I don't expect them to explain the physics in a way that matters. I expect them to cover the handful of immediately obvious aspects of use in play. That's not too much to ask. They spend many column inches telling us lots of detail about firearms, how to build an APC from scratch, etc. and yet the major McGuffin that gets them around isn't really fully described 'from a use by players/game play' perspective. It's a case of where they spent their time and where they didn't and I find some of those choices are worth giving a raised eyebrow to.

See? It's not always that difficult to guess at creator ~game play~ intentions after all!

I could point out that the game designer(s) in this case were focused on crunchy wargame type vehicle construction (Striker, High Guard) maybe more than RPG... which I'd call not being the most 'good game play' focused as they might have been.

It was definitely ~game play~ focused, just not "hard sci-fi" game play. Today, we'd call it "military sci-fi" but the important point is it wasn't really "hard sci-fi." In this sort of game play, jump drive is mostly just a means of getting from one firefight to another. . . .

That's the only nitpick I have with that. I don't care so much for the handwavium (aka science) except whereas that gets us to the real thing I want - I do care about the ways players can interact with a thing and the ways they can manipulate it and formulate strategies (or realize strategies won't work). Being able to formulate strategies that are a bit novel and that are discerned from the player knowing some mechanics and putting 2 and 2 together to get a plan out of that seems to me to be 'good game play' and thus good design.

Run a Traveller campaign based upon the mercenary tickets in ~Mercenary~ and the ~game play~ works well. ~The Traveller Book~ mostly just packaged the "small unit combat tactics" game play together with small ship operations where the purpose of the jump drive was simply to enable travel from one planetary system to the next. Hence, ~The Traveller Adventure~ where nearly ~half~ of the total "adventure" is "down time" during jump when little of import takes place. (Notice how this model also fits well with a game played mostly on the weekends--just like a good old D&D campaign.)

We don't see much of a "hard" ~sci-fi~ emphasis until Digest Group came along. It's not by happenstance that there were no military veterans--unless you count Dur Telemon--among the travellers of the ~Travellers' Digest~ campaign. Instead, there was a scientist and a seemingly-sentient robot. . . .

Traveller was nearly a decade old at that point and for much of that first decade--Marc's "Jumpspace" article appeared in the ~Journal~ in 1985--"jump drive" had been a lot like the ~Trek~ transporter: a game mechanic which mostly served for the purposes of "stage direction."

Nothing "wrong" with any of this, of course. Lots and lots of fun in that first decade! It just highlights that Traveller did not begin as a game where the "hyper-physics of jump drive"--or any other "hard sci-fi" concept--was a central element of game play. Trying to find a consistent scientific narrative in that context is going to be an enduring challenge.