Yep, no maneuver drive. I remember having the same reaction when that first saw print. There was even (IIRC) a mini-adventure where the party had to rescue an xboat pilot whose ship was about to drift helplessly into some sort of fatal situation. You have to wonder how much these pilots get payed. Or how much their families get in the settlements. :>

The whole question of pilotless jump is one of those places where Traveller canon contradicts itself all over the place. Depending on whether you allow it and how reliable it is, the texture of the background shifts considerably:

If pilotless jump is both possible and reasonably reliable, then message and routine cargo traffic would use little else. Once a ship is in jumpspace, it needs either little or no maintenance to assure that it will emerge at its destination in a week. So there's really no reason to pay people to be on board for a week, and many reasons not to -- you save not just on pay, but on volume devoted to life support, safety measures, and so forth.
If pilotless jump is possible but significantly less reliable than piloted jump (for whatever reason), then you'd still see it being used for message traffic along important routes and between rich worlds. You just send N parallel automated (and cheap) couriers, until the probability of one of them arriving with its data intact has enough 9s. Obviously, the less reliable this is the more automated couriers you lose, and at some point you hit the crossover where it becomes cheaper to include life support and pay a pilot. Then pilotless couriers would see only specialized use, e.g. as "signal flares" from ships in distress.
If pilotless jump is impossible, then more of Traveller canon makes sense, but any reasonably ambitious group of players will want to know why. :) My preferred explanation borrows from Larry Niven's hyperdrive* -- something about the process of jump travel requires a conscious sophont to be involved. Collapsing wave functions, handwave, handwave. For added fun, make it so that nobody (in the Imperium, at least) is really sure why a sophont is needed; it's actually a psionic power latent in most sophonts. Hmmmmmm, that leads some interesting directions... This would also tie neatly into the grand conspiracy narrative I helped build on the TML something like 25 years ago, where jumpsace is an artifact created by Yaskodray, and we're damaging it (and annoying Y) by using it wrong with our crude drives and minds.

* Note that in the case of Niven's hyperdrive, the ship was in some sense still moving through normal space, and needed to avoid obstacles, but ordinary sensors wouldn't work above c, so machine-enhanced psionic sensing was used. That obviously won't work as an explanation for Traveller jump mechanics.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 8:33 PM <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

Great Wiseman's Ghost! NO MANEUVER DRIVE?

I must have blocked the encounter with this nonsensical reality from my mind.

Jump (in many versions) is not super accurate. You'd have to put tenders way out beyond any significant gravity from any source at any point in the orbits of any system bodies to make that sane. And the tender would spend a bunch of time tootling around to recover this X-boat or that on heavily used termini.

And any crewmember who was out there when something went wrong in a jump or where some piece of equipment broke or where a foe was close to the exit would have no chance at all. No power to survive, no ability to even get to someplace that might have air. That's economical in a kind of horrible way.

If you are going to bomb the X-boats around in old-school CT scenarios and the tender must pick them up and they can't misjump, then why have a crew *at all*? Just load a jump tape and set a timer and the mail goes automatically. There's no reason for a human in that construction.

Some version of the game suggests maneuver in close proximity is done by maneuver drives but that gas thrusters are a backup. I suppose you could imagine an X-boat with those... but maybe not without any main drive...

And if no sensors are included (that was a later MT thing, but you'd need them), then what does the pilot do? Look out the window?

It's all fabricated anyway as nobody really developed the construction rules for this.

---- let's try to imagine a workable design -----

So, if we were to build this in MgT or MT for instance, could we manage a power plant, J-4, and similar internals? I think one of these systems must include batteries that could be sufficient and comms and so on. Plus it might give us some idea (looking at the computers) what sort of storage bank could be constructed at TL-13.

And here again, I'm thinking at least a 0.1 G drive would be useful. So might an emergency low berth for one passenger with its own battery. Or some kind of escape pod with system range.

How big of a vessel do you need to get Jump-4, system range commo (w backup), power from batteries or a plant with which to run an appropriate computer, some sort of emergency survival options, and if it fit, a main drive 1-G (I'd settle for a G-fractional drive, but that would require interpolation or extrapolation of existing tables)? What's the minimum size that works in? 110 tons? 120 tons? 130 tons?

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 6:41 PM Postmark - postmark.design at btinternet.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
On 11 Jun 2020, at 22:17, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
Except the routes are all to populated systems (never seen one on a map that wasn't in a system with a mainworld). Why tenders and not transfer stations? (Answer: Tenders make sense for establishing an ad-hoc link until you decide to build a transfer station there, even in deep space - a breakdown design for the transfer station would let you build one even in deep space... but no official X-boat routes I've seen do anything with that.)

That's a nitpick. I just don't see using a ship when you could use a station.

Also, you could probably get a big rock cheap in a lot of places, so some might well use planetoids/asteroids for economy.

The problem with using transfer stations instead of tenders is that someone forgot to put a manoeuvre drive on the X-boat. I assume that it’s a book 2 thing as their’s easily enough room under book 5. In fact there’s enough room in book 5 for the power plant and model 4 computer that they also forgot!

However, according to Supplement 7, Traders and Gunboats, there will be both a transfer station and one or more tenders.

Phil Kitching
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