[SteveS]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

I think Terran history would be very likely to be fasinating to the 3I because of its drama. Much of Villani history is dull and or repetative. They lived in a socially engineered society meant to be static and unchanging. That makes for dull history.

I disagree that Vilani history would be dull. Even if Vilani society is fairly static on a grand scale, Vilani history is so long that there's a vast quantity of history there to mine for interesting stuff: the pacification wars, political struggles between the core administration of the Ziru Sirka and the people at the fringes of empire who had a frontier to maintain, thousands of years of local history on each of thousands of worlds, stories of Vilani heroes who did great things the way they were supposed to be done, stories of rogue-heroes who did great things in spite of doing them the wrong way, and so forth.

The reason Vilani history looks dull to us (as readers of published Traveller game material) is that there's very little that's been material published about the Ziru Sirka. All we really have is enough back-story to support the published settings: the 1100-ish Third Imperium, Milieu 0, the Interstellar Wars era, etc.

Terra's history has a dramatic quality because of its changes and growth. People will seek this stuf out in the same way they seek out exciting fiction.

The reason people would be interested in Terra's history is that Terra is the original home of Humaniti, and the home of the Solomani who improbably conquered the Ziru Sirka -- not because the affairs of a single world on the rim is something that would stand out on its own in a history of 11000 years of human civilization.

Besides, Traveler has nearly always been "Brits in Space!!!!!!" It's the British Empire and a mixture of Victorian and Stuart tropes and stereotypes. The "Yanks in Space" line was always meaningless. The British Empire is clearly important in the 3I.

Besides Brits in Space (the Age of Sail feel that comes from communications being limited to the speed of a starship) and Yanks in Space (which comes from so many Traveller writers living in the US), Traveller is also Imperial Romans in Space, because the Roman Empire is the long-lived empire most familiar to us.