Re: The best thing about Traveller

Bertil writes:
>
>               It is well known that I think that the background is the best
>part of Traveller, and I'll reinforce that statement and say that Traveller
>has the *best* background measured in consistency and amount of background
>available for *any* SFRPG that I know of.

>  The trouble has been that there has never been any proper compilation of
>it. No one source were you could go to find out if the stats for Norris had
>been defined, or if the UPP for Deneb had been produced. So confusion and

You mean confusion went UP, don't you?

>internal consistency went down over time (IMHO, it started with
>MegaTraveller).

Not quite. There were a number of early Traveller ideas that were later
changed retroactively. One example is the scale of Imperial warships
that I've mentioned before. Another is the concept of The Spinward Marches
being on the very edge of explored space (remember the mysterious unknown
Outrim Void mentioned in _Leviathan_? That turned out to have a sector-full
of aslans, some of them long-time trading partners, on the other side.)

>  For a good example of this, look up the UPP for Deneb in the Imperial
>Encyclopedia. I think it is under 'Travellers Digest' or 'Digest'. Compare
>with the UPP given in the sector data from GEnie or in Digest the realworld
>paper...

Another example is the two sub-sectors of Trojan Reach published in
_Leviathan_. Whoever later generated the complete Trojan Reach apparently
couldn't be bothered to incorporate them properly but just generated
completely new stats for them. :-P

Btw. wouldn't that be an interesting project: A complete, collected-in-one-
place set of all published library data? Corrected for inconsistencies, of
course (except for such inconsistencies as might actually be in a library
data pack). I've produced a number of library data for my players, some
corrections of existing (inconsistent) data, others completely new. We
might produce something really useful there. Hmmm... perhaps two sets:
One ca. 1110 for Old Traveller refs and one ca. 1120.

>Me:
>>The Traveller universe
>>were just approaching a reasonable level of information (at least
>>in a few select sectors). And now they're going to 1) not fill out
>>what's missing, and 2) invalidate half of what's already there...
>
>  The tactics adopted by the Traveller General Command seems to be "Make
>internal inconsistency the normal state" which looks to me as making morals
>out of necessity (That was a poorly translated Swedish proverb:)

In this case I think that "dyd" should be translated as virtue, not morals.