Traveller Illustrated

I just watched „Mr. Welch’s Mad Musings: Traveller“ and arriving at 10 mins and a couple of seconds she came up for a full 30 seconds. I guess Mr. Welch took the liberty to chose to ignore the licensing terms of my image or maybe wasn’t aware of them at the time he produced the video. But it’s been out 2 years and the image wasn’t really featured or presented in a way that conflicts with my interests, so I chose to ignore that too (but: that’s MY choice, Mr. Welch, and should be, as it’s my artwork).

And to present the object of non-objection, here she is, the ship in all it’s rendered glory.

And as I did a second ship textured as the „Deep Skies“ featuring the website of the original artwork creator for this craft Tom Peters (https://www.tpeters.com), I might as well present it here too. THanks Tom for this amazing ship and for being friends, btw.

I’ve just started to play Traveller (MgT, Version 1) with my kids and needed to update my GM library of useful tools. Fillable PDF forms are always worth stowing away. So here are two nice sheets. One is a fillable variant.

TravCharSheetPlain

TravCharSheetFillable

This new year already is a few days old but even if a bit late, I wanted to take the opportunity to wish you all a very happy and healthy 2016. Thank you so much for frequently or occasionally visiting my site. So what am I up to with the site this year?

There will be at least one new ship being presented and produced that I have started to work on in 2014 already. It was a proposed collaboration with Ian Steed, which didn’t make it into reality, because several personal aspekts of my life strained my wellbeing and I fell into a big creative lock.

Sory, Ian, for not having been able to do my part. Sorry, my readers, for lack of content. That’s going to change.

Cheers,
Mirco

This 20ton Safari Launch is a variant of the small patrol boat I once designed for my patrol cruiser model. It has bee re-utilised as a Standard Merchant’s Launch (for the Subsidized Merchant) and a Safari Launch for both the Animal Class Safari Ship (yet to be built) and the JG Safari Ship.

The following interior view is from the 30ton Patrol Boat, so a few differences should be pointed out. The 20 ton launch does not have the indicated cargo bays, but retains the rear accessway between the split drives and powerplant. The corridor functions as the main airlock and has a ventral hatch to allow docking with a Subsidized Merchant, JG Safari Ship or other ships with externally mounted launches. All 20ton variants feature the dorsal hatch, which is optional on the larger 30ton boat.

A SAR (search and rescue) emergency response variant exists that trades the hardpoint for a dorsal docking mount used for quick evacuation of other craft trapped in hazardous situations. This variant also features an appropriate interior configuration (e.g. emergency lowberth or a sickbay.

The passenger area can be equipped with various configurations during construction or converted at any shipyard capable of repairing small craft.

The image above shows a 30 ton Versiil Class Patrol Boat. To imagine the layout of the 20 ton Safari Launch described here imagine the following: The rear portion of the craft is moved forward to the approximate location of the rear cargo bay walls in the image above. The drives would be located at the location of the cargo bays above. The Passenger compartment is nearly the same size and misses the two center rows of seats. The total capacity for the Safari Launch is 20 plus 2 crew.

Pure cargo configurations or such with a lot more room for each passenger are common with the average of these vessels totalling 16 Passenger seats and 2 crew seats or 8 passenger seats, 2 crew plus a small cargo area in the rear part of the passenger section.

Today I grabbed Zozer’s Star Trader from DriveThruRPG.com (at less than 5 bucks a bargain, I’d say). And I plan to play a tiny series of adventure trading using that game. I printed it out in EU A5 size to match the format of the LBBs. I plan to play a potentially unhealthy mix of T5 and Classic Traveller with Book 2+ Rules, some house rules and a bit of handwaveium. What ever I use I will document that ion the project site.

Using this I will try to illustrated some (probably only very few) ships or perhaps even scenes to support my star trader’s diary.

My reference material will be…

1. Star Trader by Zozer Games
2. a few 6 sided Traveller dice
3. travellermap.com
4. Traveller deckplans from the web
5. a spreadsheet on my tablet (google tables)
6. some pregenerated characters (which will be described)
7. http://eaglestone.pocketempires.com

And last and hopefully not least „imagination“. I want to play a trader on the edge. Maybe a smuggler or a pitential pirate. One who skips maintenance repairs, crew salaries and is otherwise quite nice. He’s not Mal Reynolds but Firefly flaor will certainly touch this solo game.

Now that I am addressing Classic Traveller small craft again, the 20dt Launch was just begging to be built from the basic ship’s boat frame.

20ton Launch

The 30ton Ship’s Boat and 20ton Launch share the same diameter hull and front section. As visible at the cockpit window configuration these craft have three windows out front. The 50ton Modular Cutter and the 40ton Research Pinnace however share a 6m diameter hull and the same front section to. These cockpits have four windows out front.

After I made a modular Cutter about two years ago, I planned to do all the standard Small Craft. I sort of relauched that project recently. This is the current State of the Ship’s Boat.

30ton Ship’s Boat Combi Configuration

I think I will need the finished boat for the 600ton Subsidized Liner, that’s also on my workbench atm. But both vessels are far from complete.

The 30ton Ship’s Boat and 20ton Launch share the same diameter hull and front section. As visible at the cockpit window configuration these craft have three windows out front. The 50ton Modular Cutter and the 40ton Research Pinnace however share a 6m diameter hull and the same front section to. These cockpits have four windows out front.

30ton Ships Boat Double Cargo Gate Configuration

The image below shows two updated models above the Slow Boat.