the Australian Aborigines, and the Dungeons and Dragons Players, etc.

These are the cultures that settled Prometheus. In Rim of Fire Prometheus, there is a picture of an Amish man in the 57th century. He is still a farmer, wearing a farmer's clothing and hat. The only difference is that he is overseeing a grav lifter (yes, probably a 57th century TL15 grav lifter) and that grav sled is picking up his bales of wheat. No horses. No mules. Just an old fashioned Amish farmer with long beard and his grav lifter sled lifting up his stacks of wheat.

The more "modern" cultures of Earth (the Americans, the Chinese, the Russians, the French, the Traveller Players, etc) were more ambitious and wanted to colonize systems further away from Earth, and searched for even more and better colonies to settle. They were happy to leave the "redneck peoples" to claim Prometheus.

Quoted from Rim of Fire: "The Early Promethean society was notable for its extreme libertarianism..."

And now to answer one of your other questions:

Prometheus settlement began BEFORE the First Interstellar War was ignited. GT Rim of Fire says this.

 

[Whipsnade]

Maldominus,

Regarding the 57th Century fellow with the grav lifter, Amish religious 'prohibitions' with regards to technology are rather complex and not uniform between communities. For example, while they may not have electricity in their homes, they do have it in their barns and workshops. Many Amish also work off the farm in small factories with a selection of power tools turning out 'handcrafted' items for the tourist trade.

I used to visit two nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania's Amish country and found the culture fascinating. They're well worth 'porting into any TU as an example of 'lite tech support' colonization.


Have fun,
Bill

 

[Maladominus]

Ahh, good to know, Bill. I don't claim to know much about Amish culture, only that I am aware their beliefs discourage them from adopting many of our "modern" technological conveniences (e.g. cell phones). I did not know how uniform these beliefs were, nor how much 'set in stone' they were.

 

[Whipsnade]

Mal,

They have another custom that makes their culture fascinating too; You aren't automatically Amish just because you were born into an Amish family!

They allow young adults; i.e. recent high school grads, about a year 'off' from Amish culture and its strictures. They can dress anyway they like, use forbidden items, drink, party, travel, take jobs, all of it in order to explore the "english"(1) world on the outside. After this, they can choose to come back or stay in their new life.

If they come back, they then sign a 'covenant' with their local church to abide by Amish cultural restrictions. There are plenty of folks around Lancaster who either decided not to become Amish after their time off or decided to opt out even after signing the 'covenant'.

I found the idea of this 'escape hatch' especially enlightening. Most 'cults'; to use the term very broadly and in both a religious and cultural sense, do not allow children born into the 'cult' to choose. You're stuck and there's no option to leave that doesn't permanently separate you from your family.

The more estranged a 'cult' is from the rest of society, the more it relies on 'breeding' new 'members' instead of recruiting them. While this works in the short term, in the long term any 'cult' rarely lasts a few generations despite frantic attempts to raise 'cult' children in the 'faith'.

The Amish on the other hand, allow an 'escape hatch' and that is why - I believe - they've been successful for centuries now despite their great technological 'estrangement' from the society surrounding them. They keep the true believers and graciously allow those with doubts or other beliefs to go.

There is no armed compound to keep people in as well as out, no self-annointed 'messiah' busily meddling with every aspect of everyones' daily lives, no condemnation of the 'lapsed', none of that. It's 'go in peace' instead of 'damn the unbeliever' and that's why it's lasted since Colonial times.

GMs creating so-called odd 'cults' for their personal TUs would do well to examine the Amish instead of the Branch Davidians. The Amish have demonstrated a staying power that 'cults' with a 'seige mentality' have not.

Have fun,
Bill

1 - 'English' is their term for all non-Amish.

 

[Shadowdancer]

The 'escape hatch' Bill is talking about is called by the Amish rumspringa, or "running around."

It is the subject of a fascinating, and very illuminating, documentary made a few years ago (2002, I believe) called "Devil's Playground."

NPR story on 'Devil's Playground'

IMDB entry on 'Devil's Playground'

 

[mwturnage]

Originally posted by Maladominus:
Ahh, good to know, Bill. I don't claim to know much about Amish culture, only that I am aware their beliefs discourage them from adopting many of our "modern" technological conveniences (e.g. cell phones). I did not know how uniform these beliefs were, nor how much 'set in stone' they were.

Like Bill said, the Ordnung (the covenant each Amish community has) varies from locale to locale, so there's no universal proscriptions. Also, new technologies are sometimes allowed, though always after great debate; there's widespread use of certain modern medical technologies (particularly breathing-assistance machines) in some of the communities due to a high incidence of genetic maladies. Some Amish businesses are even allowed to use cell phones; there was a fascinating article in WIRED several years ago about this. There's also workarounds such as gas-powered farm equipment such as threshers being pulled by oxen.

Incidentally, the Amish in a few areas are enthusiastic users of GM (genetically modified) seeds. They also are very well disposed towards gene therapy, so much so that several research programs are being undergone in the Northeastern communities.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Oddly enough, there was recently a story about a crime committed by an Amish man who was being blackmailed by some ne'er-do-well. The ne'er-do-well was threatening to post unsavory pictures on the internet to ruin his reputation........