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What do Traveller and Star Trek have in common?

Murph

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What do Traveller and Star Trek have in common? IMHO it is this; both have in some ways a sense of wonder about them. Look at the best episodes of classic Trek, and the Next Generation Trek as well as the movies. The best episodes were those that left you feeling good at the end.

Now in Traveller, if you run Classic Traveller you had that sense of wonder that perhaps just one jump away there was a marvel awaiting you and the party. I never had that feeling from Mega-Traveller, nor from that abortion The New Era since they were just dark and depressing places. Classic Traveller, the best adventures you had that spark of wonder, and in the end the bad guys lost, and the good guys won.

Now Star Trek after Rick Berman ruined it with his endless conspiracies within Star Fleet, and wars without end, I class with MegaTraveller, and The New Era. The sense of wonder, that “My God, will you look at that!” feeling was gone. The universe in both places became a dark and dangerous place and the sense of wonder was replaced with a sense of shell shock.

Now I really don’t care which game mechanics you use since in my opinion it was the background that gave that breath of wonder to both Traveller and Star Trek. I, myself, use Cyberpunk 2020, but if you want to use CT, MT, TNE, T4, Gurps Traveller, T^20, or T5, who cares? It’s the universe that you create, or is created for you. The Third Imperium, yes it was stodgy and boring at times, but so was the Federation. But just beyond that last Imperial or Federation world was the frontier, and wonders.

Don’t let the wonder go out of Traveller.
 
<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Murph:
What do Traveller and Star Trek have in common? IMHO it
Don’t let the wonder go out of Traveller.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

IMHO, Both have a sense of hands-off for other's problems, a powerful fleet which is waiting for an excuse, and corrupion creeping in at all levels, and this is just CT. Private wars (TTA, Rescue on Ruie, and others), People vs NonPeople (The treatment of the chirpers on Vanjeen/SM), ravenous enemies right nearby but slightly allied anyway (Vargr, Cardascian), honorbound psychopaths on another border (Klingon and Aslan), Conniving pseudoromans as the main enigma/enemy (Romulans, Zhodani), racial integration at the price of racial identity, and idealism corrupted by capitalism.

But hey, IMTU, many saw the rebellion as a good thing... for it meant a return to accessable leadership.
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Most classic Star Trek adventures were about an away team landing in a setting in which they had to figure out what was going wrong. Most Classic traveller adventures also involved discovery.

More detail began appearing for Classic Traveller and they included conflict with the Zhodani. Adventures against 'internal enemies' like megacorporation's trade wars and mercenary actions within the Imperium appeared in print. They kept the milieu interesting for adventure.
Along the way, the First Federation, the Gorn, and the Tholians disappeared. Everyone had equivalent technology.

As Star Trek was filled in, there was the same turn with internal enemies and organized external states. Published sectors with ring worlds and Dyson spheres were re-written without 'rumored superscience.' And with everyone having similar technolgy, interesting events turned more on intrigue and shooting rather than negotiating around different unbeatable positions.

That move to realism loses the wonder, but it does sell well, and it interests more people. If you like exploring supercience and unknowables, then I suggest one-shot convention events or your own (parallel?) universe.
 
Traveller = Star Wars

HI!
a budding ref on google groups has been suggested to run his
Star Wars adventure as Traveller, GURPS & I'm looking around the Internet
looking for ideas for Traveller = Star Wars. Elvis
:confused:
 
It all depends on how you run it.

Traveller has a pretty rich universe to play with, and there is an element of wonder and discovery to it. Travellers are a strange and unique breed of people who for whatever reason select themselves for a twilight world of cramped ships, untold years of jumpspace, and constant unfamiliarity. You have to be a special kind of crazy to be a permanent foreigner like that. The variation in social environment even from a 1 parsec jump will soon create an individual who is heavily insulated against culture shock - maybe even addicted to it. A sense of wonder and exoticism can help with this.

But it's definitely a darker universe than Star Trek TNG or TOS. In my experiences of living abroad in RL, any idealized notions you might have of another place need to be discarded pretty fast unless you want to resent the society that's hosting you. Alien cultural values are, well, alienating, and you have to be prepared for that, and ready to adapt and undermine yourself.

But Traveller can support a "high-SF" campaign, where the darker tones are downplayed. This is an aesthetic more in keeping with the bold innocence of the 1960s and 1970s, when space travel was a metaphor for American society's belief in limitless technological and social progress. It's a liberating feeling, but for someone who came up in the world during the 90s, I find this kind of atmosphere pretty thin and unsatisfying. I'm all about realism and verisimilitude. And I like the challenge of conferring that sense of realism to a science fiction setting. Different strokes for different folks.

A nice compromise between the wide open spaces of high sf and the darker gritty realism popular today is Firefly - essentially a futuristic western.
 
I've run Star Trek using Mega Traveller and Classic Traveller.

Worked rather well. the Paired Phaser Banks were 100Td Meson guns.
Simply prorated Jump Drive to get parsecs per week.
J1 became 7 days
J2 was 3.5 days/parsec
J3 was 2 days/parsec
J4 was 1.5 days/parsec
J5 was 1.2 days/parsec
J6 was 1 day/parsec.

Enterprise NCC1701 and 1701A were in the 10,000 tons range, or so I used.

Worked just fine; I used Bk5 HG designs the whole time.
 
Enterprise NCC1701 and 1701A were in the 10,000 tons range, or so I used.

Worked just fine; I used Bk5 HG designs the whole time.

Cool! Do you happen to still have the HG stats around?

Waaaay back (like Jr. High school/High School time frame) I remember designing a HG Enterprise and having a good amount of fun in the process...
 
Nope. I do recall having to use bunks for crew, tho'...

From memory:
I used a 50Td Repusor bay, double cost, for the Tractor, and presumed the shuttles were really launches, but take 8x their volume each. 4 of them. Plus 4 more at double in the shop, plus a maintenance shop (8Td).

8x4Td labs, 3 bridges, Sickbay for 25... and 4xModel 9/fib
 
I wanna play in the Mirror Traveller universe ;)

I've got stats for using Warp drives in T20 ships. They'll probably end up in the SciFi20 ship design rules
 
Nope. I do recall having to use bunks for crew, tho'...

From memory:
I used a 50Td Repusor bay, double cost, for the Tractor, and presumed the shuttles were really launches, but take 8x their volume each. 4 of them. Plus 4 more at double in the shop, plus a maintenance shop (8Td).

8x4Td labs, 3 bridges, Sickbay for 25... and 4xModel 9/fib

Neat!

I wish I still had the USP that I had generated of the Enterprise (I did it in 8th grade or something, so it was pretty terrible as I recall :) ), but I am pretty sure that I based it off of this, as the books for the refit Enterprise had not come out yet (or at least, I did not have one).
 
I've run Star Trek using Mega Traveller and Classic Traveller.

Worked rather well. the Paired Phaser Banks were 100Td Meson guns.
Simply prorated Jump Drive to get parsecs per week.
J1 became 7 days
J2 was 3.5 days/parsec
J3 was 2 days/parsec
J4 was 1.5 days/parsec
J5 was 1.2 days/parsec
J6 was 1 day/parsec.

Enterprise NCC1701 and 1701A were in the 10,000 tons range, or so I used.

Worked just fine; I used Bk5 HG designs the whole time.
I remember doing a Star Wars Imperial Stardestroyer with First Edition High Guard. NO, I don't have the stats for it. But I did think at the time that 100 Ktons was big enough.
 
Neither is as popular as they used to be.

Both had their audience fractured by multiple versions.

Both contain questionable technology.

I'm sentimentally attached to both of them, but not as into either of them as I was ten or twenty years ago.

Both feature lots of aliens that look a lot like humans.
 
TNE, Star Trek

Now in Traveller, if you run Classic Traveller you had that sense of wonder that perhaps just one jump away there was a marvel awaiting you and the party. I never had that feeling from Mega-Traveller, nor from that abortion The New Era since they were just dark and depressing places. Classic Traveller, the best adventures you had that spark of wonder, and in the end the bad guys lost, and the good guys won.

I'll admit I watched my far share of Star Trek in my youth, but as I grew up I lost interest. It wasn't because the science wasn't hard enough, it was never about the science. It wasn't because the adventure wasn't good enough, it was because the story was frozen, after every week's adventure everything returned to normal. An excellent trend in television lately is the seasonal story line as opposed to the episodic formula that has been prevalent for so long.
In alot of ways Traveller shares this failing; there is a setting, a status quo, and nothing really changes. None of the adventures are about the great and epic things that happen.
That was one of the things that I really liked about TNE, the sense that you might do something that would make a real measureable difference in the setting. One world that sticks in my mind is was water world, with archipelago everywhere, you could literaly drop out of space and have an adventure on the high sea. It was chocked full of possibilties, sleepers to be awakened, allies to contact, worlds to liberate. But instead everyone wrote it off as 10,000 worlds of smoldering rumble.
Star Trek ws not without it's dark and depressing places, many of the places in the original series were either extremely authoritarian, or the ruins of some once great civilzation. And let's not forget the powermad crackpots.

As for their other similarities, there are not that many. In Star Trek most of the action centers around the governmental forces, Traveller is more about the individual. The tech in Star Trek is very handwave-y, and the energy is cheap and abundant. Most of the similarities are thematic.

The tech level of both are very homogenized, very little divergence between the factions. And both of them try to equate technology with moral superiority, and the right ot be among the stars. They both have a somewhat sanitived veiw of the world.
 
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