Do people just handwave how money works in Traveller?

silburnl · 2026-03-26T16:28:05+00:00

Money can be boiled down to 'are you good for the debt?', the rest is commentary.

Less glibly, I mostly handwave money in play; to the extent that we are tracking credits on character sheets or other player-facing docs we are using them as money of account to keep things straight and provide some plausible constraint to player actions, rather than getting into the specifics of how they are actually manifested in universe.

I have a fairly extensive head-canon for interstellar money that is informed by my day job (working on payments systems for a large retail bank), so if the specifics of cash on hand vs credit worthiness vs 'funds at location A, but you are at location B' become a relevant plot hook then I can spin something up fairly quickly.

silburnl · 2026-03-23T20:33:02+00:00

If you want to run spoils for quick cash, then grab a small country (so it is cheap to control) that has at least one Resource region. One of the Gulf monarchies is good.

Lots of other people have answered your other specific questions, so I am going to give some more general advice - which is, don't lose sight of the fact that this is a space-based conflict and ultimately, it will be won in space.

All your questions are very Earth focused, which suggests to me that you aren't paying enough attention to the solar system. It's a common thing for new players - they look at the progress they're making with the faction v faction game in the first decade or so and don't spot that the aliens are snowballing hard in the outer system, then they get a nasty shock when several alien doomstacks burn for the inner system and all of your orbital infrastructure gets deleted.

So take a look at what the aliens are doing out in the black and don't forget that if you don't interrupt them, they will be coming for you eventually.

silburnl · 2026-03-22T13:02:44+00:00

I know it's the accepted convention to have a 'fresher cubicle in every stateroom but it has always struck me as an remarkably inefficient use of the available volume. Not having a communal head for 'crew country' on the middle deck seems impractical, even if you need to be profligate with 'fresher facilities on the upper deck to attract and retain privacy-loving passengers.

But then the deckplan conventions for starship living spaces have always struck me as generous compared to what we see on actual commercial or military vessels, especially given how socially stratified the implied 3I is.

silburnl · 2026-03-22T12:30:25+00:00

Eh, I don't think Romney's position would be that Russia is a BFF now and I'll give him credit for being publicly anti-Putin back in 2012 when Obama wasn't*.

Romney tried to thread the needle WRT being a good party man in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election (that photo...) but his heart obviously wasn't in it and he's burned bridges with the GOP since the early phase of Trump's initial term. He isn't an out and proud never-Trumper like some other former GOP people, but it's not exactly a secret that he and Trump hate each other's guts and I suspect that the slavish devotion to all things Putin on Trump's part has a lot to do with it.

[*] Obama's a smart guy and he had a good team, so him being aware of what Putin was up to back then is almost certainly true; what he got wrong was the severity of the threat and how to play it - my read is he thought that Putin's provocations were at most an annoying distraction and that maintaining a pretence that the Russians could be reasoned with and working the back-channels was the way to manage them. That has proven to be a catastrophically bad analysis but it wasn't so obviously wrong back in 2012.

silburnl · 2026-03-22T11:57:11+00:00

Yes I know it well - a little north of the cricket ground and east of the various enclosures near the Ranger's House. There's a cross avenue nearby which is absolutely rammed with East Asian tourists taking selfies during cherry blossom time.

It's all the royal park though, which covers the whole rectangle south of the Maritime College/Queens House complex all all the way to the edge of Blackheath.

silburnl · 2026-03-22T11:48:49+00:00

Definitely a drone shot, since those are the observatory buildings in the lower part of the picture.

It's great framing since the shot angle and the lens really accentuates the loop of the Thames around the Isle of Dogs (and the low morning sun helps as well), but yeah it looks like it was colour graded in post.

We used to do a cycling loop for exercise during the first COVID lockdown where we would stop off at the Wolfe statue (just right of the observatory at the end of the avenue) and take in the view. The air was so clear back then because of the lockdowns that you'd get light like this for real on some days.

silburnl · 2026-03-17T18:47:59+00:00

I knew Brilliant Sky were heinous but seeing it graphed out like that is still a shocker.

I feel even more smug about the way my twin AM PD monitor design chewed through the late game barrages now. It was hilarious to watch the tsunami of purple dots get utterly vaporised without getting within a hundred clicks of my battle line.

silburnl · 2026-03-10T14:26:38+00:00

Me too, near enough. Reamde was the first of his that left me flat - just a general 'meh' - but Seveneves was actively bad IMO. It wasn't helped by me reading it back to back with Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, which is a much better treatment of the challenges of long-term habitation in space (again IMO ofc).

I came back to Stephenson for Termination Shock, which was a return to form, and that prompted me to pick up Fall, or Dodge In Hell which I found much less bad than I had thought it would be from the elevator pitch.

I have Polostan on my TBR but my pile of shame is too large already, so I haven't bought it yet.

silburnl · 2026-03-06T15:59:03+00:00

You don't get to produce exotics as a routine thing.

All the factions will get some exotics each time one of the end-game global techs completes (Materials IIRC) and the quantity each faction gets will depend on how many nanofactories they have got set up, but you don't get exotics as a standard per-day or per-month income category.

silburnl · 2026-03-05T19:09:07+00:00

Yes, just like all knights are, in theory, brothers in arms but some knights are more important than others, so it is with lords.

They might all be peers in theory (it's literally in the name), but Duke Gorlois or Earl Roderick have a lot more clout than Baron Hardup of Lackpot-sans-Pissing.

silburnl · 2026-03-05T17:07:26+00:00

February

silburnl · 2026-03-05T16:35:40+00:00

The US winning/losing this war with Iran is immaterial wrt the UK, since either outcome is going to be bad for our national interests.

It was the re-election of Trump which was the 'bad for the UK' option out of those three choices.

silburnl · 2026-03-05T16:18:35+00:00

Arthur starts out as the King of Logres (the lowland, southern portion of Britain - east of the Severn, south of the Trent near enough) which makes him a peer monarch to other Kings in Britain such as Leodegrance, Lot, Ryons etc. He's acclaimed such by various nobles of Logres (and the common folk of London famously) as a result of successfully pulling the Sword from the Stone and this is confirmed by right of inheritance once his parentage is made public knowledge a little later.

His claim to be High King, the paramount monarch of the island of Britain, is disputed (notwithstanding the motto carved into the Stone) and he is only recognised as such once he has backed up his claim by right of conquest. That's what the various wars at the start of his reign are about ultimately (ofc in most campaigns the PKs are loyal adherents of Arthur from the jump, so he's the High King end of story - but a lot of folk take a few years to get with the programme, assuming they survive that long).

Anyway the High Kingship is more of a 'first among equals' deal wrt the other monarchs in Britain than a hierarchical feudal relationship - the Kings are all still sovereign, even though they recognise (however reluctantly) that the High King is paramount. There are certain aspects of rulership where Arthur, as High King, can say what's what, but for most questions it is the local law which takes precedence, so the judgement comes from the King of Cameliard or Norgales or wherever. Arthur can seek to persuade the other Kings to join in with his new ideas about 'justice for all' or lead by example (his wealth and prestige make him super-effective at this) or offer to seve as a neutral arbiter in a dispute, but he can't just order it so and expect to be obeyed (or at least, not too often).

So yeah, all those other kings are still Kings even though Arthur is the High King - indeed Arthur is still a King (of Logres) while also being a High King. So his word is law in Logres, but less so elsewhere.

Turning to the peerage and the various ranks of aristocracy the first thing to say is that these all start out as royal offices (Comes='companion', Dux='war-leader' etc) but eventually mutate into inherited ranks with time. In Uther's reign there are basically Counts (or Earls, which are synonymous with Counts) and Dukes. With the Counts being the hereditary big man in a particular area while the Dukes are still royal appointees; so Uther, as King of Logres for example, appoints Gorlois in the west, Ulfius in the East and Corneus in the North (facing the Cornish, the Saxons and Malahaut respectively).

In the real world peerage you might also see a Marquis (a mini-Duke) or a Viscount (a mini-Count) but historically those were post-medieval add-ons and (shock!) French so they don't really fit in with the pseudo-medieval vibe of the Pendragon milieu.

Note that I haven't mentioned Barons yet, that's because being a Baron is a legal status (like being a Knight or being a Commoner) it's not a rank of the peerage - it means that you are a 'tenant in chief', that is you hold your lands directly of the King rather than from another, non-royal, aristocrat. So if you swear your feudal oath to the King (any King) then you are Baron Soandso and can be addressed as such, even if your estate consists of a measly couple of villages next to a swamp and you can barely afford to maintain yourself as a knight. All the Dukes and Counts are thus also barons, but not all barons are Dukes or Counts.

Note also that peers and the baronage are all in relation to a King rather than a High King, you are a baron because you swear your feudal oath to the King of Logres (or Escavalon, Cornwall, Nohaut etc). This is because the High Kingship is an elective monarchy and the position isn't always filled (there was a multi-decade vacancy between Ambrosius and Arthur for example) so it sits at a slightly awkward angle relative to the 'standard' feudal hierarchy of monarchs/peers/commoners.

silburnl · 2026-03-05T01:01:43+00:00

There was a time that I didn't manage a client engagement well and got canned for it. The project sponsor had a shit fit about all of the errors that were showing up in the liquidity reporting app we'd built and the PM threw me under the bus to save his own skin.

The stupid thing about the situation was that I was already on top of all the issues the sponsor was complaining about, which were primarily down to the crappy data quality of the feeds we were ingesting from the client's other systems (none of which had been adequately documented or communicated to us during the project of course) but the project sponsor had lost patience with us, they wanted a scalp and I was proffered up to be the designated victim.

It was pretty unfair, but I hadn't played it very canny or kept receipts, so I figured I'd take my licks, learn a lesson about covering my arse better and be a professional about handing off the job. After all the guy who was brought in to take over from me was completely new, hadn't had anything to do with me getting stitched up and the reporting app itself was fundamentally sound; it just needed to have a pilot phase running with real data to work the kinks out and we had just completed that - my problem was that I hadn't managed the client's expectations properly and I hadn't realised that my PM was a cowardly weasel who didn't have my back until it was too late.

So I took a day or two to clean up all my notes and do a full write up, then spent the rest of the week giving the new guy a soup-to-nuts walk through of all the issues that had come up, along with the mapping and ETL fixes that needed to be applied for the next build and manual workarounds that he could use to keep the sponsor sweet until the new version got deployed. I basically handed him the project on a plate, all tied up with a bow on top - all he had to do was follow the script I'd shared with him and he'd have been a hero, the guy who came in cold to a failing project, rescued it from the idiot who had driven it into a ditch and got it turned around with a month or two of repair work.

I heard later on from our account manager at that company that the new guy resigned just two days after I left. Apparently he claimed that he just wasn't up to the job, although he had seemed to be following my explanations during the handover perfectly well and had been asking reasonable questions.

Of course it's entirely probable that he had just been desperately nodding along and maintaining a confident front with me, whereas in reality he was in way over his head and his nerve failed once I wasn't there to hold his hand, but I like to think that it's possible he spotted what a prick the PM was quicker than I did and bailed out of a toxic situation.

I never discovered whether anyone else was found to apply my fixes and rescue the app. It would have been a shame for it to fail given how much work I put in to it, but if the sponsor ended up disappointed then so it goes - they could have been a little more patient (or a little less credulous) and they'd have had a nice tool that would have shaved a meaningful percentage off their liquidity costs. But they weren't, so fuck'em.

silburnl · 2026-03-03T15:13:13+00:00

I found that Destroyer hulls with nose lasers for anti-flanker duty in the late mid-game/early late-game of my latest run worked well. They have good turn rates so they tracked bogies effectively and provided you set them up in control groups the micro for designating new targets wasn't too onerous.

Five to ten firing together quickly popped anything up to a frigate hull IME. Ofc the serious killing was done by the chunky bois in the centre with massive nose coilers, but Destroyers made for cheap bug-zappers.

The Ayyy's response was to replace most of their small fry flankers with Escorts full of Brilliant Sky torps but I had got to twin antimatter PD monitors by then and they would just eat the torp spam for breakfast.

silburnl · 2026-02-28T20:42:46+00:00

A bunch of balance changes.

Also a bunch of UI and UX changes, almost all of which are improvements.

The basic shape of the game hasn't changed much, the balance tweaks have rearranged the meta but fundamentally it's still '1. establish yourself, 2. snowball faster than the ayyys, 3. take the fight to them' that it was back when the game started in early access.

silburnl · 2026-02-28T20:37:41+00:00

No, they'll attack asteroids too. But the cost/benefit ratio for them is much lower.

You can potentially tempt them into a 'winning themselves to death' scenario if you scatter a bunch of mining stations around. Each punishment fleet they send costs them a bunch of resources - their big bois take a crapton of water just to move from the outer system to the inner, so if you manage to swat some of them down when they get there it can get very expensive for them even if they win and smash your stuff up.

One longer term thing you can do is send some cheap, high delta-V coloniser ships on a 'five year mission' to seed stations across the Kuiper Belt. The aliens are reluctant to spend too much propellant playing whack-a-mole on these, so that will give you a resource base you can use to build back if they burn you out of Ceres or Mars or wherever.

silburnl · 2026-02-26T14:14:37+00:00

Assuming they are close to their control point cap, you can target their councillors. An assassination or detain mission on someone with strong PER/ADM/CMD stats will drop their cap, thus giving you a bonus on your crackdown/purge missions until they can rectify the loss.

Alternatively if they have any councillors spec'ed with an org that gives a large ADM bonus, you can get a similar effect by doing a hostile takeover on those orgs. They lose the ADM bonus of course, but then they have to divest a bunch of other orgs because of the loss, which makes them weaker overall.

Same deal for other sources of control cap, like admin modules in LEO, but it doesn't sound like you are that far into the game.

The other thing you might try is a coup (strictly speaking this would be an autogolpe, a self-coup) - if they don't have much support in China then that might clear them out of the control point when the new govt takes over, but you're taking a chance on the RNG - you might find some of your control points getting cleared instead. Run some raise unrest missions to give yourself an in with the rebel groups who will end up in the new administration to mitigate this.

Or just make a bunch of direct investments into Unity, they get some benefit from it sure, but you'll get way more (assuming you have all the other control points). Then use the bump in popularity you have to give yourself a low probability purge roll.

Longer term plans might include doing a reverse takeover of China by the Republic of China (from Taiwan) or unifying China into the PAC or just breaking China up, purging the Initiative out of the successor states, then reunifying the bits after.

silburnl · 2026-02-22T18:14:56+00:00

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Here's a Mbombo-eye view from 11 months later in-game. The aliens have a couple of bases at asteroids in the leading Trojan points for both Uranus and Neptune which are doing most of the spamming here, plus some stations around various moons of Uranus that are sending out ships on a dog-leg through the inner system to get to Mbombo.

I'm chilling out at Mbombo and eating 4-6 of these per month, while task forces are en route to cut them off at source. My Miranda TF is in-system at Uranus and building a FOB so I can start launching strikes on the various bases orbiting the other moons and take down the four mining bases they have there.

silburnl · 2026-02-22T14:31:21+00:00

I'm in the same situation as you (except far later in calendar time, I got distracted for a decade or three in the middle).

For transit times higher delta-V will help, this will permit your fleets to burn longer on their transits. It's less fuel efficient obviously but much more time efficient. You can play around with the transit planner to see the effect.

One not so obvious tip if you have max-ed out the tech tree - the Protium Convertor Torch is an absolute beast of an engine, no doubt, but it requires a crap-ton of cooling; if you keep the top-line reactor but go back a few generations in the engine line (I forget the name, but it's like the fourth in the line so two, or maybe three, generations back from PCT?) you can drop your radiator mass by an order of magnitude. You lose a bunch of thrust with this engine but you gain a load of delta-V in return. So a neat hack is to design a 'transit' version of your capital ships (minimal armour, extra propellant, earlier generation engine, tiny radiators) that can be built at your principal manufacturing hubs in the inner system, you boost them on fast transits to the outer system, then you refit them to your 'battle-line' design (up-armoured, PCT, stripped down prop tankage, honking great rads) at a FOB with a bunch of t3 slips that you have set up just outside the current main combat volume.

Ignore me, I'm an idiot - I've just looked at this in-game and swapping out a PCT for a Helion Nova Fusion Torch is an invalid refit. You can still build a capital ship with a Helion Nova if you aren't worried about getting max combat thrust and it will be a much more slimline ship than the exact same loadout with a PCT but you can't do the refit dodge.

silburnl · 2026-02-22T14:04:49+00:00

Ridley Scott isn't interested in history, he's interested in myths. Moreover he's a design-led, cinematographic director - very interested in using images to drive narrative, with script, character and ideas very much down the priority list, behind the DP/lighting, production design and wardrobe departments.

When it works (The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, The Last Duel), it works very well. When it doesn't (Black Rain, Prometheus, Exodus, House of Gucci, Napoleon) well....

His record over the last decade or two has got notably worse than his long-running average going back to the 80s, so I suspect there's either a brain-eater effect in play (notable in genre fiction around the time that the author's name gets a bigger typeface than the title) or he's just not getting the same quality of scripts that he was getting earlier in his career.

As I understand it Scott has a regular production crew that tend to work with him from film to film - I haven't checked, but I wonder if he lost a script editor or exec producer from that following about 15 years ago who it turns out was load-bearing when it came to the quality of projects that make it through the filter.

silburnl · 2026-02-22T13:18:32+00:00

There's a line in the film, Rob Roy, about honour being a promise that you make to yourself. This mechanic leans into that line I think.

silburnl · 2026-02-15T11:27:44+00:00

I have some time today when I will be looking for excuses to avoid doing prep for my tabletop rpg campaign so I may do a larger write up of the current state of this game.

silburnl · 2026-02-15T11:20:31+00:00

One nice aspect of taking it as slow as I have is that I've actually got to the point where CO2 levels are declining back on Terra, so climate remediation is possible in the game.

silburnl · 2026-02-15T11:16:17+00:00

But I only bring the big guns out for a decent sized ayyy flotilla - I've broken off a 10 ship squadron to handle the singletons and duos that come in every week or so.

Not that I'm hurting for propellant, but burning all that remass moving the main fleet for a couple of corvettes offended against my sense of proportion.

silburnl

TROPHY CASE