First as an historical aside. At the time that Traveller was written about the
only computer I believe that Mark Miller had seen was an old Tandy with a
cassette tape drive (UGH). It played a great dungeon game (which was
unwinable and I think Scott Renner wrote - he is occasionally seen on the
net out of UofI). At any rate considering the inexperience of the developer
computers aren't bad in Traveller. On the straight gaming side there was
also rules balancing to consider.
My solutions to the computer problem were the following home rules:
Traveller Computers:
The current computers in traveller are rather over sized for what
they can do i.e. a computer today that can run only two programs
every ten minutes and can only store 4 more would, comfortably
fit inside a telephone, yet it takes one ton of space to do this
in Traveller. With just the currently projected advances in
technology you will be able to compact computers even more. (Also
Traveller computers obviously have no concept of virtual storage,
concurrency, multiprogramming, or multiprocessing all of which add
up to allowing literally scores of programs to run at the same
time. With these each program only needs a small portion of itself in
memory at any one time. The number of programs running being
limited by the speed of switching programs, rate new pages are
needed, and secondary storage more than CPU memory size.)
Since the Traveller tech chart shows the level 1 computer as a
Tech Level 5 entity, we are going to assume that the chart on page
13, book two is the TL5 chart. Because I find the CPU/storage
columns to be nonsense they will be combined into one column
(note that this eliminates the need to have bis models). For each
odd TL above five the program capacity of the chart will be shift
down one rows i.e. model 2 program capacity will become model one
program capacity, cost and space will be read as normal.
On even TLs the cost can be cut by one third or the mass can be
halved. Therefore the chart for TL11-12 is:
model price mass prog cap
1 2 1 14
2 9 2 27
3 18 3 50
4 30 4 70
5 45 5 90
6 55 5 110
7 60 5 130
Note that I decided to project the top of the chart at a constant
20 programs. I think for the time being we'll leave software as
it is. (I will accept comments and suggestions there though).
Any computer with a program capacity of 150 or greater can be
considered an artificial intelligence (AI cost is x3). These
computers may replace their prog cap with skills at a ration of 1
skill for 15 programs (one skill must be the skill AI which
equates to a personality)(plus they will automatically have 1 skill at
ship maintenance and be able to function as a library). AIs are
required to have a robot at their disposal and are considered to
have heat and vacuum sensors through out the ship (visual, hearing
and voice would be limited except by the presence of the robot,
maintenance senors would be placed where needed). Ship specific
skills would be: Predict, Gunnery (assumed equal to Gunner
Interact, Target, Launch, return fire, anti missile programs and a
Gunnery skill of 1), Select, Multi-Target, Maneuver/Evade, Jump
(includes Generate and Navigation programs), and Anti-Hijack. All
these skills can be assumed to have the same effect as the best
equivalent book 2 page 12 software and may be chosen freely by
the player. AI computers can also have any other skill (granted
many of them would be useless to the computer) available and can
be used to teach. AI computers can not change skills once they
are chosen. An AI computer (that is to say the ship) will not
necessarily do what it is ordered since it is a NPC (note ships are
considered to be phenomenally loyal to their owner (i.e. incapable
of treachery), but not without a sense of self preservation). We
will deal with the problems this will entail, in the area of title
transfer, when we come to it.
a. When starships are awarded to a player (when he musters
out) a die is rolled and the TL of the computer is as
follows 1 = TL9, 2,3,4 = TL11 5,6 = TL13. Note: that you
may buy a new higher TL computer to replace the one given.