Traveller: Feeding Rethe

This is the fourth part in a short series mulling over various quirks of Traveller’s Third Imperium background. Part one considered how hazardous low berths are, part two wondered about jump drive fuel tanks, and part three considered Rethe, a Mars-sized desert world where 26 billion people live.

This time, how to feed everyone on Rethe.

Rethe

A quick recap from last time. Rethe (E430AA8 8 Poor. Non-agricultural. Desert World.) is the most populous world in the Regina subsector. (I noted last time that Rethe had grown - apparently that was following the T5 Second Survey, which increased “the size of worlds with thin or better atmospheres to match the physics that small worlds can't hold atmospheres”. So I’ll stick to canon from here on.) There’s barely any air (very thin – respirators needed) and no water.

Yet somehow, 26 billion people (mostly humans) live there.

How do we feed Rethe?

How many calories do we need? (I’m just going to concentrate on calories (kcals), in this post. I’m not going to complicate it by thinking about individual nutrients or factors such as processing.)

On average, humans need about 2,200 kcals a day. Men need slightly more, women slightly less, but we’ll use 2,200.

26 billion people, therefore, need 57 trillion kcals each day. Which is 400 trillion kcals a week, or 21 quadrillion kcals a year.

Where is all that energy coming from?

Homegrown

So let’s assume that everything is grown on Rethe (or in-system somewhere), all 21 quadrillion kcals. How much land is needed?

According to Our World in Data, the most efficient use of land is to grow maize. 0.65m2 of maize will create 1000 kcals. (I’m pretty sure that’s an annual yield and is based on an average of numerous real-life studies, so it includes an allowance for variation in yields due to the soil, weather, nutrients and so on. There may be other foods that are more efficient - I haven't made an exhaustive search, but maize provides a sense of the scale of the challenge.)

So a single km2 of maize generates about 1.5 billion kcals, which is a lot. But not enough, not by a long shot. To feed Rethe, we need 13.5 million km2.

That’s roughly the surface area of China and India combined.

Or imagine the sheer grandeur and majesty of the orbital hydroponic farms. They’re huuuge!

Endless fields of maize

And that’s just the area of maize. It doesn’t allow for space for planting, watering, weeding, packaging and harvesting. It assumes the soil is rich Earth-like.

It also assumes that the 26 billion people of Rethe are happy with a maize-only diet. If they wanted a more varied diet (maybe some spuds to go with their corn on the cob), then that would take up more room. (Although given Traveller is an SF game, I assume other delicious plants are available in the Third Imperium that take up no more room than maize.)

Given that Rethe is a desert world with a very thin atmosphere (maybe like the Tibetan plateau, but drier) at TL 8, perhaps we’d better import the food.

Imported food

So let’s import some food: red kibble.

Delicious red kibble

For the sake of this exercise, let’s assume red kibble is a dehydrated nutritious (if not delicious) foodstuff with an energy density of 1200 kcals per 100g. To compare, 100g of salted peanuts contain about 600 kcals, so I’m probably being generous. But it’s the far future, so let’s go with it.

So 1 kg of red kibble contains 12,000 kcals.

We now need to turn that into a volume. We’ll assume that 1 kg of red kibble occupies 2 litres – or 1 cubic metre weighs 500kg. (To compare, according to this website, 1 litre of peanuts weighs 0.62kg, so I don’t think I’m far out, given this is fictional anyway.)

The volume of each displacement ton is 14 m3, which is 7,000 kg of red kibble. That means each ton contains 84 million kcals. (I’m ignoring packaging.)

How many Far Traders?

A Far Trader has a 63-ton cargo bay, which, if filled with red kibble, can provide 5.3 billion kcals.

However, feeding Rethe for just a week requires 400 trillion kcals, and you would need a fleet of over 75,000 Far Traders. Arriving every week.

Another way of looking at it is that Rethe needs 4.8 million displacement tons of red kibble every week, without fail, not to starve.

But let’s put aside the logistics of delivering nearly five million displacement tons of red kibble every week and think about where it’s coming from.

Sourcing red kibble: local systems

Luckily, within two parsecs of Rethe we have three potential food suppliers: Paya, Focaline, and Inthe. (And all the systems have gas giants, which is fortunate as we need a lot of fuel.)

Paya A655241-9

Paya is the closest and has an A-class starport. It looks the most promising – it’s a reasonable-sized world with 50% hydrographics. The wiki describes it as “a garden world.”

However, Paya has fewer than 1000 people living on it (600, according to the wiki).

I’d like to think that Paya has vast robotic farms churning out red kibble, but as it's not classified as an agricultural world (too few inhabitants), I guess that’s not the case. Perhaps the soil isn’t great.

Focaline EA88544-7

According to the wiki, “Focaline is an agricultural world with an ideal environment for producing food from plants, animals, or other forms.”

There’s just one problem – it only has an E-class starport. Even if it could make five million displacement tons of red kibble every week, it can’t get them easily into orbit.

Inthe B575776-9

Inthe is “an agricultural world with a tainted atmosphere but still a near-ideal environment for producing foodstuffs.” So that’s just what we need. Phew!

It has a decent starport and is big and fertile enough (and not too populated – tens of millions) to provide all the red kibble Rethe needs.

The influence of nearby worlds

This shows one downside of Traveller’s planetary creation system: it’s completely random, with no recognition of nearby worlds. Of course, a world’s physical characteristics should be independent of its neighbours – but in the Third Imperium, I would expect the social characteristics (population, government, law level, tech level, starport type) of nearby worlds to influence others.

In Focaline’s case, if it was a wonderful source of red kibble, then I would expect Rethe to invest in a good starport and have shipped millions of workers over (making barely a dent in Rethe’s population but boosting Focaline’s massively) to make sure the red kibble flows uninterrupted.

But as Focaline only has an E-class starport, then perhaps it’s not fertile after all.

(And the same could be said for Paya. If it’s that great at growing things, why doesn’t someone invest in automated farms and a workforce? There's a ready market one parsec away!)

But at least we have a source for our red kibble: Inthe.

In "reality", I would expect Rethe to import food from all three worlds (and elsewhere). But let's go with Inthe for now.

Next time

Next time, I think about cargo and how to ship all that red kibble, and I might even build a megafreighter.

Update: other sources of food 

I posted this link to Reddit and Facebook and it has provoked some lively and interesting discussion. So I thought I’d capture my responses here.

Soylent Green

A few people have talked about eating the dead. Assuming the cultural implications are easily overcome, there is a bigger problem - corpses don't provide enough kcals.

According to Wikipedia roughly 150,000 people currently die each day here on Earth. Rethe has a population 3x Earth's, so that's 450,000 people every day (or about 170 million people a year). Searching around, the most generous reports are that there are about 150,000 kcals in a human body (my search history is... odd). That means cannibalisation only provides 66 billion kcals a day - and Rethe needs 57 trillion! So way less than 1% of the total calories needed.

Underground hydroponic farms

What about underground farms? This place grows salad crops, which famously aren't energy dense. But it's the far future, so let's make some assumptions that a good, calorie-dense crop can be farmed using underground hydroponics.

Let's assume it's twice as effective as maize, grown on Earth, and 1000 kcals needs only 0.325m2 per year.

This shrinks the area needed to "only" 7 million km2.

But wait, we can stack the units! Let's say we stack them in 10 units high. That gives us 700,000 km2. How big is that? Well, that's a little more than the surface area of France.

Except that we probably need to add 50% onto the area to allow for access for maintenance, cropping and so on. That gives us a little over 1 million km2 - so we have to add Germany as well.

So that's indoor farms with hydroponic beds stacked 10 rows high, the size of Germany and France combined. (Obviously, it's not one farm, but hundreds of thousands of them.)

But what about water?

So far I’ve assumed that water is available on Rethe – either in ice or available via comets. How much water do these underground hydroponic farms need?

This article here suggests that a hydroponics system requires 5-7 litres per day per m2. Let's be generous and assume our miracle food only requires 4 litres per day per m2.

I imagine Rethe is good at recycling its water and recovers 90%. How much more does it need?

With 7 million km2 needing water, this means a daily requirement of 4 x 7,000,000 (km2) x 1,000,000 (m2 in a km2) x 50% (recycled) or 2.8 trillion m3 of water per day. Which is a cube of water 1.4 km on each side - every day. (And this is on top of the water needed for drinking/washing/cleaning/sewage/industry and everything else.) On a desert world.

It's that last bit that I struggle with. A desert world. While I imagine Rethe does grow some food, I would imagine much of it is imported.

Update August 2024

Over on Unchartered Territories (here and here), Thomas Pueyo considers vertical farming in detail – and it looks like vertical farming is what Rethe needs. (The limitations that hold back vertical farming here on Earth don’t apply to Rethe – Rethe doesn’t have the luxury of a surfeit of good arable land for crops. And power isn’t an issue, assuming cheap fusion power.)

According to the article, vertical farming promises up to 200x improvements in land area compared to regular farming. 200x sounds rather like marketing hyperbole, but it’s the far future, so let’s go with it. That means we ‘only’ need about 67,500 km2 of vertical farms, which is a little smaller than Scotland. This is still huge, but much more manageable.

Also, over on my post where I talk about Biospheres, Father Fletch pointed me to this discussion about food on Freelance Traveller.

Traveller: Rethe and the perils of random world generation

This is my third post on some of Traveller’s illogicalities. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Traveller background (the Third Imperium) – it was my first RPG, as I’ve said before. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.

Earlier posts covered low berths and starship fuel tanks.

World creation

Traveller has a procedure for creating worlds. Roll dice, work through the steps and out pops a world at the end of the process.

This can produce weird results – but if you’re doing this yourself, you can either tweak the results so they make more sense or justify those results.

However, the Traveller canon has several books full of systems, most famously the Spinward Marches (Supplement 3), where most of the original Traveller adventures were set. I imagine a computer was used to create the hundreds of systems in the Spinward Marches – and as a result, some worlds are a little crazy.

Such as Rethe, in the Regina subsector.

Rethe

Rethe on the wonderful Traveller Map

According to page 150 of The Traveller Book, Rethe has a population of 26 billion, the highest in the Regina subsector.

According to the Traveller wiki, that’s now either 30 billion (if you hover over the UWP) or is “over one billion” and “in the last 25 years has grown by well over six billion” (according to the text, at time of writing). I’ll stick with The Traveller Book for the rest of this post.

Reth’s UWP (Universal World Profile) is E230AA8 8 Poor. Non-agricultural. Desert World.

Let’s break that down:

• Starport E (Frontier installation – a patch of bedrock with no facilities.)
• Size 2 (3,200 km in diameter, roughly – about the size of the moon. But see below.)
• Atmosphere 3 (Very thin, needing a respirator.)
• Hydrographics 0 (No freestanding water – like the moon. Maybe some ice.)
• Population A (Tens of billions – 26 billion, according to The Traveller Book.)
• Government A (A charismatic dictator.)
• Law level 8 (Guns and long-bladed weapons are controlled – a bit like the UK.)
• Tech level 8 (Laser carbines and air rafts – according to The Traveller Book, this equates to 1980-1989 on Earth!)
• Poor: Any world with an atmosphere of 2-5 and hydrographics 3- is automatically poor. I’m not sure this makes sense.
• Non-agricultural: Worlds with an atmosphere 3-, hydrographics 3- and population 6+ are non-agricultural.
• Desert world: Hydrographics 0 and atmosphere 2+. (Mongoose's Core Rulebook describes Desert worlds as "barely habitable".)

How big?

According to the Traveller map and the wiki, Rethe is size 4 or 6,400km in diameter. That makes it slightly smaller than Mars – according to the wiki, Mars and Rethe have the same physical characteristics (430).

I’m not sure why it changed, and it doesn’t change my argument about Rethe’s inhospitality, but I’m sticking with The Traveller Book for the rest of this post.

But what does all this mean?

So, let’s talk about the obvious outlier – a population of 26 billion people. On the moon (or Mars). At tech level 8 and with no starport to speak of.

Really?

Imagine 26 billion people living on the moon. Thanks to the very thin atmosphere, they must live indoors – in massive cities/archologies or orbital settlements. (The wiki mentions orbital habitats.)

But what’s it like? Is Rethe futuristic and grand, like Coruscant in Star Wars? Or is it shabby, overcrowded and awful, like Ceres in The Expanse?

Why Rethe?

Why are there 26 billion people on Rethe? What makes it so attractive?

According to the Regina subsector page on the Traveller wiki, Rethe’s population is mostly human. (It doesn’t explicitly say that, but you can work it out from the numbers in the sophont population table.) And humans didn’t evolve on Rethe – they went there.

(And it’s more plausible to say that there are 26 billion people in the Rethe system, but Rethe itself is the most important world, and most people are there.)

It seems likely that Rethe is rich in lanthanum, Zuchai crystals, unobtanium, anti-matter, dark matter, or other exotic minerals. (Being rich in heavy metals would help it retain its thin atmosphere rather than being airless like our moon.) Something that has drawn billions of people to Rethe to seek their fortune (either by mining or servicing the mining industry, or by servicing those servicing the mining industry).

Rethe needs to export something valuable – because it must import food and other essential resources. (I imagine it can find ice, and therefore water, in the system somewhere.)

If it doesn’t import anything, it starves. And if it doesn’t export anything, it can’t pay for its imports, so it starves. So, assuming that the population of Rethe isn’t starving, it must be doing brisk trade with nearby worlds.

The Traveller wiki notes that “Since it was colonized, the world has been a backwater, with the population producing just enough to support the cost of life support.” That doesn’t sound like a rich, prosperous world – but “just enough to support the cost of life support” for 26 billion people means that Rethe is producing an awful lot of something.

E class starport?

But how can Rethe trade when it only has a class E starport?

Maybe if Rethe was in a lightly populated part of space, then you justify not having a starport. There could be a garden world somewhere in the system and lots of in-system trade, but no actual starport. (Although why Rethe is the main world and not this lovely garden world then needs further justification.)

But Rethe isn’t remote – it’s on a branch of the Spinward Main, a long chain of systems just one parsec from each other.

Giving Rethe a Class E starport is like imagining New York without ports, stations, airports or roads – and only a single-track highway to get there. It’s hard to imagine – it doesn’t make sense.

So Rethe needs an enormous starport (or starports) filled with bulk carriers. They bring in supplies and take out whatever it is that Rethe exports. It must be Class B at least – and probably Class A.

(The Traveller Wiki suggests that Rethe originally had a Class B starport, but for unspecified reasons, it was downgraded.)

And tech level 8?

How can Rethe be only tech level 8? The Traveller Book hasn’t dated well (it tells us that TL8 is the technology of the 1980s), but Mongoose Traveller says that at TL 8, “permanent space habitats become possible”. Possible.

Rethe needs better than “possible,” given it has 26 billion people living in what are effectively permanent space habitats. (It might have an atmosphere, but it’s not breathable. And there’s no water - and that means no food.) At TL10, “orbital habitats and factories become commonplace”, which suggests that Rethe needs to be TL10 at least.

But perhaps there has been a war. That would explain the Class E starport and the (relatively) low tech level. But a war also suggests a huge humanitarian crisis that the subsector (if not the sector) should be mobilising to fix. But such a war or crisis isn't mentioned anywhere (The Traveller Book's library data for Rethe just mentions an annual festival.)

Canonically, I think the date of The Traveller Book is 1105. The Traveller wiki entry for Rethe says that it is Milieu 1116, which covers the period from 1100 to 1117. Seventeen years is a long time for 26 billion people on a desert world not to have a decent starport, and according to the wiki, Rethe is still  TL 8 Class E (although rebuilding back to Class B).

But that’s one of the challenges of canon – having the background (particularly one as vast as the Third Imperium) evolve. Peculiarities such as Rethe are almost inevitable.

How likely is Rethe anyway?

I recreated the rolls that made Rethe from The Traveller Book. The rolls were:

• Starport (2D): 10 or 11, for an E class starport
• Size (2D-2): 4, for size 2
• Atmosphere (2D-7+size): 8, for atmosphere 3
• Hydrographics (2D-7+atmosphere): 2, 3 or 4 for hydrographics 0
• Population (2D-2): 12 for A
• Government (2D-7+population): 7 for government A
• Law level (2D-7+government): 6 for law level 9
• Tech level (1D +1 (for size 2) +1 (for atmosphere 3) +4 (for population A)): 2 to get tech level 8.

With only a few extreme rolls, it’s not surprising that a world like Rethe appears somewhere – probably more than once.

Rethe is a little less likely with Mongoose’s core rules because the starport roll comes after the law level roll and is modified by population (+2 for a population of 10+). An E-class starport is still possible, but you’d have to roll 2. But a roll of 10 or 11 (as per the original roll for a starport) would have given Rethe an A-class starport.

And an A-class starport gives Rethe an extra +6 modifier on the tech level roll (and +1 for 0% hydrographics, which isn’t in The Traveller Book). So that’s a total DM of +13, which gives us TL 15 if we take the original result of 2.

So, a Class A starport and TL 15. It’s more like Coruscant, and the only question is why Regina is the sector capital rather than Rethe.

What I’d change

I’m not doing this to poke fun at Traveller – I’m just pointing out some illogicalities that can arise when you randomly create systems using a formula. Rethe isn’t particularly unusual – some of the rolls were at the extreme ends of the bell curve (but even then, only one 12), but if you roll up a lot of worlds, it will happen sooner or later.

So if I were to change anything, I would ensure high populations on worlds that can’t support themselves were at least TL 10 with a good starport. Or maybe a common-sense check before committing the system to the canon.

Next time

Next time, I look at how to feed Rethe.

Traveller: Why do starships have internal fuel tanks?

Last time, I mused over the lethality of Traveller’s low berths. This time, I’m grumbling about starship fuel tanks.

Jump drives

Back in 1981, when I first read Traveller’s little black books, I didn’t fully understand how jump drives worked. I imagined they were like the hyperdrives in Star Wars – and were used throughout to keep the ship in jump space.

Except they don’t work like that.

I realised something was amiss with my concept when I got my hands on Supplement 7: Traders and Gunboats and, in particular, the Gazelle class Close Escort.

The Gazelle class Close Escort

The Gazelle then: From Traders and Gunboats

The Gazelle included a new feature: drop tanks.

“The L-Hyd Tanks: The close escort carries a large fraction of its fuel in droppable tanks mounted longitudinally. With the tanks attached, the ship is capable of jump 4 and 4-G acceleration. When the tanks are dropped, the ship burns the fuel and can achieve jump. Once the tanks are dropped, they must be replaced at a starport or naval base; until they are replaced, the ship is capable of 5-G acceleration, but only jump-2 (due to lack of sufficient fuel capacity).”

This crashed up against my assumptions, and it took me a while to work out what this actually meant: jump drives spent all their fuel before entering jump. And then they could drop their tanks, which is important because, in Traveller, a ship’s volume (measured in, er, tonnage – more on that below) determines how far it can jump.

This was the first time I had seen this. It wasn’t in my little black books, and it wasn’t in The Traveller Book.

It’s not even particularly clear in Mongoose’s latest rules.

The Gazelle now: From High Guard (2022 update)

Core Book 2022 Update

While providing a much clearer explanation of what’s going on during jump, Mongoose’s Core Rulebook Update 2022 doesn’t clearly say that jump drive fuel is consumed to create the jump bubble before entering jumpspace.

And the amount of fuel spent creating the bubble is 10% of the ship’s tonnage x the distance jumped, in parsecs. (While this is implied, I don’t think I’ve seen it in the core rules, although I may have missed it. It’s covered in the Traveller wiki.)

Why is this important?

Because in a world where tonnage is money, why would you ever have internal fuel tanks for your jump drive? Once you enter the jump bubble, those tanks are empty…

In fact, for most ships, the J-drive fuel tanks are empty for most of its life. You normally only need to fill them when you’re about to make a jump – otherwise, it is best to keep them empty.

The cost of an empty fuel tank

So, if we look at a humble 200-ton (or rather, 2,800 m3 volume) Free Trader, its jump-1 drive requires 20 tons of fuel. If a Free Trader had droppable fuel tanks, those 20 tons could be turned into cargo space which would be potentially an extra Cr 20,000 every trip (assuming it was filled with standard cargo).

Why wouldn’t you do that?

Now, drop tanks may only work in civilized places – perhaps only at class A and B starports or where there is a steady trade. I can imagine renting standard drop tanks much in the way you’d rent a skip today. (So that will eat into that Cr 20,000.)

And you might want internal fuel tanks if you didn’t know whether you would be able to refuel at the other end. However, most Traveller ships don’t have the fuel capacity for more than one jump, and the assumption is that fuel is pretty easy to get.

Are there other options?

Alternative fuel tanks

High Guard gives us more options for fuel tanks:

Collapsible fuel tanks: A huge bladder that sits in the cargo space and can be filled (and emptied) with fuel as needed. It's a good idea, but there’s no time to use the cargo space productively between forming the jump bubble and entering jumpspace.

Collapsible fuel tank from High Guard

Drop tanks: As fitted on the Gazelle Close Escort, above. However, they bring a penalty to the jump drive roll, and the tanks themselves have a less than 50% chance of surviving the experience. (I find it odd that they aren’t more reliable – I imagine Toyota kaizen-ing the hell out of these and making them safe and reliable and cornering the market as a result.)

Fuel/Cargo container: Allows fuel to be stored in unused parts of a ship.

Mountable tanks: Fixed tanks that convert cargo space into fuel tanks, and as far as I can see, have no benefit over a collapsible fuel tank. (Well, they take up less space than a fuel bladder, but you’ve lost the use of your cargo space.)

None of these are ideal – they either use up precious cargo space or aren’t particularly reliable.

My solution: collapsible external fuel tanks

Collapsible external fuel tanks

Why not fit those fuel bladders on the outside of a ship? That way, when the fuel is used up, the bladder collapses and preserves the ship’s precious volume. And it can be reused time and time again.

Collapsible external tanks will affect a ship’s streamlining – although I can imagine blisters on the hull that conceal the tank (but at a cost – maybe 2% of the fuel tank tonnage) and protect the ship’s streamlining.

Implications

The real problem with this is that it invalidates almost all the Traveller ship design assumptions since 1977. Ships should have more cargo space and less fuel space. You might still want internal fuel tanks for some situations, particularly if you need an armoured hull, but most ships would have external fuel bladders.

Footnote: Traveller tonnage

Traveller tonnage is a bit weird. Ships are measured in displacement tonnage, which is actually a measure of volume (equivalent to the volume of liquid hydrogen displaced, measured in tons – so one displacement ton is 14 m2).

I can see how this works for jump drives – the J-drive needs to create a jump bubble big enough to take the ship. So volume is important.

But for manoeuvre drives? I would have thought that a ship’s mass was more important than its volume for an M-drive. So, is a ship more agile with its fuel tanks empty? Apparently not – but maybe that was one calculation too many. (Interestingly, M-drives use power from the power plant but no actual fuel themselves.)

Next

Next time I look at the most populated world in the Regina subsector: Rethe.

Traveller: low berths

Some background: I have a vague plan to run some Traveller sometime soon, so I’ve been doing some reading (Mongoose 2nd edition, the 2022 update), and I’m enjoying immersing myself in it.

I haven’t read this much Traveller since the early 80s, when I started roleplaying. I’m pleased at how familiar everything is – but at the same time, modern and updated.

But I have a few niggles; things that don’t seem quite right. None are game-breaking (and few actually affect actual roleplaying), but they have the sense of something that hasn’t really been thought about properly.

So I’m going to mull over some of them – starting with low berths.

What are low berths?

“Back to the old freezerinos.” – Brett, Alien

Low berths are a staple of science fiction and may be known as cryotubes, stasis, hypersleep pods or whatever. Essentially, the passenger is frozen for the duration of the voyage.

Alien starts with the crew coming out of cryosleep – but you can see the same sort of thing in Avatar, Passengers, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the Golgafrincham B Ark) and many others. (Here’s a wiki page devoted to the subject.)

Technically, it’s not without its challenges. In particular, the challenge of preventing ice crystal formation. But assuming you can overcome that problem, cryosleep is great for transporting a lot of people a long way with minimal life support.

Traveller, however, is a bit odd about that as they’re typically used for one-week jumps. It hardly seems worth it. (Here’s the Traveller wiki page on low passage.)

What’s wrong with Traveller’s low berths?

In short, they’re lethal. 

My 1982 copy of The Traveller Book says: “Throw 5+ for each passenger when he is revived after the ship has landed. DMs: Atending medic expertise of 2 or better, +1; low passenger with an endurance of 6 or less, -1. Failure to achieve the throw to revive results in death for the passenger.”

So that’s an unmodified 5/6 (83%) chance of survival.

That means if a family of four takes a trip somewhere, they only have a 48% chance of all surviving the journey. (So, a greater than even chance that at least one family member won’t make it.)

Those odds are appalling! Even with a medic on hand (+1 DM), there’s still a 30% chance that at least one family member won’t survive the journey.

(In Traveller, a 200-ton Free Trader has 20 low berths. There’s only a 2.6% unmodified chance of everyone making it.)

I certainly wouldn’t get into a low passage – they’re just too dangerous. It’s literally a game of Russian Roulette. And putting 20 on a Free Trader (taking up 10 tons of valuable cargo space) seems extraordinarily wasteful!

(And the low lottery, where passengers hold a sweepstake on the number of low berth survivors, is just tasteless.)

Mongoose Core Rules

In Mongoose’s Traveller, things are slightly better. Slightly.

The Core Rules say: “There is real danger to the passenger, as a Routine (6+) Medic check (1D x 10 minutes, INT) is required upon opening the capsule, applying the passenger’s END DM to the check. A further DM+1 is applied if the ship is TL12 or higher, while non-humans suffer DM-2. An emergency low berth inflicts DM-1 on this check.”

While at first glance this appears worse, taking longer over a task gives a +2 DM. As there really shouldn’t be any reason to rush defrosting someone from a low berth, this gives an unmodified roll of 4+ to survive, or an 11/12 chance of survival. And Medic-2 makes it an automatic success, making low berth travel much safer.

What would I change?

First, I like low berths. They’re a science fiction stable, and it suits Traveller, but for me, it needs some adjustments.

First, I would assume that the problems of low berth travel have been largely fixed. Low berth travel should be boring. Routine. Safe. Maybe there’s a one in a thousand chance of a problem, with one in twenty of those resulting in a fatality. That makes low berths more realistic.

Second, I would remove low berths as fixtures in ships – maybe have a few low berths for emergencies. Instead, I imagine low berths being part of the cargo. 

There’s no reason for low berths to be per-jump. Instead, you could be put in a low berth at one end of your journey and defrosted at the other, however many jumps later. I imagine a small industry of seamless, low-cost passenger shipping.

Low berths and aliens

Mongoose’s Traveller gives a DM-2 for non-humans, but presumably, that applies only to non-humans trying to use a human low berth. On a Vargr ship, it should be the humans who get DM-2.

That’s assuming they can fit in the low berth in the first place – a K’Kree won’t ever be able to use a human low berth.

And some aliens may be unsuitable for low berths in any eventuality. (Discussed to some extent on this Traveller wiki page about Low Berth Racks.)

Other ideas

Low berths (or their equivalents) regularly turn up in science fiction, sometimes with interesting side effects.

It’s a long time since I read Arthur C Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, but from what I remember, the hibernation pods had a small rejuvenating effect. How popular would they be in Traveller if regular use was a positive DM on your ageing roll?

On the other hand, in The Legacy of Heorot (by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes), some colonists suffer from Hibernation Instability caused by ice crystals forming in the brain during cryosleep. So maybe one potential side effect of low berths is a risk of -1 to Intelligence rather than death? 

(Similarly, in the Flatlined adventure, the Travellers awaken with temporary amnesia.)

Or might passengers enjoy cellular reprofiling during cryosleep? Maybe not as extensive as the rejuvenation process in Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained (Peter F Hamilton), but perhaps enough to give +1 to Dexterity or Endurance? This would probably be expensive – and I imagine it taking longer than a week. But if you’re travelling from Efate/Regina to Pretoria/Pretoria (11 jumps, at jump 2), why not avoid the tedium of travel, eradicate your hay fever, boost your reflexes, and change your eye colour at the same time?

Next time

Next time, I grumble about starship fuel tanks.

2023 in games

And suddenly, it’s 2024. Was 2023 anything to write home about? Some good, some bad – at least in terms of games.

2023's new boardgames

Freeform Games

Freeform Games had a great year. We published two games, transitioned our old shop into a more modern shop, and had our best year (sales and revenue) so far. I will write more on the Freeform Games blog, in a few days.

Conventions and games weekends

I’m attending more conventions these days (largely thanks to giving up the day job). I love going to conventions – as much for catching up with old friends as much as playing the games.

In 2023 I attended:

Retcon (February, Retford): A replacement for the normal UK Freeforms weekend game, Retcon was a convention of smaller freeforms and boardgames. I ran two freeforms and facilitated a game of Fiasco.

Airecon (March, Harrogate): A lovely local convention in Harrogate – I’ve been going for a few years now. It’s primarily a boardgames convention, with a small-but-healthy RPG stream. (It’s like a small UKGE, but more focus on playing and less on the trade halls.) I ran two tabletop RPGs and played lots of boardgames.

Peaky (April, not far from Tamworth): I’ve been to every Peaky since it started in the early 2000s. Intense, creative and fabulous. I wrote one game and played three. Brilliant.

Continuum (July, Leicester): This was my first Continuum in a while – it had fallen off my games calendar. I like the mix of tabletop and freeforms that I get at Continuum, plus I ran into several old friends that I don’t see at the other cons. I ran two tabletop games and played in three freeforms.

Furnace (October, Sheffield): Tabletop roleplaying only, and local enough that I don’t need to stay overnight. I ran one game and played in three.

Consequences (November, not far from Poole): Longest time away (four nights), I ran two freeforms and played in five.

Plans for 2024: Mostly the same, except that the weekend freeforms are back, which means there’s no Retcon. And I’m hoping to get to at least one day of Larpcon in Coalville.

Freeform larps

2023 was a great year for freeforms. I played or ran 20 freeforms, which I’m sure is a record. I also self-published a book, Writing Freeform Larps, which does what it says on the tin.

Favourite to run: Children of the Stars, at Consequences, was my favourite to run. It went smoothly – and although the follow-up (Messages from Callisto) also went well, that was beset by errors on my part.

Favourite to play: The Ashlight Labyrinth, which I played at Peaky, was a delight and my favourite freeform as a player in 2023. (Close runners-up were Across the City, Better than Life, Antarctic Station 13 and Ghosts: It’s not Ibsen.)

Plans for 2024:

• Finish writing and then run The Stars our Destination (the next in my first-contact series of games).
• Publish All Flesh is Grass on Itch.io. Start work on getting Children of the Stars ready for publication.
• Maybe start writing another freeform for Freeform Games.

Tabletop RPGs

I played in and ran fewer ttrpgs in 2023 than in recent years. My regular groups are fairly small (usually just four of us), and if someone can’t make it, then we cancel the session rather than struggle with just three of us. Unfortunately, we had lots of cancelled sessions in 2023.

My 2023 top games in terms of numbers were As the Sun Forever Sets (nine sessions as GM), Good Society (four sessions as a player – this is ongoing), Kingdom (three sessions as GM/facilitator). 

I ran two sessions of Hillfolk, which I’ve been meaning to run ever since it came out in 2023. So it only took me ten years. It was as good as I hoped, and I want to run more.

I published Other London: Desk 17, along with a couple of adventures. They’re not setting the world alight, but I find the whole process very satisfying. I like sharing my stuff.

Favourite to run: The two sessions of Hillfolk, which were a delight.

Favourite to play: The session of Fiasco I played (and facilitated) at Retcon – we had a great group of players and it was one of the highlights of the con.

Plans for 2024:

• Run more Hillfolk (at Airecon – and maybe see what it’s like online).
• Playtest the two scenarios I have written up (one for the Department of Irregular Services, one for Desk 17) and then publish them.
• Finish writing up two half-finished scenarios and playtest them as well.
• Maybe run a bit of Traveller, which would be very old school for me. At the very least, I will buy Mysteries of the Ancients and Wrath of the Ancients, which are completely in my wheelhouse. (I know I can get the pdfs right now, but I’m saving myself for when the hardbacks are ready.)
• If the Urban Shadows 2.0 Kickstarter appears, I’d like to take it for a spin. It’s very late (the campaign was back in 2020), but I’m relaxed about its tardiness. I don’t have room for another game, and I’d rather it was right and late than wrong and on time.
• And perhaps most important, I’d love to meet more gamers and play more games. Maybe run a few one-shots online or find a semi-regular face-to-face group.

Boardgames

In 2023, I played more games of My City than any other game. I played on boardgamearena a fair bit, which has been a lot of fun. While I’ve had a couple of online evenings with friends, most of my games have been turn-based against strangers. It’s been more fun than I had expected, and I’ve tried a lot of new games.

The new games to my collection:

My City: Reiner Knizia's legacy game with 24-episodes, plus an “eternal” game once you’ve done with the legacy game. It's a tile-placing game that takes about 15 minutes to play - so easy to play a few games in one sitting. I’ve played the eternal game quite a bit on Boardgamearena. The campaign is okay – although, toward the end, it can be demoralising if you get too far behind in the overall score.

Mottainai: a small card game by Carl Chudyk with a lot of gameplay. It’s the spiritual successor to Glory to Rome (one of my favourite games), and I like it a lot. It's tricky to get your head around and has some of the craziness that Glory to Rome has – but in a smaller, quicker package.

Daybreak: A cooperative game of decarbonising to solve climate change by Matt Leacock & Matteo Menapace. I gave it to myself as a Christmas present. I’ve played it solo on Boardgamearena a few times, but my first in-person game with Miss H ended in a loss. Don’t put the fate of the planet in our hands!

The Traitors Card Game: A Christmas present from Miss H. A tie-in to the wonderful TV series. I wondered if it was just a reskinned Werewolf (which is all The Traitors is), but it brings in elements from the TV series, such as shields and gold. It's for four players or more, and so we haven't tried it yet.

Plans for 2024: More of the same – no doubt the games collection will swell. Already on order is Kavango (drafting African animals, Kickstarter) and Innovation Deluxe (more card-based craziness from Carl Chudyk, Backerkit), but I should restrain myself. (I try and cull it every now and again, but not always successfully.)

Other games

And as usual, I played the usual assortment of video games: too much World of Tanks Blitz, plenty of Star Realms and Race for the Galaxy.

And overall?

So overall, 2023 was not so good for tabletop roleplaying, about average for boardgames, and excellent for freeforms. So I can’t complain.