16 August 2015

Alternative

In Traveller, the Star Trek could be regarded as an alternate history because it's set 3,300 years in the past.

It could be also be considered a fantasy story as well because of the unrealistic and magical technology compared to the surprisingly mundane Imperial tech.

Edit to add:

If you think of Traveller computers as needing this space as shown instead of thinking of them as the little line-replaceable-units; then the LBB computer sizes make more sense.  It doesn't forgive the 1 lb. hand computer that's just a remote terminal though.

4 comments:

  1. I will take the mundane Imperial Tech over Star Trek any day. Traveller has a feeling to it that seems to be more like what real people would do and be like. Technology may change but people...not so much.

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  2. Well, except for computers. Traveller needs better computers.

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    Replies
    1. GURPS: Traveller gets the same computers as GURPS: Ultra Tech, so there is that.

      I retconned the large volume of the computers in Traveller to mean the size of the avionics bay, which just like a server room, is much larger than the actual hardware involved. Plus I assumed 5-plex redundancy per computer. When the stakes are as high as they are in space, I'd think you'd build for reliable over small wherever you could.

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    2. If you sell it like that then I may be in the market.

      Though I would hope the computer spaces would be a tad bit cleaner! I think it would be like the computer room in the first Alien movie where Tom Skerritt's character is talking with "Mother". The computer is hidden in plain sight by totally surrounding him in the small white room. Still it wasn't a pristine white and looked old and worn.

      But in real life with at least one company selling a quantum computer (even if everybody thinks it is slower or about the same as current computers) (http://www.wired.com/2014/06/d-wave-quantum-speedup), new breakthroughs in materials and storage, I think that over three millennia from now things would be far more advanced and smaller than the current Traveller Universe.

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