User:Mike dill/IMTU

In My Traveller Universe

Universe Overview:

It’s a big galaxy, billions of stars, possibly millions of solar systems with planets. No central government can possibly keep track of everything that is happening. Pick a time and place in the past, and you can probably find a planet that tries to run using those assumptions. Imagine any type of utopia, and there is probably a place trying to make it happen. There are some really bad places as well, that got that way for another very large set of reasons, some of which you really want to stay away from.

The Imperial government at Sylvan is Imperial Rome or France or Britain or USA or Japan at their zenith, except with fleets of dreadnoughts and legions of marines that try to keep the far flung parts of an interstellar empire from falling apart again. Fealty is the only way to hold something this vast together, and it mostly works, in most places, most of the time. The farther from the center you get the more exceptions you find. Those exceptions are what make things ‘interesting’.

Oh, and there are competitors around as well, both internal and external, and some of them are not exactly human or sometimes not even close. There are reasons for the myths of wolf-men, bat-men and centaurs, and possibly even some others.

Technology assumptions:

• a. Interstellar ‘translations’ are possible using relatively large amounts of energy (see b).
• b. Nuclear fusion is a well defined source for the energy needs of a spaceship (and expensive).
• c. Antimatter power plants exist, but are generally seen as unnecessary (and really expensive).
• d. In general, batteries and capacitors have greatly improved (see i.).
• e. Partial nullification or amplification of the effects of gravity is the science of gravitics.
• f. Inertia can be partially reduced by gravitic generators, but not entirely.
• g. In general, medicine has improved.
• h. Genetics is still an issue in some places, but not in others (see i.).
• i. In some places nanotechnology is unimaginably good, and substitutes for everything or anything.
• j. Some improvements have been made in software (see k.).
• k. In some places Artificial Intelligences run the place.
• l. Psychics exist, and are running one large area of the galaxy.

OK, I follow Classic Traveller rules for the most part, but the biggest change I have made is the use of antimatter. I make the cost of antimatter at 5x refined fuel, so any ship that needs to run on it is EXPENSIVE to operate. The positive side is that antimatter containment vessels can hold ten times the equivalent energy, so a jump 1 only needs 1% of the volume of a ship.

I have my express couriers run on antimatter, and that eliminates the need for express courier stations every four parsecs, as an express courier can now go twenty parsecs without refueling, but most of the time they go for four jumps, where I have the next express courier station. This means that express courier stations need an antimatter processing plant, and those need to go someplace far away, like an uninhabited planetoid circling a gas giant.

The Imperial Dreadnought Fleet also runs on antimatter, which allows it to respond very quickly to emergencies, and for individual ships to jump into a system, and then jump out again without refueling. Running these ships is EXTEREMELY EXPENSIVE, so the Imperial Dreadnought Fleet only gets activated if the problem cannot be solved at the Sector Navy level.

For the sake of a story I have written I created a plot device called a Maker. It is a molecular assembler that can build small electronic, electogravitic or electromechanical devices using an ion beam to position individual atoms. It works best at the nano-scale, but it you have a lot of energy and time, it might be possible to assemble a spaceship one atom at a time.