Traveller. What do you think?

[aramis erak]

There's also the T20 setting using the 3rd Imperium but around IIRC the year 990.

I'd highly recommend Traveller. I'd check out the Mongoose books. I've played GURPS Traveller, T4, T20, CT and Mongoose Traveller. I like the Mongoose rules. I also have a lot of the Traveller material even for Mega Traveller. I heard that T5 has a lot of errata. Plus the book is super expensive like $100 US.

Mike

Little secret from the dev process: the M1100 stats were used for M1000... There is no difference between the CT era and the T20 setting era of any note, except who the emperor is, and the date of the Birthday celebration. (Yes, I'm the Aramis in the lead playtester list - and that is a serious misnomer - those people, myself included, should have gotten "additional development" credit.)

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I did, of course, play a bit of the original Traveller back in the day and it quickly got kitbashed in with Space Opera and a bunch of house rules. I never really had a feel for it - although I did have some fun with my mass-murderer PC Booboo and his equally sociopathic compatriot Snailhead in one of those rules mashups. I think the problem was that I'd never actually read any SF or seen any movies that had a setting like that - far future tech but still using mostly slugthrower/gunpowder weapons. I had none of the rulebooks myself so ALL information about the rules and the fluff about any setting had to be given by the GM and there just wasn't enough for me to grok it (meaning whether it was there or not I never got a proper feel for it from the GM).

Not until Firefly came along and then the light shone down from above - THAT is a Traveller kind of setting. Ever since then I've had on the back-burner the idea of throwing together a Firefly-ish setting (maybe just a dash of SW too) and using the original Traveller rules (since at some point I'd acquired the 2000 digest reprint of the first 8 books). I was reasonably sure that the mechanics weren't arcane enough to be any kind of obstacle and stuff like ship design could be easily munged into appropriate shape as needed. Then I LOST the stupid reprint and didn't find it again until digging through some stuff here a week or two ago when I was looking for something UTTERLY unrelated. Now I gotta read into it again and see how much effort I want to start putting into that idea again.

 

[aramis erak]

I did, of course, play a bit of the original Traveller back in the day and it quickly got kitbashed in with Space Opera and a bunch of house rules. I never really had a feel for it - although I did have some fun with my mass-murderer PC Booboo and his equally sociopathic compatriot Snailhead in one of those rules mashups. I think the problem was that I'd never actually read any SF or seen any movies that had a setting like that - far future tech but still using mostly slugthrower/gunpowder weapons. I had none of the rulebooks myself so ALL information about the rules and the fluff about any setting had to be given by the GM and there just wasn't enough for me to grok it (meaning whether it was there or not I never got a proper feel for it from the GM).

Not until Firefly came along and then the light shone down from above - THAT is a Traveller kind of setting. Ever since then I've had on the back-burner the idea of throwing together a Firefly-ish setting (maybe just a dash of SW too) and using the original Traveller rules (since at some point I'd acquired the 2000 digest reprint of the first 8 books). I was reasonably sure that the mechanics weren't arcane enough to be any kind of obstacle and stuff like ship design could be easily munged into appropriate shape as needed. Then I LOST the stupid reprint and didn't find it again until digging through some stuff here a week or two ago when I was looking for something UTTERLY unrelated. Now I gotta read into it again and see how much effort I want to start putting into that idea again.

To do firefly with Traveller, simply make the J-drive rating into a sublight constant speed drive, around 1 or 5 PSL per rating, and prorate with standard duration of 1 week ... It is, after all, only about 260 AU to cover the whole shebang... about 2185 LM, or 36.4 LH... which, at 10 PSL is about 15 days, which also puts everything within 1 week. At 1-2 PSL, the 181 AU from White to Blue is 7.5 to 15.9 days.

 

[TrippyHippy]

I Steve Jackson games still has a license from Mark Miller even though they haven't produced a new product in a long time.

I think they lost the license to produce new books after Mongoose got their license.

 

[pemerton]

Earth 2 wasn't hard science fiction. Telepathy, psychic powers, two humanoid alien species (one of whom is necessary for the planet to survive), magic saliva that cures all diseases across species, etc. do not work with "hard" science fiction.

Traveller has psychic powers including telepathy, and humanoid alien species. So if those things are at odds with hard science fiction, then Traveller is not a hard science fiction game.

 

[TrippyHippy]

Traveller has psychic powers including telepathy, and humanoid alien species. So if those things are at odds with hard science fiction, then Traveller is not a hard science fiction game.

Traveller is generic sci-fi, although the default Thrird imperium setting is space opera with an aesthetic towards a hard science flavour. If you want an actual hard science setting, these days, you go for the 2300AD setting instead. The core (Mongoose) rules remain the same though.

If you go the T5 route, well the science is very hard (insofar that it's well grounded in physical reality and the things that don't comply are well highlighted in discussion) but again it's set in a space opera setting by default.

 

[aramis erak]

Traveller has psychic powers including telepathy, and humanoid alien species. So if those things are at odds with hard science fiction, then Traveller is not a hard science fiction game.

Traveller is pretty soft on the sci-fi... for space opera, a subgenre of sci-fi, it's on the hard end, but that still is nowhere near Hard-Sci-Fi.

The major breaks from reality in Traveller:

• reactionless drives (tho' the EMDrive is giving some cause to think that it may be wrong only in the details)
• the Jump Drive
• Artificial gravity and Inertial Compensation
• easy fusion power (the issue is extracting more than the cost of ignition. We can make stuff fuse in the lab well enough, but the lowest cost to initiate that's been credibly published was about 102% of recovered energy)
• Star systems are built using the Titus Bode relationship (which has been generally disproven by exoplanet orbits that have been worked out). Except in MGT 1E, where the expanded system gen doesn't go into any detail of note.
• humans everywhere
• Psionics - and not just telepathy and clairvoyance, but full on TK.
• Anagathics (Anti-Aging drugs)
• Relatively safe and reliable cryogenics
• Silicon based intelligent life (SDG chips - see CT Adventure "Signal GK" and TNE core rules)
• most native life is edible to humans
• habitable worlds around stars with lifespans measured in double digit megayears (estimates are that a world needs about 50 megayears just to cool enough to start the liquid process... and another 20-500 MY to coalesce into primordial life after that)
• a lack of frequent disease transmissions by space crews (sufficiently few that the one major case in canon, the Dingr Plague, aka the Snow Plague, is notable... as it ended the Ziru Sirka {Vilani Imperium aka First Imperium})
• Human-made Uplifts (Chimps, Gorillas, Orangs, Dolphins, Orcas, Bears)
• human-breathable atmospheres on tiny rockballs (which is one of the strongest links in Firefly to Traveller - but Firefly actually explains it with world-sized artificial gravity)

 

[qstor]

The SJG license expires at the end of this year

http://www.dicetowernews.com/steve-jackson-games-gurps-traveller-license-to-expire/18544

 

[aramis erak]

The SJG license expires at the end of this year

http://www.dicetowernews.com/steve-jackson-games-gurps-traveller-license-to-expire/18544

Technically, it ended on 31 Dec 2014 (per Marc Miller's comments), but was handshake extended to 31 dec 2015.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Traveller is pretty soft on the sci-fi... for space opera, a subgenre of sci-fi, it's on the hard end, but that still is nowhere near Hard-Sci-Fi.

The major breaks from reality in Traveller:

• reactionless drives (tho' the EMDrive is giving some cause to think that it may be wrong only in the details)
• the Jump Drive
• Artificial gravity and Inertial Compensation
• easy fusion power (the issue is extracting more than the cost of ignition. We can make stuff fuse in the lab well enough, but the lowest cost to initiate that's been credibly published was about 102% of recovered energy)
• Star systems are built using the Titus Bode relationship (which has been generally disproven by exoplanet orbits that have been worked out). Except in MGT 1E, where the expanded system gen doesn't go into any detail of note.
• humans everywhere
• Psionics - and not just telepathy and clairvoyance, but full on TK.
• Anagathics (Anti-Aging drugs)
• Relatively safe and reliable cryogenics
• Silicon based intelligent life (SDG chips - see CT Adventure "Signal GK" and TNE core rules)
• most native life is edible to humans
• habitable worlds around stars with lifespans measured in double digit megayears (estimates are that a world needs about 50 megayears just to cool enough to start the liquid process... and another 20-500 MY to coalesce into primordial life after that)
• a lack of frequent disease transmissions by space crews (sufficiently few that the one major case in canon, the Dingr Plague, aka the Snow Plague, is notable... as it ended the Ziru Sirka {Vilani Imperium aka First Imperium})
• Human-made Uplifts (Chimps, Gorillas, Orangs, Dolphins, Orcas, Bears)
• human-breathable atmospheres on tiny rockballs (which is one of the strongest links in Firefly to Traveller - but Firefly actually explains it with world-sized artificial gravity)

Hard SF is in the eye of the beholder. A lot of the things on your list look to me like they would be possible without breaking our current understanding of science.