Traveller was my third RPG, after AD&D and Gamma World. I didn't have the three Little Black Books (LBBs) Edition - I had the Starter Edition, which reedited the 3 LBBs into one Black Book.
I so remember my characters occasionally dying during character generation :)
So, all I can say about the Traveller Bundle of Holding is this:
If you don't have Classic Traveller - GET THIS NOW!
If you have Classic Traveller, but don't have all the books in the bundle (Starter Collection at $6.95 or Bonus Collection which is currently under 15 bucks) GET THIS NOW!
If you have all the Classic Traveller any breathing roleplayer would ever want but don't have it in PDF, GET THIS NOW! Well, alright, you do have 12 days to make the purchase, but I'd hate to see you forget.
Shit, enough of this. Jumping in for the Bonus Collection. There is stuff here I don't have. Now I want to play Classic Traveller again (but I'd make the ship computers MUCH SMALLER, just so you know ;)
"Classic" Traveller is well worth many times that price. But the ship computers need to stay that size. It's part of the charm.
ReplyDeleteI keep hearing that converting material between classic and Mongoose Traveller is a cinch, so I went in for this.
ReplyDeleteStill have the LBBs and the Spinward Marches chart in the original box. Along with many of the supplements. If you can find the Striker ground combat rules pick them up too!
ReplyDeleteI'm really not supposed to be spending money right now, but I'm very tempted to buy this, if only to finally see the original chargen process. I've always been fascinated by the idea that you could die before the game even starts, and it's something I've often considered adding to D&D
ReplyDeleteHave to second Matt on this. I've always understood Traveller to be about old-school sci-fi. If the computers don't take up at least one wall, it's missing part of the appeal (unless you're going for a Firefly game. I've heard it'd work well for that too)
I've got them all in pristine condition in print but that only makes the PDFs more tempting....
ReplyDeleteI thought I'd quit this argument forever but why not.
ReplyDeleteClassic Traveller computers are not, de facto, oversized.
Everyone saying that is thinking "my PC is so small".
To paraphrase Han Solo, "Traveling through hyperspace ain't like modeling interest rates, boy!"
I model interest rates for a living as well as pricing assets based on projected interest rate scenarios. Every night we rough 2000 or so scenarios on most rates and tenors used in the G7 plus a few others (do some Kroner stuff and Swiss Francs).
For that I have about 20,000 processes with I don't know how much storage but it must be in the petabytes (one day's run is 10s of Gigs of data) spread across eight clusters in four data centers in four states.
One ton in Traveller is 1m cubed. A typical six foot tall rack (one chassis) is about 0.4m cubed assuming a square footprint (which is small, lots are deeper than they are wide). My typical cluster, excluding the NAS for storage, 15 or so racks. That it, I need 48 tons of processor for my economic models which, depending on the exact party, take 8-16 hours to run. You need to add in storage which is probably another 4 tons minimum plus backup storage.
Compared to modern physics simulations (ie, the closest we have to calculating hyperspace jumps) we're pikers in time and for many in time. They usually take a week or more for a run on clusters our size or larger.
Looking at Traveller Book 2 the largest computer is 9 tons. In my job I utilize six Book 2 Model 7 computers.
I don't know what, if any, the limits of miniaturization will be. Nor do I know how complete hyperspace drive calculations will be. However, I don't see shrinking down the work I need 54+ tons to do over two weeks down to 1 ton in two hours (an improvement of power to volume of 9072 or 2**13 more or less (that's actually 8192 so a little more but closer than 2**14) and that's a lot of change to assume "isn't enough".
It might be Traveller computers are oversized but it is far from a given.
The displacement ton in Traveller is 14 cubic metres. The 1m-cubed ton is in Striker, as a measure of weight.
DeleteBut this in no way invalidates your point about computer size.
It's not our fault the Danish and Swiss are so far behind in computing. They should get a 400-ton ship with more room for calculating interest rates and jumps.
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