Solarpunk Traveller: The World of Mora

 

TL;DR. In a long, rambling post I try to describe what the world Mora, the “hub” of the Spinward Marches, would be like in solarpunk Traveller. I focus more on the nature of life in a large, technologically advanced solar system and less on the stuff adventurers care about.

Although this is in reference to a table top role playing game, my actual goal is to think about what a successful, solarpunk society would look like. I propose that Mora is a heterogeneous group of communities holding many different beliefs and goals, but it uses four key values to make a world in which everyone benefits. These values are; personal freedom, radical transparency, a diversity of communities, and a limit on the inheritance of wealth.

No one has a definitive answer to what a post-scarcity "solarpunk" world would look like, but I'm going to give it a shot.

This is post #6 in my Solarpunk Traveller series. The others can be found here (  #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5). That said, I have tried to write this post to stand alone. (You do need to know that Traveller is an old science fiction TTRPG set in a universe of thousands of different worlds and it makes some assumptions about future technology, which I will try to explain as I go.)

Background.

What I mean by solarpunk. In the Traveller setting, there is no conflict between polluting and non-polluting energy sources. The game has always assumed that vast amounts of very inexpensive energy is available from fusion power. So instead, in this context, I am using solarpunk to mean that the people of Mora use appropriate technology (here we mean, easy to maintain, low cost, environmentally friendly, and appropriate to the community), they understand that they are integrated into the web of life on their world, they reject unjust social hierarchies and respect the worth and dignity of all people, they understand that they live in communities and that there are obligations of mutual aid, and for the most part they believe that problems can be fairly / justly solved—often with the appropriate technology.

What is Mora, the world and system. For this post I’m only considering the material in the original Spinward Marches as cannon and everything that’s been added over the years, I’m taking or leaving as I feel fit. That said, I went with the physical description of the Mora system on the Traveller map and I set the systems population to around 50 billion.

Mora is (I think) the most heavily populated system in the Marches. It is TL 15 (which is the highest possible in the main human empire) and has well over one billion people living off-world in the various communities scattered around the solar system. And, it has been settled for over 1,000 years and people living there have generally had a pretty good for most of that time. The world itself is 90% covered in water, has a dense and tainted atmosphere and a gravity of a little over 1 G. Most people live in large archologies.

Living on Mora. Mora is not a happy world full of people who all share the same beliefs and spend their time loving their neighbors and having drum circles while singing Kumbaya, far from it. But it is a peaceful world.

And a vibrant world. There are endless things happening, people trying new ways to live, new arts and entertainments. There are countless communities pushing the frontiers of human knowledge and inventing wonderful new technologies.

There are rich people and poor people. But no one is ever hungry except by choice. No one is destitute except by choice. And there is hardly ever a need for violence.

Most people are generally happy and content with their lives. But they are almost always in disagreement with others around them. But that’s okay because being around people you disagree with is not bad, as long as everyone feels safe to express themselves and everyone has the basics needed for a fulfilling life. And they do because of the Core Values of life on Mora.

The Core Values.

Mora society is based on four core values, personal freedom, radical transparency, diversity of communities, and the inheritance cap.

Personal Freedom. The people of Mora believe that humans should be able to live their lives as they feel is best, with certain restrictions. The most commonly cited restriction is, “first do no harm”. But there is a lot of disagreement over what constitute “harm”. Certainly almost everyone accepts that killing and maiming and removing peoples only source of income is considered harm. It gets fuzzier when the conversation turns to changing the physical nature of the environment or pulling people away from one world view and towards another. But conflicts are resolved using informed, democratic approaches whenever possible. And the “informed” part in linked to the next value.

Radical Transparency. The people of Mora believe in, and expect, radical transparency (it has a Wiki page). There are public resources that allow anyone to know who – exactly – controls any given resource. There are cyborg sales representatives who can see a person’s estimated total net worth just by looking at them. There are AI agents which can alert you when a member of some community comes near you, or enters your shop, or passes your air raft in heavy traffic. You can easily know the earnings of a store or the pollution created by a factory. All that information and more is available to anyone who cares.

But most people don’t care. It is only when lifestyles are coming in conflict and there is the potential to cause harm that people will start worrying about the implication of this or that ownership. The richest person on Mora might sit next to the poorest at a ball game and each not realize it. (Unlikely, because the richest will usually buy better seats, but it does happen. Not every event worth attending has monetized their seats.)

Diversity of Communities. Rather than working towards one giant monoculture of a community with everyone believing and living the same lifestyles. The people of Mora recognize that their planet’s strength comes from the wild diversity of different communities. People are free to belong formally (or informally) to a wide number of communities at the same time. This might include their Immediate Family, their Extended Family, one or more World View communities like a religion, and one or more for profit or non-profit corporations associated with their work. Most people also identify with a number of social communities based on their interests and activities, including sports teams, fan clubs, and interest groups.

The Inheritance Cap. Wealth represents an individual’s control of certain assets. If a person owns a home, they control the use of that home under normal circumstances. Conditions may occur where their ownership is superseded by another group, for example if the home is on fire, the local fire fighters have authority over the house, but only as it relates to the fire. But all wealth is an agreement in the broader community of who has control of the given asset.

And the community decides how this control passes between generation. On Mora there is an agreed upon system for defining a family and for determining the median family income. No single individual can receive from any other individual more than two centuries worth of the current median yearly family income. So if the average Mora family makes 50,000 Credits per year, no one can gain from anyone else more than 200 times that number. This allows an individual to inherit enough wealth that they never have to work a day in their life—if they don’t want to. Yet not so much that there are lineages of people with inordinate control over the lives of others.

Note about calculating a person’s wealth. On Mora something like the market capitalization of a corporation would be considered meaningless. If Guy Wealthy owns 50% of a corporation which has 1,000,000 shares valued at $100 each, on modern Earth we would say they are worth 500,000 (his number of shares) times $100 (their current value) or $50,000,000. On Mora they would say he controls 50% of the company's shares, and the last time one share sold, it went for $100. There are more than enough computers on Mora to sort through all the ownership details should it come up, there is no need to reduce one person's total wealth to a single number. Should such a number be needed, there are many mathematical models that are used to estimate it. And given radical transparency, everyone can know anyone else’s number, if they care.

Life on Mora

People of Mora

The people of Mora have been able to safely modify their own genetics for at least 800 years. And given their love of personal freedom, they have been doing so for centuries. Although everyone is unique in their own special way, the people of Mora can be roughly classified into four biological types.

Main. These are the “wild type” humans. They are not particularly well suited for life on Mora, but they can get by okay. They must were a filter mask when they are outside, but are otherwise comfortable. These folks usually live in large archologies and seldom have to go outside for any length of time.

Off world. Over a billion people live off the main world in Mora. There are giant orbital cities and artificial moons. There is (of course) a massive Imperial Navy base and an Imperial Scout base high above the planet’s surface. Needed mineral resources are harvested from the Oort cloud while metal are refined and reduced in giant artificial space stations.

Adapted. These people have genetically modified respiratory systems so they can go about outside very comfortably without a filter mask. They usually also live in the archologies, but some have settled in small towns on the occasional land mass, or on large floating islands that drift across the planet’s surface.

Aquatic. About 500 years ago the first people modified their biology so they can live in the shallow waters that cover much of the planet. They must surface every few hours to re-oxygenate but otherwise they can live anywhere down to about 50 meters under water. Many of them are very happy to spend most of their lives underwater with life styles including everything from agriculture of aquatic plants to heavy industry. Most have air-filled homes floating just underwater and pop in and out of the water like modern terrestrial humans going outside. A little over 20% of the population live like this.

Deep Sea. In the last few centuries people have started moving into the deep oceans. Some are Aquatics with technological equipment to help them in the “deep dark” but recently people have begun adapting themselves to live down there with ever less technological support.

Population

Total: 50,000,000,000

    Off world: 1,000,000,000

    Main: 20,000,000,000

    Adapted: 14,000,000,000

    Aquatic: 10,000,000,000

    Deep sea: 5,000,000,000

Note regarding biological modifications. All the genetic modifications deployed on Mora follow careful safety standards. If an Aquatic, for example, mates with a Main, the child will develop into only one of the two genetic types. Once the child reaches maturity, it can be very difficult to alter their body to a new type so care is taken to allow the child to chose which lifestyle they want.

Native Life

Long ago the Ancients seeded Mora with a very terrestrial form of life. The equatorial seas are thriving with corals and fish and crustaceans and everything else required for coral reefs. The shallows are a garden-like paradise populated with human cities integrated into this web of life.

Whale-like filter feeders live off the microscopic critters growing in the deep water while human settlements slowly expand across the sea floor.

But the 10% of the surface that is above water is almost entirely a manicured garden. Archologies sit on rock outcrops while anywhere with soil is cultivated, but mostly for aesthetics. The population receives most of the reduced carbon in their diet from shallow sea agriculture.

Social Life

People on Mora spend their life in community. Well, in a lot of communities. On Mora communities have a legal existence that allows for the collective action of individuals. Governments, families, political movements, religions, and ethnicities are all legal communities, just as as for profit and non-profit corporations.

World View communities. This is the collective term for religions, philosophies, political movements, and even different approaches to science and technology. There are thousands of World View communities on Mora. Many are off-world religions or even ethnicity. For example, in three polar archologies there is an active Sword World community composed of the decedents of Imperial prisoners of war who didn’t want to return to their world of origin after the conflict.

A note on ethnicity. On modern Earth, ethnic groups are people who share genetic or cultural backgrounds. Since by TL15 it is trivial to change one's genetic makeup, ethnic groups exist only as groups sharing traditional cultural backgrounds. There is no biological component to a person’s affinity to an ethnic group. Certain World View communities still think a genetic component in an ethnic backgrounds are important, but most people and communities do not.

Social communities. Governments are all viewed as local communities, as are families. Family structure is often determined by ones world view community. A reclusive religion might only recognize certain family structures and marriages to other members of the religion. Personal freedom allows anyone who wants to leave the freedom to do so. They might loose access to certain community held resources and they might lose any inheritance from their extended family, but there will be a place for them somewhere. And it will support a comfortable life.

Note on families as communities. By TL 15 human reproduction is a conscious act. There is no need for the existence of unplanned pregnancies. Therefore, much of the social conventions formerly used to control reproduction are meaningless. On Mora, many communities exist, by design, for only a fixed amount of time. Families are one such community. Many common families are incorporated for a time to see the creation and raising of some number of children. Other families are created to legally join two or more people together for mutual support. There are no bounds on the size or nature of these families. Two people might join together "until death do us part", but so can three or six. Whatever. As long as the paperwork is filed correctly, it is no one's business. 

Likewise, new adults frequently enter into formal relations of a fixed duration. Four years is very common. At the end, if it is working out, they might renew it and add addendums for children--or they might not. No harm, no foul.

Corporate efforts. Lastly corporations, whether for profit or not, are considered communities. Everyone working for a corporation knows exactly how much money the group is making and how much each employee earns. This puts a damper on abusive business practices and allows individuals to earn money according to their value to the endeavor.

Of course when the corporation is formed, there are rules that are laid out on the distribution of funds and some people may get a disproportionate amount of the earnings, but at least everyone knows what they have signed up for, and those who don’t like it are free to leave, knowing full well that they will have a comfortable life while they look for a new position.

If you’ve read this far, hopefully you have seen something that makes you think about the nature of a post-scarcity, solarpunk world. This one is just a fiction for telling stories in a game, but I expect there are people who might find it useful. As always, thank you for taking the time to read this, and I truly do welcome comments and questions.

Solarpunk Traveller #5

 

The Big Picture

TL;DR. In this post, I try to pull together what an actual solarpunk Traveller adventure would actually look like. At a high level and focusing on games that would appeal to the average “traditional” Traveller player. What I did not do, is focus on “cozy sci fi” which is something I think Traveller could do—and maybe I’ll talk about that later.

 

This is post #5, the first four are  #1, #2, #3, and #4.

 

Welcome to Solarpunk Traveller. In this setting, the Imperials are the “Good Guys”. They regulate interstellar commerce allowing the free, but profitable flow of knowledge within Imperial Space. They prevent the willful enslavement of others. They regulate the standards used to create technology and they protect the borders from those who wish to destroy what humanity has made.

Tech Aside: Technology doesn’t just work. It requires coordination. A common modern example might be cars and fuel. There are big cars and little cars. There cars made by this country and that country, but they all are built to use a standardized fuel—or at least one of a small set of standardized fuels. Likewise, in Solarpunk Traveller, starships are built around standards. If the players capture an enemy ship with a really cool triple laser turret, they can sell their old single pulse laser and swap in the new one. It doesn’t matter which Imperial world made the ship or the salvaged turret, only that they conform to Imperial standards. From there it is just engineering to swap the two. Traveller has always had a “Do-it-yourself” or solarpunk view of technology.

The corollary being that a megacorp can’t ship through interstellar space turrets that only work on the starships they built. This creates sustainable technology which can be adapted to meet the differing needs of people across the Empire.

 Individual planets and star systems are autonomous political units. Most exist to look after the welfare of their citizens. Some follow highly restrictive beliefs while others are welcoming and friendly. Some are prosperous with new people continuously immigrating, bringing with them highly qualified personnel with rare and valuable knowledge, while others are slowly dying under the weight of their own stupidity. The Empire allows this, with one restriction, people are free to use their own wealth to leave, if they wish.

Social Equity Aside: Traveller has always been like this. People can come and go from planets—there are a few that the Empire has isolated. The Traveller’s Aid Society has labeled these as Red Zones and a few TAS advises folks to not visit (Amber zones), but generally the population is free to travel as they wish between worlds. Traveller has always had this element of social equity. Sure, there are unjust worlds, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Most of the Empire is full of star systems with spaceports full of people coming and going, travelling between worlds for business or pleasure. Few of these people carry weapons, because they are not needed. In general, Traveller has always rejected pessimism. Only on the edges are things ill-defined or dangerous.

In Traveller, the Empire has always been made of communities focusing on particular needs. Planets or star systems have governments focusing on the needs of the people living there. The Traveller’s Aid Society is a community of affluent people who work to make their travels easier—and also help non-members at the same time. Corporations are communities of people working to build and sell goods and services. The Scouts are a community of people interested in (and support by the Empire to) exploring the edges of Imperial Space.

So, what kind of adventures can we have in such a world?

The adventure Tarsus just works out of the literal box as a solarpunk adventure. A citizen has a problem with her inheritance, and a group of her friends help her sort out the trade relations with different communities. Depending on the players, violence may or may not be very important in resolving the problems. Here are some ideas.

Diplomatic Spies. Maybe the players are a team sent from Milagro (a minor world in District 268)  to see if they can’t open relations with Lydia (a small, xenophobic world just inside the empire in Glistin). This could be a highly roleplaying, diplomatic game which would not be most players’ preference, except that the nearby world of Grote is offering the player characters good money to also learn the secret to Lydian tea which is highly regarded in many noble homes.

Trouble Shooters. The players could be a team of trouble shooters for the Imperial Bureau of Standards who are sent from world to world on missions to investigate corporate wrong-doings. Not the legal kind, that is the parties NPC sidekicks who are all lawyers and accountants. No, the parties job is to sneak (or fight) their way into restricted spaces and extract evidence of illegal activity. This remote outpost might be a “chop shop” converting stolen Zhodani technology to work within imperial standards. That planet might be using radioactive paint on the faces of their stylish watches. All sorts of “spy adventures” are possible.

Human Rights Protectorate. The Traveller’s Aid Society spends most of its time worrying about its member’s comfort, but they are a huge organization with a lot of money, and an invested interest in keeping the empire strong. So, they might have a secret organization of their own trouble shooters who investigate allegations of slavery, forced labor, and other illegal activities. These teams might be sent to all sorts of nasty places to investigate all sorts of unpleasant groups. And it would be easy to imaging more typical players jumping in  such games.

This week we are investigating a claim that this remote oligarchy is genetically manipulating their citizens to create low-intelligence laborers who are unable to ever leave the system. Next week it is a corporation that kidnaps poor children and raises them as mindless killers.

Of course, the group can be all these things. The player characters could simply be a trusted team with a starship that is hired for different missions. The key to making it solarpunk (IMHO) is focusing on the basics. Refusing pessimism. The players are out to effect positive change in the world. Sustainable, “do-it-yourself” technology. The players are not shipping around a few boxes of mindless junk from one world to the next, trying to make a payment on their personal debt. They control assets (particularly a starship) that is given to them by their community with the understanding that they will use it for good. And social equity, they are doing good in their world. They are not chasing this month’s mortgage payment. They are chasing people who are taking advantage of others. They are chasing those who violate the community standards that define the empire. And hopefully they are having interesting adventures as they do it!

 

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this, and please feel free to leave comments or questions below.

 

Solarpunk Traveller #4: Technology and Corporations

TL;DR. Human technology does not require corporate ownership of intellectual property and capitalist investment to thrive. Technological advancement requires people with different skill sets to work together towards a common goal. Yes, this can be funded by the wealthy for the soul purpose of increasing their wealth, but it is not required. In fact, in an open setting, capitals protection of intellectual property could be very restricted, and technology would do just fine. And, the core Traveller mechanics already model this structure. In other words, Traveller technology is already solarpunk.

This is part four of a (very slowly) developing thread about what a solarpunk Traveller game would look like. The others are found here. Solarpunk Traveller #1, #2, and #3.

There is a TV commercial called "Dear Alice". It's somewhat famous amongst the solarpunk community and for many people it defines both the solarpunk aesthetic and solarpunk technology. I'm going to assume you've watched it--here's a link:

In Dear Alice, an unseen grandmother has left a small farm or agricultural business to Alice, along with some advice. We learn that “the land is more than just dirt. If you look after it, it will feed you forever.” Now remember a couple of posts ago I was babbling on about why people would go into space. Many people are travelling to find a new home where they can establish themselves forever. Of course, the settlers don’t expect to life forever, not in Dear Alice and not in the Traveller universe. But they expect people to live forever in the place they are creating.

This solarpunk vision is not anti-technology. The people of the land show use all sorts of sophisticated equipment to provide for themselves and others. They have robotic harvesters and flying wind turbines and cool micro-rain generators.

But they also have upgraded their wooden barns with advanced materials (at least, that’s what it looks like to me) and their robot carries a cloth sack when picking fruit. They use their technology and adapt it to their needs.

This is not an anti-technology vision. Technology is accepted as one of the core elements of human existence. It is what we do. But it is not the only thing we do. We also live in community. Remember, we are told, “a business is only as good as its people”. So treat them well. We have technology, we have a culture of reuse and adaptation, we have a concern for community, but we also have one other thing. We know that Alice is “a smart one” and she will be “okay, come rain or shine”. The last element we have are what Canadians like to call HQP, or Highly Qualified Personnel.

Not everyone can know everything. In fact, in Dear Alice, we know there are people who are struggling, because we see her farm preparing a crate load of food for “donation”. We don’t know who gets it, or why they need it, but we know she is donating some of her produce. All that advanced technology Alice uses requires skilled people to develop, build, and deploy it.

But in an era with modern communication it doesn’t really require vast amounts of money. Some money, but not “half the wealth of the country is controlled by a handful of people” kind of wealth. In the sciences we have “open science”. It is an off shoot of the open source movement in software. Both of these open movements are allowing great technical innovation, without wealthy capitalists backing them.

I would argue the key element here is something called Intellectual Property. The ownership of ideas. Today, we allow people to own ideas for a length of time to allow them to profit off the effort it took them to develop the idea. We can copyright, patent, or trademark our ideas. But an often overlooked aspect of Traveller is that the Empire only controls interstellar trade. In the Traveller universe, the Empire controls the movement of intellectual property.

At almost any technology level people can communicate with others in their star system. But communication between stars happens at the speed of travel, or at the speed of trade. The most important thing the Empire provides are standards and protocols. The Empire regulates how technology interfaces with other technology. This allows the Empire to exist as a single culture even though there is massive heterogeneity within its people and their technology.

Mora can develop a cool new jump drive, but someone on Regina can install it on their ship. Because all the standards are set by the Empire. The Traveller mechanics already allow this, which implies that the Empire is regulating technology standards.

We are already primed for solarpunk Traveller. This setting is not anti-corporations instead it is anti-enshittification. No one can have a monopoly on a technology. Imperial standards allow local components to be added to off-world systems. If someone wants to sell Alice a harvesting robot, they can. But if she can access the right highly qualified personnel, she can modify it to meet her needs. And if her world has enough population and high enough tech level, she can likely find someone who can help her.

Mega corps are not all powerful. The things they make are commodities, not protected intellectual property. Instead, Traveller corporations are fragmented bodies, not dissimilar to (say) the Hudson Bay company before the invention of the telegraph. Traveller interstellar corporations that leverage the unique skills of their HQP and history to create products people want. But if they start enshitting their products to try and extract increased wealth at the expense of utility, people can simply walk away.

On Earth today there are a handful of corporate entities that control the intellectual property behind most of modern technology. In a Traveller setting, such a monopoly can not exist. If you start making your products worse, in order to gain a profit, someone else can make a replacement for the thing (using a different approach) and everyone will start buying that and everyone will start buying that and swap out your tech.

In fact, corporate reputation will likely be one of their most important assets. And the key resource being traded long distances is knowledge. Specifically, technical knowledge. There can be endless adventures focused on identifying and recruiting the HQP who have the technical knowledge needed to create a local solution.

In fact, Traveller technology is already be solarpunk, we don’t need to change the tech rules—just how we view them. Any set of tech rules where you can create a vehicle (or robot) by purchasing different components, at different tech levels, but which will interoperate, can be considered solarpunk.

Now we are in a place where we don’t need to change the rules, just our understanding of what the rules mean. Well, that is enough rambling for now. As always thanks for reading this and please feel free to leave your comments or questions below.

Solarpunk Traveller #3

 

Why people wont ship food between worlds (much).

Here are links to the earlier posts. Solarpunk Traveller #1 and #2

I’m writing this in Q2 of 2026 in the time between when the oil has stopped flowing from the Middle East but before the last cargo ship arrives in North America. We have been watching a crisis unfold slowly across the globe as locations which use Middle Eastern oil for energy start to feel the shortage. We don’t really know how that will effect the US and Canada yet, but we will start seeing the effects in about a week.

But it has made me think about shipping food.

A recurrent theme in the Traveller is buying and selling cargoes for your free trader starship. It is a notion modelled on the world of about the time my parents were born. Back then, in the 1920s and 30s, there were large cargo ships that were made for specific companies, that would travel on fixed routes, with fixed cargoes. One might pick up bananas in South America, move them to the US, then reload the ship with cars and move them to Europe, then take cargo from there back to South America. Then there were the free traders. These were smaller ships that would look for cargo in whatever port they happened to be in, take it to where it was going and start looking for more cargo there.

These free traders also usually had a few cabins and would take passengers with them. Allowing people to move about before the creation of regular air lines. Here is a neat book about travelling on these ships. That whole world died with the Second World War. By the 1970s, when Traveller was written, food transport was already beginning to be standardized. Containers dominated shipping. Cargo ship seldom picked up cargoes and instead things were moved in standard containers with corporate ships transferring containers as needed between ports and trains taking them inland. Free traders were already rare at that time.

By 2026 this containerized network covers the global and represents the overwhelming majority of all international movement of goods.

Including food. We grow fruits in one country, ship them halfway around the world to process them and then ship the processed food again for packaging. Shipping is so cheap that it is the price of labour that drives where certain work is done, moving the goods is almost free. At least as long as the oil is flowing.

But in Traveller, movement is expensive and time consuming (one week per jump) and energy is basically free. Traveller assumes that there are relatively low-tech ways to convert hydrogen gas into electricity—it’s the power plant for all those relatively inexpensive starships.

Google tells me that accelerating a 100 ton starship at 1G for 1 day would take on the order of 8 x 10^12 calories (already converted to kcal for my fellow math nerds) which is enough energy to feed half of Earth’s current population for one day. In other words, a 7 ton, 16 Mcr power plant could feed all the people on Earth today. Let’s assume 50% efficiency and go with two of them. The amount of money spent on food in the USA would pay for these two power plants in about six minutes.

So what is food? Food is mostly just reduced carbon. Plants take in carbon dioxide, which is literally just oxidized carbon and they “reduce” it – if you remember REDOX reactions from high school chemistry, that was what they were talking about – the plants then break water (H2O) and produce O2 gas (oxygen) and various hydrocarbons. We then eat the hydrocarbons – often as sugars and starch or lipids—and use the energy to run our bodies. Now there is some fancy chemistry that needs to be done, our bodies have certain small molecules that we need but can not produce ourselves, essential amino acids and the like, and there are a number of micro nutrients that we also need. But all of this is just a chemistry problem.

You can imagine LEDs being used to grow plants which are then feed to other creatures in carefully constructed networks that creates everything humans need to survive. In Andrew Weir’s 2017 book Artemis , we see a very near future moon colony that recycles wastes to run algae production to create food, using power from a nuclear power plant. And it is so new that people complain about the flavors, and rich people like to pay to have Earth food shipped to the base. But that is about the extent of it.

So any Traveller colony of non-trivial size, say half a million or more people, would have food production facilities that will meet all of their populations needs for a fraction of the cost of one one-hundred ton starship. We can assume there would be multiple systems producing a variety of foods. There is no real need to ship food from one world to another.

In fact, food production is really just a minor consideration for interstellar travel. Sure, there will be short-term bases that are created to do a thing, and they are too small or too temporary to justify setting up an ecology. These places would have regularly scheduled food shipments. Likewise, there will be communities that want specific food items only available on another world. These can be shipped as needed.

But in general, the creation of food is a solved problem long before the first interstellar starship heads off to establish a new colony.

This does bring up an interesting problem of technology. Some places are going to be hostile to life. They will need a “mechanical” or “technological” ecosystem. Food will be created from carbon dioxide which will create the required oxygen gas, which in turn is consumed by the humans to recreate carbon dioxide. Energy will be feed into this system and allowances will be made for certain inefficiencies—maybe they need to add outside water to account for trace amounts of escaped gas or maybe certain micronutrients are not recovered and everyone takes a pill once a month. These worlds need to maintain their technology level if they are to last. Life on such a world is dependent on the technology.

Other worlds may want to be self-sufficient without needing technology. They want self-replicating, living systems, to create what they need. How this is done depends on why people have settled the world. If your religion believes that you should settle this particular uninhabited world and there you and your decedents will live the “One True Life” (tm), then you either need to change the world to fit your needs or you need to change yourself to fit the world. And this opens infinite terraforming and biopunk story opportunities.

This is probably enough for today. As always thank you for reading this and I always welcome comments or questions below.

Solarpunk Traveller #2

It took me a while to figure out how to approach this, but I think I have it.

This is Part 2 of a series that starts here.

Why would people go into space? If you want to create a realistic solarpunk interpretation of the Traveller universe, you have to start by answering the question, “Why do people go into space?” This is the main problem holding back modern space exploration. No one can come up with a compelling reason to go. It is hard, technically challenging, and requires a comparatively large amount of resources.

But, it is pretty obvious that eventually people will start travelling through space. One obvious reason to go is to prove (to yourself and others) that you can. That’s how the USA put people on the moon.

A close follow up to that reason is to see what is there. Given that in the Traveller universe the only way to see what is actually going on at another star system is to go there, it seems likely that a lot of initial space exploration will be jumping to new systems just to map them, see if they have any unusual concentrations of resources, or if there is any alien life there.

This brings us to an oddity of the Traveller backstory. Once upon a time, 300,000 years ago, an alien species called the Ancients transported humans to all sorts of other worlds. No one knows why. But, this means that eventually our exploring humans will encounter other exploring humans and everyone’s view of life, the universe, and everything will be upended. Once we know there are other clusters of humans out there, many cultures are going to jump start their exploration just to see what they can find.

Next, people will go into space just to harvest resources. But there won’t be that many resources people actually need. At least, not resources that will need to be shipped back to another star system. Elements and minerals that are rare on the surface of Earth, gold, diamonds, are common if you look in the right spot. Since gold forms in the hearts of massive events like supernovae, once you find where it is locally abundant, you can get as much as you need. And you don’t really need that much. We like gold because it is non-fungible—meaning we can use it as a token to control commerce. There will be no element that can serve this role once you have access to all of space. And minerals like diamonds—aside from likely being very abundant in certain locations, they can be fabricated. Even today, diamonds are easily manufactured whenever they are needed.

An oily aside. Petrochemicals won’t exist the way we know them today. To get oil deposits, you need plate tectonics, which requires liquid water and oceans, and living systems lasting for hundreds of millions of years. The living systems reduce carbon from their environment, die, and get buried through tectonic action, before they can oxidize. There will be very few worlds where this will happen, and there will be no reason to ship the oil when they do. We like oil because it can be burned when needed to power cars and the like. But in Traveller, you already have all the power you need with fusion reactors. It is easier to build an electrical distribution system around your reactors than to ship a bunch of flammable liquids over interstellar distances.

It seems likely that there will be some short-distance transfer of raw resources. This planet finds it easier to get the mineral that they need from over there, rather than building factories to make it on their own world. But if the trade starts getting too hard, you just walk away from the problem.

Which brings me to what I think will be the main reason people will head off to other worlds. To get away from people.

People form communities and communities form cultures and cultures are always different from one another. I currently live in Manitoba and this is one of the last corners of Western civilization. There are just under two million of us here, with about half living within a half hour drive from where I am typing. (We have one main city, Winnipeg, and it has about half the province’s population.) In this province, we have dozens of different communities composed of people that want to only (or primarily) associate with their own people. Some of these communities are small enough and have been together long enough that they are starting to become inbred. I see no reason to suspect that this will ever change. The individual groups come and go, but I can easily imagine a far future where groups of people are transporting themselves off to uninhabited worlds and establishing themselves there, with the hope of living in isolation.

A biopunk aside; Genetic Isolation. I suspect that once the tech is available, a lot of these communities will also want to modify their biology to further this isolation. It is likely that it will be relatively easy to modify an organism’s chromosome structure so that members of a community can only produce viable children with other community members. This is a likely way that despotic leaders will try and keep their population under their control. At the same time, it is likely they will also want to modify people’s physical appearance so that you can easily recognize outsiders.

“But hey, this is biopunk not solarpunk. Where is the optimism?”

“Easy. It is in the rest of humanity.”

I live in Manitoba and I am surrounded by self-isolating communities. But I am also surrounded by people who have left them. The problem that the despots face is that as soon as people realize that these communities are based on a false understanding of the world, many of their people leave. I know countless ex-this and ex-thats.

So my vision of a solarpunk Traveller universe is one that is full of worlds that are marked as amber zones because the locals are trying to keep their people from learning the true nature of the universe while it is all glued together by people who have—for the most part—recently left this or that group and have discovered the broader nature of human existence.

Further, this will be so common that there will exist communities who’s main goal is liberating those who are trapped. Underground railroads transporting the repressed. Genetic clinics that reverse religious-based modification. Countless games can be focused on the adventure of people discovering life beyond that they are taught.

And that leads us to the one force that has the greatest impact on human mixing, conflict. But I think that is a topic for another post. Until then, I thank you for your time, and as always I invite any questions or comments below.

Solarpunk Traveller #1

 

I have a hard time considering running a Traveller game within the default setting because it is just so unrealistic. As I’ve already mentioned (in my four earlier Traveller posts, #1, #2, #3, and #4), the game is based on backwards-looking science and tries to recreate something like the British Empire in space. It’s fine if you are into that sort of thing, but I want something with more science fiction, less historical.

What do I want? What I am really trying to accomplish with these posts is to motivate someone to write a descent Traveller setting that I can then convince my Monday night gaming group to play, without me having to write it myself. If you are thinking of writing a forward-looking version of Traveller, please feel free to take any or all of what follows and incorporate it into your work. I want to play this game, not write it.

What is solarpunk? Like all fiction genera, solarpunk is ill-defined and means different things to different people, but it tends to cluster around a few core elements. I consider them to be:

Refusing pessimism: Solarpunk is not about accepting that all human existence must be miserable and dark. Instead, people can create societies that are functional and fair. Further, we can create technology that works for the benefit of people.

Sustainable technology: Solarpunk says that humans can create technologies that allow people to have a good life within these functional and fair societies. A lot of solarpunk focuses on renewable energy, but here we are talking about Traveller which assumes cheap and clean fusion power is easily available, so this is less of an issue.

Social equity: In order to have these fair and functional societies, we need to recognize the role of social equity. In my mind, this includes recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of all people. And we also have to recognize that wealth accumulation is a function of the rules of a society, and these are written by the collective will of the people.

The second issue with social equity is that we must recognize the fallacy of biological determinism (which I have posted about here). This becomes an even bigger issue when we realize that at relatively low Traveller Technology Levels people will be able to modifier the genetics of their progeny. So, for example, in my game Rubble and Ruin their are bad people who have intentionally created races of big, low-intelligence humans. Solarpunk Traveller is going to have to address this application of technology.

Do-it-yourself: Lastly is the idea that the ability to create and modify technology does not have to be controlled by oligarchs. Much of the idea that modern technology cannot be modified or repaired is created by corporate entities trying to force people to buy a new device rather than repair an old one.

This becomes critically important when you think about interstellar trade in a Traveller-like universe. In a Traveller universe, there are nearly infinite markets. You do not need to intentionally make a bad product to drive sales. In fact, if you want to sell something off-world, you need to have a reputation for being reliable and repairable.

I argue that DIY in the Traveller universe is the presence of transparency and technological standards. Transparency means that you have to say what things really are. No withholding important information. What is the thing made out of? What are the operating conditions under which it is intended to work? How is it designed and how does it work? And standards imply that others can build things that work with what you have built. If you make an electronic devise, I need to be able to know exactly what power supply it needs. We already do this on Earth. There is just a handful of electronic plugs and voltages that are supplied, and you need to make sure your electronic equipment conforms to those standards.

But more than that in Traveller. All your information technology needs to interoperate. Imagine not being ably to repair a starship because the navigation computer was made on Mora, and they use a different jump drive interface and the computer and the drive cannot function together. Now consider this for every two pieces of equipment that are supposed to work together. Imagine missiles fired from a starship that accidentally swing back and attack the firing ship because the targeting system uses the wrong measuring scale.

The most important thing that the Empire does is to keep the technology from one world able to operate on another. Any reader with a technology development background is likely say, “Of course, that is a massive and wildly important task”, while other readers are likely shaking their head and saying, “How trivial and boring.” In a sense, they are both correct. But most real conflict in a Third Imperium type world will come from conflicts over standards rather than over resources.

===== Getting Started =====

The Ground Rules. What am I keeping from the Third Imperium and what am I letting go?

The Map? Let’s start with the map. It is a silly, 2D hex-based map. I love it. When 2300 came out, everyone I knew loved the realistic 3D star map. Someone had already done the work of finding routes away from Earth that matched the space travel technology postulated by the game. It was great. But at the end of the day, for me, it neither enhanced play or immersion. I accept that some people will want a nice, modern 3D map, but I’m willing to not worry about it.

The Future History? What about the background? I’d like to keep the major events. The Ancients seeded many worlds 300,000 years ago. These scattered worlds have become the home to humans who have spread out across the nearby space. There are other alien races who have also developed space travel, and they are different from humans. That’s all works for me.

The Core Technology? Let’s keep it. Let’s keep the restriction that jump drives take a week to travel, independent of the distance they go. This is a great mechanic and it leads to an interesting situation where travel between human communities is once again long and dangerous. Let’s also keep the important fact that there is no faster way to communicate between worlds than to travel there.

Psionics? I vote no. I was there in the 1970s. Many, many people truly believed that psionics were a real thing and they were just about to become understood. This was a traditional that traced back to the dawn of science fiction. People honestly believed that magic was a real thing that we just didn’t yet understand—but it was coming soon. This hasn’t aged well and I think we can let them go. (As an aside, you find psi powers in all hard sci fi games of that time, Morrow Project, Aftermath, all of them.)

But we are going to need to add a modern understanding of biotechnology. And we will need to modernize the information technology. But those are separate issues.

For now, I think I am going to stop this here. I have a start. The next post will start with what I think a solarpunk Third Emporium will look like—or at least, what issues we need to consider. In till then, as always thank you for taking the time to read this and I always welcome comments, questions, or concerns in the comments below.

Traveller Blog #4. Xenobiology

 

This is my fourth post on “modernizing” Traveller. The others are, here, here, and here. The importent bit is that in the last one I mentioned one flaw with the biology of the game. Namely, that it did not take into account how easy it will become for humans to modify their own biology.

Traveller uses a mechanic called Technology Levels to track how sophisticated a culture needs to be before they can enact certain technology, and the original authors in 1977 thought things like controlling the aging process would be the hardest, so only the most advanced technology societies (TL 15) could do it. It is not something that is just around the corner. And they set uplifting other mammals as even more difficult. Yet, controlling gene expression and modifying our own biology is something that is coming fast on the heals of the information age, more like TL 9 than 16.

As an aside, I think they wanted anagathics to be hard to balance their life path character creation system, but we don’t need to do that today—there are other, easier, ways to balance characters.

There is another element of the biological sciences that needs to be woven into Traveller, xenobiology. As part of my “miss-spent” youth, I worked for several years in the laboratory of Sidney Fox who happened to be a world-expert on the biochemical origin of life. Which, aside from being an inherently fascinating subject, is also central to the Traveller setting. I can’t blog a review of all the details of this field of study, but I will hit on a few relevant points.

How common is life in the universe? Or, why are we looking for evidence of life on mars? There is a concept of the stellar ecosphere (or Habitable Zone) which is a space, shaped as a hollow shell, around a star wherein water on the surface of a planet can exist in liquid form. Life appears to have started on Earth within a few hundred million years after the planet formed—very quickly in geologic time. But here’s the rub. For the first few hundred million years of its existence the sun was burning hotter and Mars would have been in the habitable zone—in fact, the Earth might have been too hot to sustain life.

Now old-school origin of life folks imagined that life forming was a freak event with an almost zero change of happening. Fox’s work in the 1950s and 60s showed that this was likely untrue. In fact, the formation of life might be almost a given on any rock with the right collection of elements that is the right distance from its star.

So to prove this, we need to look for life on Mars. If life started to form on Mars, and then froze, it would mean that life almost always forms on planets withing the stellar ecosphere and therefore we should expect life to form frequently on other worlds. In Traveller, we assume this is true. So within a couple thousand light years of Earth there are assumed to be hundreds of planets that have their own, independent, life.

The History of Colonization. Further, in the Traveller “future history” there are several important waves of expansion. The most important is the work done by the mysterious ancients. An alien civilization, 300,000 years before the game (which is about 2,000 years in the future) took humans and transported them to many other planets, for reasons unknown. They also uplifted dogs to create the Vargre.

The game has several other major and minor alien species. Just in the Spinward Marches there are the Aslan and Droyne, both major races with their own world of origin, and there are chirpers and a few other scattered in various adventures published over the years.

The Biochemistry Problem. If one looks at all the different mechanisms that have been proposed over the years for the abiotic origin of life, I would lump them into two groups. The first answers the question, “How did we get here” and deals with the formation of life on Earth, and the second considers mechanisms for the development of life on other worlds. These latter approaches (I’m looking at you Graham Cairns-Smith) talk about other types of life, silicon, clay, or even non-Terrestrial carbon-based.

Fox’s work suggests that non-Terrestrial carbon-based life could very likely have recognizable proteins. And if you look at the thoughts on the subject from Freeman Dyson (the Dyson Sphere guy, presented here), it is reasonable to think that these proteins would have a genetic structure controlling their replication—but even if they did use sugar-based genetics, the sugar moiety would likely be completely different. This means that all these worlds are going to have a completely different biochemical basis.

A Little Background. Life on Earth is a complex web of biochemistry that creates ever more complex structures from reduced carbon--remember those redox reactions from high school chemistry--living systems burn reduced carbon to liberate energy to create new structures of reduced carbon. Because no process is 100% efficient, we have to burn more reduced carbon than we end up making. We might eat 100 calories and make 10 calories worth of new material.

Life exists as a thin layer coating a planet in a field of energy flux.

And life exists at different scales. Within cells there are symbiotic subcellular structures that were once independent living systems that have found their existence within your (yes, you the reader’s) own cells. There are small blocks of genetic material that form viruses. And their are giant whales that live by filtering microscopic organisms from the water they swim in. And all of this life is busy building more of themselves. The autotrophs (mostly plants) are capturing energy from the sun and reducing carbon dioxide from the air, while the heterotrophs (animals and fungi) are taking apart other things to build more of themselves.

And these systems are more or less specialized. Humans can eat all sorts of things, but not everything. Only certain plants can grow up here in Manitoba, while those same plants will be out competed if they try to grow further south.

And this brings us to the Biochemistry Problem. When two carbon-based biochemistries meet, one is likely going to completely disassemble the other—wiping it from the world. Or, the two will be completely incompatible. Neither being able to extract anything from the other.

So if we want humans travelling from one of the human worlds created by the ancients and living off native life forms, they either have to be eating Earth-based life, or the humans have to be modified to eat it—with just the occasional, weird, “Oh, you can eat that” alien thing.

This is going to lead to an interesting set of worlds. Those that you cannot go to, because you will be eaten—likely by unseen microorganisms—and those that have Earth-based life transplanted by the ancients but modified long ago to fit the new environment. And those where Terrestrial life co-mingles with the native life, each mostly ignoring the other. And those where humans have changed themselves to adjust to the new biochemistry.

Conclusions. As I move towards a vision of a solarpunk Traveller, I think I have all my main issues laid out. (But I am just writing this as a go, it is a blog after all.)

In my next post I want to start talking about life and exploration in a post-scarcity society. We need to consider things like, “What resources are important?” and “Why go to another world?” There will be different types of worlds with different biologys. But this is probably enough for now. As always, thank you for taking the time to read this and (as always) I welcome comments and questions below.

Traveller Blog #3: The Missing Sciences

 

This is my third post regarding the Traveller RPG. It is not a secret that I’m trying to build a case that we need a solarpunk interpretation of the game’s setting. And to get there, I wrote this post as background on the game and this one about how the science in Traveller was “backwards looking”; It is a game that focuses on old, not modern, science.

The two major sciences in my professional lifetime have been Information / Computer Science and Biology. Both are ill-defined, because they are both very much in active development and experiencing rapid growth.

Computation. In a Traveller context, our world has just left Technology Level (TL) 6 and entered TL 7 and in doing so, our world has changed. Every grandmother in the developed countries now has a computer with more computational power than the largest, fastest supercomputer in the world on the year Traveller was first published.

Think about that.

I want to say it was over a decade ago that an iPad had more computational power than the fastest Cray in 1977. And Grandma uses all that computational power to swap recipes with her physical and virtual friends (and pictures of cats).

Traveller considered computers large, complex machines used primarily for navigation and for storing little snippets of information. This will need to be reconsidered.

And our ability to interrogate biological samples has been increasing at a faster rate (here’s a link). What we know about the working of living systems is changing faster than our computers. Now from around the 1980s, when computers became a household appliance, to around 2010—let’s say 30 years—the physical nature of computers changed quickly. People in developed countries were buying new boxes every year or two. You had to. But, somewhere 10 to 15 years ago, that ended. Computers kept getting smaller for a while, until it reached a point where laptops are used as workstations, and handhelds are all you need for day-to-day computation.

Life Sciences. Biology hasn’t reached that “end-point” yet. But we’re moving quickly towards it. My day job is in children’s health research. When a child presents with symptoms of an in-born error of metabolism—which is fancy, medical speak for, “when parents take their baby to a doctor because something seems wrong,” -- it is not uncommon these days to perform whole exome sequencing. A little saliva (or maybe a drop of blood) will be taken and all of the child’s protein coding genes will be sequenced. For about one third of these children, we will immediately get a diagnosis. A diagnosis can be made, which in the past would have taken up to a decade, in a few weeks. For (about) another third, nothing unusual will be found. There is still plenty of work left to be done here.

But here’s the neat part. For the remaining third (plus or minus), we will find what are known as variants of unknown significance, almost always called a VUS. Figuring out if these genetic variants are important or not an area of active research. But the reason I bring this up in the context of Traveller, is because humans and fruit flies have so much of our biology in common, one thing we like to do—if the VUS has certain technical properties—is to make a fly but remove its version of the gene in question, replace it with the “normal” human form of the gene and another group of flies with the VUS form. If the baby is showing motor problems (which is a fancy way of saying they can’t move right), for example, and the humanized fly does not have motor abnormalities, but the VUS form of the fly does, we take that as evidence that the VUS could be negatively impacting the child’s motor development.

The point is that in 2025, we can just add and remove genes from animals (and to a lesser degree, plants) and we can give those genes whatever genetic sequence we want.

In 1977 the power to do this was considered to be so far in the future that in Traveller, only the ancients – with their super advanced and lost technology – could have uplifted a mammalian species. Now, unless someone finds a currently unseen obstacle, I expect this to be possible within my child’s life time. Maybe 40 years, certainly within 80.

Biological Constraints. On Earth, living systems are complex, self-replicating chemical reactions that are able to evolve over time. All living systems trace back to a single, small population of cells called the Last Universal Common Ancestor – Luca. This Luca appeared on Earth just a few hundred million years after the Earth formed, and it’s decedents have been thriving and diversifying ever since.

Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.

Complex multicellular organisms, plants and animals, create forms of themselves which alternate between different numbers of chromosomes. Mammals will create a sperm and an egg, which are haploid. These two will get together and make a new organism which inherits properties from both parents. This new organism will start from a single cell that divides. As these cells divide, they change the pattern of expressed genes, with this differentiating being an absurdly complex interplay between the genetic code and its environment. Usually, if it is able to secure resources, this new organism will develop into an adult form that can then repeat the process.

Or, to paraphrase, to make a new human a mommy and a daddy both make a haploid form of human, get them together, and that starts the creation of a new person. This new person develops from a lump of tissue undergoing the most complex chemical system currently known in the universe.

The important part, for a science fiction RPG, is that it is relatively easy (at near future technology levels) to modify the initial form of this organism, but very difficult to change it once it has grown.

This suggests that by TL 9, just as humanity is approaching interstellar travel, modifying organisms to meet their environment should be common place. And there is no reason this couldn’t be applied to humans.

So if we were to reimaging the Traveller setting, I argue, we must consider the effects of people being able to intentionally alter their biology, specifically to accommodate the needs of different worlds. Settlers can adjust their children’s metabolisms to accommodate local hazards. That world where everyone needs to wear a respirator mask while outside, not the locals. They’ve modified their lungs 800 years ago. But, it does mean that they may not be interested in travelling to a world where their modified lungs place them at a disadvantage.

And as we start thinking about the effects of information science and biology on the Traveller setting, we have to turn our attention to the development of life on other planets—and how that would effect our starward humans. But that sounds like the theme for the next blog post.

So, as always, thank you for reading this, and please feel free to leave any questions or comments below.

Traveller Blog #2: Science looking Backwards

 

This is Part 2 of my current thoughts on the RPG Traveller. Part 1 is here. Full disclosure, I love this game, I’ve been playing it on and off for almost 50 years. So what I’m about to say is not meant as a criticism or some negative assessment, only a statement of fact.

The science in Traveller is backwards facing, not forward.

In other words, it is looking back at old science and not looking forward to the new. The game was published in 1977, just years after physics reached its, shale we say, “social peak”. In the 1960s if you wanted to be a serious scientist working on the great issues of our time, you wanted to study physics. As the game was flourishing, the world was shifting its focus towards computer science and information technology. Sure you could still have a great career as a physicist. But it was becoming just another science.

I had a brother-in-law who was a little over 20 years older than me. He had a PhD in physics, worked on the space shuttle in the 1980s, but then went into business for himself by the 1990s and spent the bulk of his life running his own roofing company. He was very successful as a roofer; he benefited from his education and experience in the field, but he—like many others—left physics. It had become just a job.

The other main science of Traveller is the one that peaked just before physics caught the public eye, geography. Now days most people think of geography as a subject in school, not an active field of study, and certainly not a cutting edge discipline. And this is unfortunate because geography is, and always will be, an extremely important field of knowledge.

In the late 1800s, geography was a big deal. Humanity was finally gaining an understanding of the physical nature of our world, and who lived where. The peoples of many nations were interested in things like finding the source of the Nile and the unification of countries like Italy and Germany and the development of topographic maps of the major mountain ranges and rivers and just knowing our world.

Aside. I like to say that Lovecraft, writing in the 1920s, was writing just after the Age of Geography. He was writing at a time when the only places left in the world where there might be giant, alien, forgotten cities and civilizations, were in the most remote corners, in Antarctica or the furthest reaches of Africa. But his readers were in living memory of a time when such things could have existed. Our knowledge of geography had been so bad that there could have been hollow mountains in Main topped with undiscovered standing stones—at least when his older readers where young. But at the time of his writing, all that was past. But I think this is part of the enduring legacy of Lovecraft. His writings hinge on an incomplete knowledge of geography.

(Image, ©2017 Peter Saga used with permission. All rights reserved. )

Traveller in play. So Traveller is a game about the interplay of geography and physics set in an imagined far future where both of these disciplines affect everyday life of the characters and the people they encounter.

The physics part of that last statement is easy to defend. The game attempts to autogenerate realistic solar systems (you know, using mechanics from before when the first exoplanets were detected, but still, they try). They have a whole starship construction system with Drive Potential versus Hull Tons and the like, and the formulas for calculating interplanetary travel times.

It is this last bit which ties the game into geography. Traveller starships do not move at the speed of plot. They do not hop characters from one system to another, appearing at just the right time to maximize the drama. Nope. They have a fixed travel time, and it’s slow. Not generation ship slow, but it takes a little over a week to travel from one star system to the next. And you can’t go very far. Traveller is the original hex crawl-centric game. You start with a hex map with systems in maybe half the hexes, laid out at random, and your starships can move from one to six hexes per jump. In the games I played, typically two hexes.

Oh, and one more thing, there is no way to communicate between star systems that is faster than travelling there by starship.

The slowness of travel and communication creates a setting something like the late British Empire. It takes something like seven months to a year for information from the Home Office in the Imperial Core to get to the Spinward Marches, and the same for a response to return. Information can move, and troops can travel, but just not fast enough to replace the local governments.

This is the exact opposite of cyberpunk games. In a cyberpunk world the evil corporation has access to vast amounts of knowledge and can play the characters like pawns. In a Traveller game, everyone is scrambling for information. Everyone is wondering who they can and cannot trust. Everyone need to know the geography of their surroundings. Which systems are aligned with which. Which systems have resources, how much, and of what type. What can they do with all these things.

Geography, not Economics. Traveller tries to say it is focusing on economics. Characters have mortgages to pay on their ships. They are always trying to earn a credit hauling cargo. There are charts for the number of passengers you can find in each system and how much and what type of cargo you can get.

But those things don’t usually define the adventure. It is the geography. Frontier wars breakout and affect hundreds of systems. Evil Imperial megacorps have secret drug production factories on border systems and are selling them to the forces on the other side of that Frontier war. That’s geography, not economics.

Non-late-stage Capitalism. It is kind of funny to me, but just like the British Empire, Traveller is in a non-late-stage Capitalism setting. But the writers were writing from a Capitalist culture that was already in decline. The most obvious (to me) place where this comes up is with technology breaking. There are constant references in the later works about how technology cannot be effectively moved from high tech worlds to low tech worlds. TL 9 people will not pay a premium for TL 15 gear, because it will soon break and be useless.

But there are also TL 16 (above what the Empire can create) items that have lasted for a thousand years.

Even by the late 1970s we were talking about built-in obsolescence. About how manufacturers were purposefully making things that will fail with time so they could sell a replacement. If Traveller had real economics, it would allow that TL 15 cultures could make TL 9 items that would last close to forever.

Last summer, in real life, I got to volunteer on the oldest running steam train in North America. Our group’s Engine #3 was built in the 1880s and has been in continuous service. It went out of industrial service in 1972, when it was sold to the Vintage Locomotive Society. This organization keeps it in service, running on their 15 KM of rail line. (I jokingly tell people I’m into 1::1 scale model railroading.) As other industrial lines were converting to diesel engines, the local energy company (here in Manitoba) used the #3 to run back and forth on one specific line. I believe it would run from our city out to a remote power generation facility and back, moving supplies and personal. It only went out of service as it get to hard to maintain.

Imagine a steam engine made on Mora (the TL 15 industrial hub of the Spinward Marches setting). It’s properly engineered fittings would last a thousand years without maintenance. It would be light and easy to use. If manufactured for remote worlds, it could have 3d-printable replacement parts. If Traveller had real-world economics there would be a flow of useful technology moving from the developed worlds, out to the remote areas, and resources moving back. Companies would be fighting over markets—trying to determine how they could, more cheaply, solve a developing world’s problem. How they could profit from the technology gap between worlds.

Instead, the late-stage Capitalist idea that technology will fail rules all the markets of the Empire. But for this to be true, the manufacturers on Mora have to be purposefully making things to fail. And they would only do this with the hope that they could then sell more. But by doing this, no one is buying their tech.

Conclusions. I’m heading towards a re-imagination of the Traveller setting. One that is substantially more solarpunk. One that thinks about the economics of unbounded markets coupled with the isolation created by long travel times and the lack of instantaneous communication.

But before we get there, we have to think about Traveller’s missing science, biology. And that will be my next post.