Starship Chrome for Traveller

I’ve written previously about how setting greebles—small bits of detailing—can help lend fictional settings the appearance of complexity and depth. The Terran Trade Authority books were particularly good at working in these greebles: each entry in Spacecraft: 2000 to 2100 (1978) has a brief technical synopsis in the style of Jane’s Fighting Ships that are loaded with such details. For example, here are the Specifications for the CAM 130 Cyclops:

Manufacturer	Consolidated Aerospace
Classification	Long-range Missile Carrier
Main Drive	Nuclear/chemical CACE 43 Skymaster 850,000 lb thrust
Personnel	4 human crew
Armament	Vulcan’s Hammer space to surface missile
Defence	14 mm Plastisteel WCRC Type 18A Defence Shield

This little table is doing a lot of worldbuilding in just a few lines! There’s an advanced material (“plastisteel”), a future corporation (“Consolidated Aerospace”), and just enough details to foster an illusion of realism. We can readily puzzle out what these unfamiliar terms mean, but their strangeness and specificity are intriguing. Is 14 mm of plastisteel a lot of armor, or too little? Is 850,000 lb a lot of thrust? Is CACE a manufacturer, a model line, or a type of propulsion drive? In the end, it doesn’t really matter but with relatively few words these little greebles help Cowley convey a setting with history and scope.

As Traveller has evolved the general tendency has been to describe things in gamist, rather than setting terms. Part of this is due to the increasing complexity of the game. CT, with relatively simple mechanics, could use formats that cleverly worked simultaneously as setting artifacts as well as game mechanics. The Universal Personality Profile, for example, is both a statblock and setting detail: an NPC can be neatly represented as “3BA865, SMG.” But by the time we get to MgT, high or low characteristic scores have modifiers and the old UPP is not as useful a statblock as STR 3 (-1), DEX 11 (+1), END 10 (+1), INT 8 (+0), EDU 6 (+0), SOC 5 (-1); SMG (25m, 3D, Auto 3). Less elegant, certainly, but more convenient to work with at the game table.

Also, Mongoose has established its edition of Traveller as a generic science fiction game, keeping the setting lines separate from the pure game supplement lines. There is a tradeoff to this approach: on one hand, it’s much easier for a referee to create their own Traveller universe, but on the other hand it limits the ability of designers to seed supplements with little Third Imperium setting greebles.

I think a little something gets lost here—as a referee who runs games in the Third Imperium, I enjoy discovering the strange little setting nuggets scattered across the Traveller canon. And I particularly miss these details the most when I’m reading about starships. A generic class or type of starship probably doesn’t need a lot of extra fluff, but to my mind such treatment is certainly welcome when it comes to individual ships. Any ship that the PCs will be associated with for a long time should be treated like a very important NPC with an individual history, quirks, and perhaps, mysteries. Here are some thoughts on how to add these little non-mechanical details to the starships in your own game.

Ship History

Several CT supplements, including Leviathan and Kinunir as well as Supplement 5, Lightning-class Cruisers, provide brief histories for a whole suite of individual starships. This information, while having no game mechanic value, is extremely helpful in establishing the ship as part of the larger setting.

Details to consider include builder and shipyard: a Type A built in Core sector is likely going to have a very different story than one built in the Marches, just as one built by Ling Standard Products will be different from one built by a small start-up subsidized by a planetary government on the Imperial fringe.

When was the hull was first laid down and, and when did the ship make its first flight? Anything important happening at that time? Was the ship built as part of an economic boom in the subsector, or during a time of war between neighboring systems?

Is the ship a unique design or but one iteration of a larger class? If the latter, is this an early build or a later build? What is the ship’s tail number? Where is the ship registered?

Is this a brand new ship? (Sometimes new ships present all sorts of complications of their own.) If the ship had a prior owner, who was it and how did they use the ship? If it was a trader, what routes did it work? What was the maintenance history? Have any major components been damaged or replaced?

Any accidents, legal disputes, battles, or mysterious gaps in the service record? Ships, like people, can acquire reputations—for reliability, profitability, speed, luck. Or the reverse. The TAS Green List database probably works like a 57th Century form of Yelp, incorporating passenger and broker reviews.

Ship Chrome

I was reminded of the Terran Trade Authority books when I recently re-read Classic Traveller Adventure 1, The Kinunir (1979). Under “General Specifications” we have the following data for the titular Kinunir-class of battle cruiser:

Tonnage	1,200 (standard). 16,800 cubic meters.
Acceleration	4G constant.
Dimensions	73.5L × 52.5W × 15.5H (fin adds 11 H).
Crew	10 officers, 35 men. 35 troops.
Jump	4
Powerplant	4
Engineering	2 Deltic Mk1827 JK Fusion power plants, driving one Shva type r3-55 jump drive (with integral r2-55 backup), and 2 Dupree 734 impulse maneuver drives.
Gravitics	Standard inertial compensators, plus 1G floor field.
Range	Unlimited maneuver. One jump. 200 days.
Armament	Dual ventral missile turrets, each with semi-automated missile launch racks. Charged/neutral particle accelerator tip turrets (port and starboard). Anti-boat laser batteries along dorsal surface.
Electronics	ISMM Model/7.3 on-board computer with multiple input stations and limited AI. Integral fire control and on-line storage. Fibre optic back-up network.
Ship’s Boats	One 22.5m pinnace. One 7.5m grav APC with limited sub-orbital capability.

Some of this information, such as Tonnage, Acceleration, and Jump, should look familiar to any Traveller player. But some of these line items, such as Gravitics, might not. And take a look at that Engineering line: it reads like something pulled straight from a TTA book! None of these details have any real game meaning, but they do work extremely well as setting greebles. We learn of at least three different manufacturers/brands/models (Deltic, Shva, Dupree) as well as component specifics like “Mk1827 JK.” Same with the electronics entry.

For discussion purposes, let’s call these little non-mechanical bits of color starship chrome.

In looking through my Classic Traveller books, this same specification format appears to be used again in Adventure 5, Leviathan (1980) and again, but inconsistently, in Supplement 7, Traders and Gunboats (1980) before being dropped forever from GDW products. 

But the format did not immediately die away! Across the pond the designers at Games Workshop used this in their IISS Ship Files (1981) supplement.

But the writing was certainly on the wall. The last published use I could find of this format was by the indefatigable Andy Slack in “Assignment: Survey!” from White Dwarf 40 (April 1983). His Explorer-class scoutship features such lovely details as “One Malvatnikov 27F fusion power plant driving one NovZem Motors Q4 impulse manoeuvre drive and one TCS Drives type 15 Mk II series Jump drive.”

Rob Eaglestone has been one of the few Traveller writers who remembers and still uses these old pieces of starship chrome. For example, the Edwards Far Trader from Xboat 2 (2020) features a “Shaava type A1-gx jump drive.” (Is Shaava related to the Kinunir’s Shva?)

I’ve compiled a spreadsheet of all the interesting starship chrome I found in published Traveller sources. Almost all of the examples are ships from the Spinward Marches and it’s unclear if the manufacturers would be exclusive to the Marches, or are perhaps subsidiaries or subunits of megacorporations.

In any case, I find this spreadsheet a useful model for generating additional bits of chrome for my own games. I also find that looking at deckplans can be helpful: if the plans show the maneuver drives in two separate masses, then it’s natural to describe those as “two coupled M-drive units.” And so on and so forth.

Because this data is untethered to game mechanics, a referee can really go wild here. But some restraint is desirable: you want to provide just enough starship chrome to create the illusion of depth and complexity, and not actual complexity itself. Ideally, you are mixing unfamiliar and familiar elements together to keep the reader engaged and not overwhelmed by technobabble.

Physical Details

Among the General Specifications from the Kinunir are the basic physical dimensions of the ship: length, width, and height. This data is not generally provided in MgT, even though it is exceptionally useful to visually imagine the ship.

In all editions of Traveller, ships are categorized by volume in displacement tons, also known as dtons. This is a game specific unit of measure, supposedly equal to 1 ton of liquid hydrogen, roughly 13.5 to 14 cubic meters or kiloliters. Dtons are a convenient game mechanism, as one square of deckplan, 1.5 × 1.5 × 3 meters, converts to ½ dton.

A few editions of Traveller have fairly detailed ship design systems that try to inject more realism into ship builds, using actual material densities, strengths, and masses. These systems usually output specific ship dimensions based upon the overall configuration and construction materials. For many referees, the additional realism and detailing is simply not worth the headaches, and I think Mongoose was wise to drop back to much more streamlined ship design for High Guard.

That said, several helpful design spreadsheets have been developed for the more intensive design systems. I particularly like the ones built by the poster AnotherDilbert and hosted over on the Citizens of the Imperium forum. He has tackled some of the most complex, errata-riddled systems and produced spreadsheets that even a hack like myself can pick up and use. If I need to develop ship dimensions for a new design, I generally turn to either his MegaTraveller or Fire, Fusion, and Steel spreadsheets to generate this data. The two systems often diverge, but I treat them as a helpful range for spitballing numbers for my MgT game. For our purposes, close enough is plenty good enough.

Given the explosion in high quality digital models of Traveller ships, I find that referring to these can be another way to estimate starship dimensions. For the Starjammer, both MT and FFS agree that an airframe starship of 300 dtons should have an approximate length of 50 meters. By referring to Ian Stead’s excellent renderings of the armed packet, I was able to calculate the height and wingspan for the PC’s ship.

These detailed design systems can also output loaded and unloaded masses, as well as maximum and cruising speeds for ships in atmospheres. While these details have no direct game relevance, they do help ground the starship in the real world.

Similarly, these detailed systems generate power plant and energy weapon outputs in real world values. These tend to vary a great deal between systems. My understanding is that CT High Guard developed an abstract Energy Point economy for balanced game use. The CT Striker supplement then equated 1 EP to 250 megawatts (MW) for a separate vehicle design system. Then MegaTraveller extrapolated that Striker conversion to starship design, resulting in extraordinarily high energy needs. TNE, in contrast, has greatly reduced energy needs but also assumes a different sublight propulsion system.

Based on reading through the older gearhead discussion boards I get the sense that there’s a Goldilocks number somewhere between these two systems for CT or MgT ships. Assuming an MgT starship power plant outputs 3–5 MW per Power Point does just that—you get power plant numbers that are generally higher than TNE and lower than MT.

Similarly, laser weapons tend to be rated from 100 to 500 megajoules (MJ), with the standard laser weapon having a 250 MJ output. Much more powerful plasma and fusion weapons might range from 400 to 900 MJ for an Adventure Class Ship.

By carefully mixing and matching these physical details with starship chrome we can produce specifications that look “realish,” as long as you don’t have a physicist or electrical engineer in your gaming group. A “Fusion-14 power plant” is fine, a “750 MW fusion power plant” is better, but a “Tsyasha Kwa Impetus-E 750 MW fusion plant” is even better still.

Starship Quirks

Finally, each starship should have at least a few distinctive traits or quirks. These might have been present from creation or picked up over the years. MgT has a decent system for detailing older starships complete with a table of quirks, and I’ve used this system for my own games.

That said, the list of MgT quirks is a bit short and the results tend to have game-mechanical effects. I think it’s also worth establishing smaller, non-mechanical quirks. If you own a car or a house, think about all those small peculiarities that make your purchase unique, both the good and the bad, and apply these ideas to a starship. Things like “She may be ugly, but a Magyar ship is built like a grav tank,” or “General Products can’t make a jump drive worth installing, we’re always fighting to get that Gee series tuned,” or “Ag jobs might easy to find, but we‘ve never gotten the smell out of the scrubbers from that one shipment of livestock.”

Quirks provide a concrete way to show, rather than tell, the ship’s history, chrome, or physical details. In a future post I’ll apply many of these ideas to my PC’s Starjammer.

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