Last article, I talked about the Tech Level of Milieu XX16. However, I neglected an important and difficult duty I set out for myself. Because the post was already long, I did not write up an Examining Every Decision section when I wrote it. At the time, I think I intended to write these sections at the same time as digging further into the categories, but I’m not yet sure I want to write those right away, so before moving on for now to describe the Coreward Setting, I wanted to publish my current thoughts.
The first thing I discussed in that article was communications. Slow communication between systems is one of the backbones of the Traveller setting and part of what sets it apart from other sci-fi settings. One of the things I like about it is that the empires in Traveller are very reminiscent of historical empires due to the massive time required for the Imperial government to communicate with its holdings. This makes it easier to form a better understanding of the structures in play by considering the structures of real historical empires. We have not yet seen the outcome of information age imperialism, so reinstating the impossibility of instant communications makes sense to create a more realistic world. I want to dig into the X-network further at some point–I like the idea of centering the individuals who transmit the mail and their work, but I worry they feel a little vulnerable and I think the passage of information over national borders might be an important theme. One important change I’ve already made is that the X-network is not exclusive to the Imperium, but works across national borders to support freedom of information.
The next thing I talked about was education. Being passionate about education, and having experience as an educator, I believe that the future of education is not a ceaseless progression of technology. Education progresses when we provide more resources to educators and raise more, better-trained, educators. I went over the Traveller wiki’s recommendations on education technology and found that, largely, they probably wouldn’t have a huge impact. That sounds disappointing, but I find it more freeing–we don’t need wafer jacks and massively multiplayer VR to teach better. All we need is support with the resources we have. That being said, I like the potential of VR to bring easier access to well-stocked schools, and I think that’s reasonably possible this far in the future.
Wafer jacks being in this section is something I’m a little dubious on, even though my official line is more or less that they barely exist outside of the Traveller equivalent of Area 51. Downloading skills is such a common trope in sci-fi, but I don’t know if I would consider it education. COVID-19 has taught us that part of the value of education is that kids spend time together exploring their world and their relationships with each other, and while I think it may one day be possible to do that in sufficiently advanced VR, the time spent learning is clearly vital to human health and development and I don’t think that can ever be replaced. Keeping wafer jacks as military technology highlights, to me, the violence of programming kids to fill roles rather than teaching them to live.
I definitely want to come back to entertainment, since I think it’s an important detail to know how people entertain themselves in the future. For now, an acknowledgement that we’re probably never going to kick the cycle of the cable network project will do. That, and a reminder that entertainment is tied up in geopolitics. Boycott Eurovision –Anyway. The “News” paragraph is just restating things from earlier. I can examine it when I’ve thought of anything new to say.
Infinite pollution-free cold fusion is a decision I think Traveller comes to too lightly. It trivializes a lot of the very real issues with infinite expansion by handwaving away all issues of pollution, danger, and labor related to energy. And yet the space empire setting doesn’t really work without infinite power in some capacity, because giant starships need to fly and laser guns need to shoot and expensive CGI backdrops need to look cool. For now, I’ll solve the issue by making the generators themselves more or less all they’re cracked up to be, and have the issue be in how they’re made–requiring high-tech equipment in giant factories to be created and sold at high prices.
Antimatter reactors are even more exclusive, and primarily exist here because I find hydrogen jump drives game-mechanically annoying. They suit NPC ships great, but for player character ships, they make the ratio of ship size to number of people on it feel patently absurd. The smallest jump-capable ship is 100 dTons, which is already about 1,400 cubic meters of space–about 3/5 the size of an Olympic swimming pool. A ship like that with a jump-6 drive already needs to be 60% fuel space, 15% jump drive, and 11% reactor. With an average room height of 3 meters, the players will have 65 square meters to themselves–about the size of four and a half parking spaces. (All numbers from the 2022 Mongoose Traveller core rulebook, all comparisons from themeasureofthings.com.) All this to say that antimatter drives give me the option to give player characters a starship that doesn’t feel unimaginably vast or unbelievably cramped. Being made of handwavium, antimatter drives are not so much part of the setting and more part of the story, like a lot of things connected to the Ancients are.
Moving on to transportation, G/boards are literally just part of the setting because Saga by Connor Kostick is one of my favorite books of all time. ‘Nuff Said. Similarly, Bullet trains are here because that’s just mag-lev. I can have a little self-indulgence as a treat.
Air/Rafts are flying cars, and they’re basically here to make points about car infrastructure. “Isn’t it incredibly inefficient for every family to have at least one incredibly complex, high-tech, machine that needs its own tiny Fusion+ reactor to power travel when the technology literally exists to transport them on bullet trains and other high speed, reliable, low-impact public transit?” I hear you asking. Well, dear reader, that question should inspire you to go call your representative and ask them to revitalize public transportation, because bullet trains are real right now and we would have them were it not for the car lobby.
In terms of space travel, Traveller largely concludes that NAFAL travel is a done deal. You can go, more or less, as fast as light. Big whoop. In reality this is in fact something of a big whoop for almost everyone but player characters. I haven’t yet explored all of its implications yet, but I know I want in-system travel to be somewhat like travel between EU member states, and to have multiple relevant worlds within one system far more often than Traveller generally does. I think polities of multiple populous worlds in one system are a rich space Traveller largely ignores as a step between single world polities and cluster polities.
The decision to make Jump-6 the current technology in jump drives is because basically all existing Traveller material is based around it. This number is not set in stone, and once I have my finished star map for the Coreward setting, I want to consider it again.
Hop space is coming along a little earlier than in conventional Traveller media, because I intend for it to be the best way to go from the Coreward setting to the Spinward setting. That is to say, I’ll provide a route for Hop-1/Hop-2 enabled ships to take from setting to setting, leaving the space between outside the scope of this work.
I love the idea of jump/hop space being cognitohazardous and want to play it up much more than Traveller does. Space travel in Traveller has a lot in common with historical sea travel in real life, and I want to give players some real cause for superstition and a general understanding that FTL travel plays with powers they cannot control. The farther out of the “real” universe you go, the more you deal with other violations of physics and concepts the brain is not evolved to understand. I want to be explicitly non-Lovecraftian with this, since Lovecraftian horror is often founded in racism and fear of the unknown. The kind of cognitohazard I want to evoke here is not in that jump space is unknown or unknowable, but rather that it is unbelievably inhospitable to normal space life, and that it is that way on axes that normal space simply cannot be. Making even the all-powerful, all-knowing, Ancients terrified of it is a step in that direction. Making Ancient ships have low jump ratings, however, is a narrative contrivance that goes alongside antimatter drives to make cool and balanced ships for player characters.
Manufacturing technology lags behind the traditional Traveller universe because I think that claiming that all supply chain issues have been replaced with handwavium does a tremendous disservice to the real-life people currently undergoing genocide over materials for the computers and technology that powers our world, and to the billions of people across the world who work dangerous, underpaid, jobs creating the various items we use every day. I have no interest in pretending our consumer luxuries come from nowhere in this world, and no interest in bolstering that assumption by creating another sci-fi setting where they do have no impact on real people.
Because of current hopes and fears about AI, I wanted to set the advancement of AI in milieu XX16 not to far advanced of our own. Large learning models have gotten bigger, perhaps, faster, and certainly more accurate, but they are essentially the same concept. It may be unrealistic that they have not yet developed a way to make them truly living beings, or it may not–I certainly have no way of knowing how far AI will go. But what it will certainly be is relevant to real life right now, and I think that is more important.
In terms of finance, I’ve stuck pretty close to Traveller canon since I don’t really understand economics. I’m definitely looking to learn more and add to this section as I go!
Terraforming is such a common concept in sci-fi, but I wanted to emphasize here how dubious it is to try to enforce the Earth natural order on other planets. I don’t know if any planet should ever be terraformed, especially at the cost of its own natural flora and fauna. Certainly it is not something that could or should ever happen lightly. To that end, even where imperialism indicates the prevalence of that technology, it has drawbacks that would give even a dogged imperialist pause–its cost and labor intensity. Arcologies are to some extent the preferred solution, but they too will have their issues.
When it comes to life sciences, the canon Traveller universe seems to introduce horrific moral dilemmas as frequently and casually as 2d6 lookup tables. I don’t want to get rid of all the things that make Traveller what it is, but I’m also really not sure how much of the situation with Solomoni geneering I’m going to keep. I’m definitely taking a hard stance against creating a species to hold as slaves, which is something Traveller has somehow not had the courage to do. And of course, eugenics is really not a moral dilemma. It’s just wrong. Wherever it will show up in milieu XX16, it will be categorically wrong. The genetic engineering of plants and animals is more of a grey area, but environmental imperialism is something to keep in mind as I tackle these issues.
Medical technology is advanced, but I have explicitly chosen not to erase disability in any way. If anything, the medical advances in this universe are designed not to remove or undo disability but to help disabled people fully and completely participate in society. In this sense, eugenics is clearly a failure of medical technology, covering up its failures.
While the human lifespan is extended by medical care, people must still eventually pass, and anagathics available at eye-watering prices to the very rich are intentionally meant to be unnecessary and unethical.
Military technology being highly advanced is meant to provide satisfyingly high odds for the player characters to fight back against, while making it clear that straight fights against imperial forces are often doomed. The players are never meant to develop the ability to punch in the weight class of entire empires; milieu XX16 is not really meant for war stories like that. Massive-scale war should always be a tragedy they want to avoid.
I think that’s more or less all of my thoughts! Join me next week when I actually go to the Coreward setting, probably.
About empire and slow travel… At one point Harold Nicolson was something like the third-senior British diplomat in Tehran. When the Ambassador had to go to London, he would be gone for months—which meant that if the second-senior person was not immediately reachable for any reason, Nicolson had to make significant diplomatic decisions himself, with a communications lag of several days (at least). My recollection, which may be wrong, is that Nicolson was by himself in charge of the embassy when there a Shah was deposed and replaced, and had to decide whether the Empire would support the new Shah.
-Ed.