Traveller and modern electronics

[warellis]

Having never played Traveller before, but having read up a lot on it and reading up on various tech discussions, one thing I've always heard is that Traveller is a game that shows its 1970s roots. That in addition to the fact much of its themes and ideas are based off of science fiction from the 1940s to 1970s, you also have mention of the giant computers being an example of how Traveller was designed before the computing revolution of the 1980s.

Having said this, I've often heard that for starships but do those same assumptions ever show up for day-to-day civilian electronics, like something you would use in your home and such? Are there any civilian electronic tech or computers that really show "yeah this was definitely designed before the Digital Age?"

[Anthony]

Traveller mostly doesn't talk about personal electronics, which I guess shows that it predates the era of personal electronics being common.

[warellis]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Traveller mostly doesn't talk about personal electronics, which I guess shows that it predates the era of personal electronics being common.

Still didn't that era often have like uh tricorders or some equivalent (to use Star Trek as an example?) Or is it more that such things were used only for professional reasons?

Like for surveyors and such.

[thrash]

(I'm taking "Traveller" to mean "Classic Traveller," prior to 1986. Later editions tried to update the tech to some degree.)

There are a number of personal electronic devices scattered throughout the books: communicators, inertial locators, hand computers, map boxes, digital cameras, low-light and thermal goggles, etc.

What Traveller pretty much missed is the potential synergy among all these gadgets. Instead of a pile of electronics that mostly doesn't talk to each other (though you could hook up your map box to your inertial locator to get a scrolling display of your current position -- oooh!), your cell phone now does most of this by itself.

Traveller computers also don't obey Moore's Law. They get bigger and more expensive as they get more capable, even at higher tech levels. Part of this is that Traveller TLs are pretty flat and finely divided compared to GURPS: TL15 in Traveller is only about twice as productive as TL9-10, which would be good for only a one tech level difference in GURPS.

One thought I've had about replicating Traveller tech is to say that all the electronics are analogue, rather than digital. They work just fine for their intended purposes, but you can't implement a new function just by downloading a program.

Note that the "huge computers" thing is somewhat misleading: the "computer" volume includes workstations for programmers and system administrators -- more like an IT center than a room filled with vacuum tubes. Still too big and heavy, just not ridiculously so.

[SteveS]

Originally Posted by thrash

Note that the "huge computers" thing is somewhat misleading: the "computer" volume includes workstations for programmers and system administrators -- more like an IT center than a room filled with vacuum tubes. Still too big and heavy, just not ridiculously so.

This is my rationale. I'd add an allowance for all the external sensors a starship could be required to have, particularly in combat, as an additional explanation for the space required for a Traveller starship computer.

Originally Posted by thrash

. . . Traveller (again, meaning CT) had no formal character rewards or experience point system, and no knowledge skills (sciences, scholastics, languages, etc.). . . .

There was a character improvement system in classic Traveller, but it didn't allow for nearly the advancement one would receive in the character-generation services. There were some knowledge skills -- more than any other early role-playing game -- but they were pretty thin.

Originally Posted by jason taylor

I don't see how that will be. The videogram and the telegram both have the same disadvantage-that they are always at least a week late. . . .

In some plots, a week late is late -- particularly a bounty hunt. In others, where information doesn't change rapidly, it's no big deal.

As far as the things the PC is interested in, one of his problems will be information flooding. In the game ap Star Trader by comparison intelligence is the most precious commodity-one should never neglect a chance to pick it up. But it comes in manageable chunks and it is usually fairly easy to separate the useful from the indifferent. In Traveller there is plenty of information to be had but no way to separate it. Much like the twenty-first century in fact except much of the information is old. Intelligence Analysis skill will be at a premium.

This is another good point. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is always a challenge in information -- see this year's buzz about fake-news for example.

It will affect the style somewhat. The Traveller equiv of Internet Cafes will be all over the place and there will presumably be several arranged to cater to different markets. These will specialize in providing a pleasant venue from which to sit down and surf. One can have a, "You all met at an inn" experience there. Indeed the solid space meeting with a patron will not be replaced, it will just be adjusted. But "Inns you all meet at" won't be eliminated, because many people have reasons of their own to be their even when they could be surfing from their stateroom. Easy access to food and drink, company of strangers, annonymity(the two are actually reinforcing; it can be quite pleasant to spend time among people you never met who won't ask anything more of you then to be orderly). Of course these can be had online, even the condiments can be had takeout. But many will prefer a central location.

I like this as an adventure building model. I did something like this last time I ran a game. In a high-tech world, communications would be ubiquitous, but on a low-tech world with nothing but a landing pad, a beacon, and an administrator's shack, the "internet cafe" might be the equivalent of a sign on the administrator's shack with the URL to the planetary visitor's bulletin board.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by SteveS

There was a character improvement system in classic Traveller, but it didn't allow for nearly the advancement one would receive in the character-generation services.

... which is why I specified "experience point system." Character improvement existed, but not as a reward for play.

There were some knowledge skills -- more than any other early role-playing game -- but they were pretty thin.

I disagree. All Classic Traveller skills were practical: they allowed you to do something. There were no skills for which the only benefit was allowing you to know things and answer questions about them -- as opposed to, say, History or Area Knowledge or Occultism skills in GURPS.* That function was covered (if at all) by the Education characteristic.

I'm belaboring the point because I think understanding information as an implicit rewards system is important to comprehending how Traveller played.

I'm willing to be wrong, however. What skills were you thinking of?


* Legal skill is an edge case: it does serve some useful functions, but is not primarily described in those terms.

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by warellis

...
Having said this, I've often heard that for starships but do those same assumptions ever show up for day-to-day civilian electronics, like something you would use in your home and such? Are there any civilian electronic tech or computers that really show "yeah this was definitely designed before the Digital Age?"

There's the old, old Murphy's Rules panel titled "Three Tons, 16K", discussing how unrealistic Traveller's computers were even at the time. IIRC, that particular strip either predates or is as old as the original Apple Macintosh, dating to somewhere in the early-to-mid 1980s.

[warellis]

In what ways would Traveller have changed if its computers or electronics had been designed with modern ideas and experiences of computers and electronics? I mean I imagine you could easily keep the slow FTL & no FTL comms Traveller has but would Traveller with modern ideas on electronics or computers change things a lot?

[Dr. Beckenstein]

Originally Posted by warellis

In what ways would Traveller have changed if its computers or electronics had been designed with modern ideas and experiences of computers and electronics? I mean I imagine you could easily keep the slow FTL & no FTL comms Traveller has but would Traveller with modern ideas on electronics or computers change things a lot?

I think not much. Traveller is about star faring, free traders and mercenaries. The big things that define the game are star ships, aliens and the third empire, not computers or AI. Maybe the ship design had changed a little, "computers are free" or some thing like that.

On the other hand - I wonder if GDW had a computer in their office when the game came out in... 1977?

Man, the game turns 40 next year.

[thrash]

The biggest changes come as you pass through the realm of networked computers (cyberpunk) into networked people (transhumanism). Traveller (again, meaning CT) had no formal character rewards or experience point system, and no knowledge skills (sciences, scholastics, languages, etc.). The line between player information and character knowledge was muddier than later generations of rpgs. Much of the flavor of Traveller adventures -- both implicitly and explicitly -- comes from having incomplete information about the universe and setting out to explore.

The Universal Planet Profile was an aspect of this: deliberately sketchy and potentially unreliable or out of date, a party of characters might find something quite unexpected at the worlds they visited. The rewards for playing through Twilight's Peak or Secrets of the Ancients were almost entirely about what the characters learned in the process (though there were one or two token physical prizes, they weren't overwhelmingly useful or lucrative).

Contrast this with a universe with ubiquitous, networked computing. Yes, the FTL drive means that data packets get older the farther away they originate, but one could send entire updated Wikipedias for each world on a remotely plausible Xboat network and still allow players to short-circuit all kinds of adventures by Googling them into irrelevance. The referee then spends an inordinate chunk of prep time figuring out Yet Another Reason this simple approach won't work (much like transporter problems in Star Trek).

On the communication front, if interstellar messages are more like videograms than telegrams, it becomes much less plausible to rely on random strangers who happen to be available (i.e., player-characters) rather than recruit appropriate experts from surrounding systems. Most of the random patron encounters then go out the window.