Traveller: Ship Diversity

One thing I like about Traveller's starships is they are so diverse and cool. You could design anything in any shape and still have it work within the default setting or one of your own. With the default ships given in the basic rules - you still have a wide variety of designs, shapes, and concepts all coming together for a fun and diverse mix of styles and shapes.

You see this design ethos tend to standardize itself in sci-fi movies. In Star Trek, all ships tend to follow the same design theory. You have engine sponsons, large upper disks, small main hulls, and a general flat deck design. Star Wars is a bit more diverse, but you still end up with the same flat desk cruisers and small ships, with a wider variety of fighter shapes. There are a couple different styles of ships in Traveller for a fun mix of hulls and design concepts, and you see those come together nicely and in a seamless blend.

Flat Deck Ships

These are your typical flat-deck designs, you land on a planet, and the decks are aligned parallel to the ground. Walk-in and walk off. A lot of games and sci-fi assume this design since it is very familiar, and makes starships seem like space trucks. And this is also cheaper to film since you are not dealing with an orientation change when you film people getting in and out.

Antigravity is very important with flat deck ships, since acceleration would force everyone to the "back" of the ship in the opposite direction of the thrust.

Space Stations

I like the laboratory ship design in the book, it is a spinning wheel type ship and very cool. Not many other sci-fi games have starships that look like space stations and this game celebrates them. This is also one of those classic designs from one of the old Traveller adventures, and it is good to see it held up as an example of a cool design. It reminds me of movies like Interstellar and that just makes me smile.

You need antigravity in these ships when they are accelerating, because you run into the same "forced back" issue as flat deck ships (unless there is a second and third opposing floor set on the ring). When stationary, they can minimize the energy needed to maintain artificial gravity by rotating the ring. With solar panels I bet these ships could have incredible endurance sitting in one place and still maintain a comfortable living environment.

Stacked Hulls

Stacked hulls are starships with decks arranged like a loaf of bread. If you landed on a planet (if you could) half of the deck would be pointing down and the other half up in the air, and without artificial gravity everyone would fall to one side. These types of ships were popular also in the original Star Frontiers game, and that threw our expectations since we had assumed a more flat deck style coming from games like Space Opera.

Stacked hulls get around the problem of not having anti-gravity if all you have is 1G acceleration. You accelerate towards a point in space at 1G and keep the decks down, and everyone inside has normal gravity due to acceleration. Mid-point, you flip the ship so the engines point at the destination (something which all Traveller ships do anyways no matter what thrust rating), and fire off the engines at 1G of deceleration and all of a sudden you have normal gravity going towards the "floor" again. Without antigravity, this is how you do space travel, and stacked hulls make this possible.

Older ships in my games are nearly all stacked hulls from pre anti-gravity days, and these still see use. Hey, space is expensive and if you can re-use old ones for in-system work, who cares? That is why we pay you spacers the big bucks, now deal with our lowest bid contract. Just be thankful we didn't pay more money for a new ship since that would be coming out of your pay.

Hey, economics and cheap business practices don't go away just because we are in the future.

Not All the Best Stuff

This one I love. Most of the ships in the basic rulebook are Jump-1 and Jump-2 designs, with only a couple being Jump-3. Thrusts are similarly contained to low numbers. All the designs assume a TL12 baseline, and there are no Jump-6 and very few Thrust-6 ships in the book. I like this, and for the most part the universe should be a lower tech level than the maximum, and the maximum TL designs should be limited to very rare ship designs and specific situations. Not even if a world has billions of people should you assume the TL of its cultures is TL15. You should not walk into a starport, even the best one, and see shelves full of TL15 ship parts waiting for installation and purchase.

Like all technology, only certain militaries and governments are going to have the best stuff. And in a backwater sector or lower-tech game, you may never see the best stuff come around.

High-tech ship parts and personal gear are your "magic items" in a sci-fi game with a range of technology levels. Keep the baseline to "just what works" and keep the good stuff out of reach for rewards and goals. None of this great high-tech stuff should be purchasable, only on black markets and then that is even risky and could be a setup or swindle. Some high-tech gear should ideally be of alien design and require specialized knowledge (or an alien who understands it) to maintain and use.

Our sci-fi RPGs suffered from this "arms race" style of problem where the technology level and utility of starship parts kept increasing, and after a while starship combat and operations became unfun or total-destruction-or-nothing. Like those episodes of Star Trek where you can sit there in your ship and talk about problems, knowing nothing rules-wise can affect you. It got boring quick, and devolved into gotcha situations.

Maps!

I love the maps of the ships, and seeing them done in perspective is very cool. I love the idea of a sci-fi game with standardized ships. You know what to expect, the ships themselves become "knowable" and familiar, and surprises are still possible with tweaked designs but there is still an element of similar design in custom jobs.

Sometimes I feel sci-fi properties go overboard with custom ship designs just to look cool or be different. I like the classic Star Wars ships, and seeing them reused and come up again and again is very cool and hits my nostalgia button. However, there is a point where there feels like too many ships in that universe, every time we see a movie there are different ones, and I something in the back of my mind tells me they need to build these things on an assembly line and standardize. They must all be going broke.

Traveller, assuming a game that says "90% of the ships are standard designs," takes on a coolness factor where these things are mass produced and you get what you get. I can't go to a car company and say "I need an SUV, and I need it custom designed..." Well, if I were Elon Musk I could, but for most people, no, you buy a car from what's out there - new or used. If 90% of the ships made were "the ones that worked" and those are the ones from the book, that is what you are going to find and be using most of the time.

And that makes the special and unique ships out there rare and notable, which is a good thing because once you see something special, you get that wonder and surprise back. If everything is special, nothing is special.

Fun Classics

I like this version of the game and the updated take on back to the basics. This is hitting the right notes for me, and seeing these old friends come back and be celebrated again warms my gamer heart. The diversity of designs is also cool, and it is fun to see even movies made today reflect these designs and give us a new look inside them. No other sci-fi game really does that as well, and this is like seeing an old friend again who is doing just fine.