The Zhodani Coreward Expedition? Is this official?

[Janitor_Prime]

So looking around the Travellermap (dot) com. I chanced to see a line of sectors, two or three hundred, starting two sectors from Zhodani Consulate space and going toward the galactic core.

That would be a thousand years of Jumps minimum. Combined, it is many times the total area of the Third Imperium. The map shows a line that is presumably the path of the expedition ships though every world in the sector has a name and UPP.


This does suggest that some of those worlds closest to the Zhodani Consulate were settled or seeded for colonization centuries ago.

 

[mike wightman]

The first core expedition was launched in IY -4000, they have been doing this for over 5,000 years by the 1105 campaign start date.

 

[TheDark]

Classic Alien Module 4 mentions that one of the Ancient artifacts on Zhdant projected a star map that was 30 parsecs wide and 8,000 parsecs long stretching coreward. It also provides occasional visions to psionics using the map.

A cruiser misjumped in -4,074 and returned to Zhodani space 40 years later, having wound up in one of the systems from the map and confirming that its information and visions were accurate. Between -4,000 and 750 they've mounted seven expeditions, with the eighth being planned to depart in 1150. The last expedition lasted for fifty years, including ten years of exploration time at a distance of 5,000 parsecs from Zhdant.

Individual ships exploring on their own are said to have gotten another 1,000 parsecs toward the core, and they also explore laterally outside of the 30 parsec corridor shown on the Ancient map.

Chtierabl is a sector of Zhodani territory 250 parsecs to coreward that was established "over 800 years ago," and Vlanchiets Qlom is a set of 30 subsector and partial-subsector regions past Chiterabl that reaches to 600 parsecs coreward, plus a handful of bases that are even deeper, as far as "halfway to the core."

Other than AM4, there's a fanon discussion in Security Leak #5 (1988), which looks at setting up a campaign playing out the Eighth Core Expedition. It includes random encounter tables and a list of "supersectors" that the expeditions have gone through (each 200 parsecs long).

Those are the two main GDW-era sources I can think of, although it's always possible I've overlooked and/or forgotten something else.

 

[Talifon]

Mongoose's release schedule lists a sourcebook for the Core Expeditions as being in the layout phase and to be released in PDF format later this month. So there will be more canonical information soon.