In order to be a part of the Imperium, it is practice that you must have an Imperial Starport. All traffic in and out of a world must pass Imperial customs. Normally, PC's will not even be aware of that - as the tariffs and fees are paid by the brokers or shippers. When the PC's leave the starport they enter into local law, and leave Imperial law. When they buy stuff 'On World' generally it's automatically sent to their ship, and the customs are subsumed into the price. If they can carry it past the XT line, then it's generally not valuable enough for the Imperium to really care.
So, do you have a 'formal' starport at every significant (and possibly insignificant) station or world in a system? Or does anyone jumping in have to be boarded or show up for inspection directly to the single mainworld starport? Does the Navy chase around anyone trying to sneak around to unload where the mainworld port is not their destination?
Sounds to me too if I read this right that there ARE taxes on goods in your TU. (They makes historical and political sense to me).
My theory is that every system has an Imperial XT line. The Imperium controls the space between the systems, and the systems control themselves. Sometimes a larger system on the frontier might be able to have a tiny SPA presence, even though they have large amounts of trade.
The benefit (as I see it) is that traders and shipping concerns never have to deal with local customs/tariffs. They never deliver good to the system, but rather to a broker inside of the XT line, and then the broker deals with all of the strange local taxes, customs, etc. It keeps the trade flowing (and somewhat models how we operate ^h^h^h used to operate at the Canadian border.)
So when you sell your spec cargo, you are selling it to a broker that has a on world buyer lined up.
Now, the Imperium is a large place, and this ideal is not always 100% followed, especially on the fronteer. But that's the theory. Practice can vary wildly, until someone with the juice to fix it notices. Things can (and do) vary wildly from one extreme to the other.
Does the Imperium in your TU try to arm twist new candidates to accept the SPA and cede all interstellar (and maybe intra-system) trade? Is this a per world negotiation or does the Imperium just show up with a very immutable standard agreement and say 'take it, leave it, or maybe we'll even just invade’?
It’s in the boilerplate treaty - I picked this up from a passage about the early 3rd Imperium that talked about Cleon doing gunboat diplomacy - offering trade deals, and blockading the folks if they declined. Again, even though that’s what is signed, there can be under the table side agreements that change things until they get noticed…
An Imperial starport might be a modular cutter's starport module on a flattened field, or it might be a highport/low port complex.
Security is either handled by Navy, COACC or Marines, (Enri, why did you get posted *here*?) or the lone SPA offical's shotgun.
Dagnabit! Now I have Sean Connery and Outland on the mind.
And, that is not a bad thing :D
Who handles customs inspections and assessments (versus security inspections)? Imperial Forces instead of system forces?
When landing at the Startport, the SPA handles that. When you cross the XT line, the locals handle it, and when you come back the SPA handles you re-entering the Imperium.
SPA handles all of the above, and only really calls in the local military assets if they need it. The idea is that the SPA is like our (pre 9-11) police forces, but since they are dealing with folks that might have megawatt lasers, they have a strong arm on call. So you might see Impy Marines in Battledress with FGMP-15’s wandering around, but generally you will see bureaucrats, workers, and perhaps some lightly armed security forces.
Now, the XT line is a demarcation point, and the Imperium likes to remind the locals that 1) they are part of the Imperium, and 2) the Imperium is strong. So the XT line will often be heavy monitored.
One of the side effects is that if the local laws are more strict then the Impy laws and a person runs afoul of the local law, if they can make it across the XT line they might be able to get off planet before the local law can get the Impys to hand them over. So the XT line can be like the old Wall in Berlin, or it can be open like Canada/US used to be. It depends on the relationship between the locals and the SPA.
Another of the side effects of this that I see is the stagnation of a system’s, well, system when it joins the Imperium. The rulers of the system generally get to decide who “becomes a noble” and represents the system to the rest of the Imperium. They also tend to control where the starport is going, and the relationship with the SPA. They also can land juicy contracts for things like Naval bases, Imperial Army bases, etc. So a side effect is that the rich stay rich or get richer, and the masses, while gaining the ability to in theory travel to the stars, might not be able to realize that dream.
The Imperium, while just and nice and good is an agent of oppression. As long as it gets what it wants, which is more trade and thus growth in taxes, it’s happy. It really does not care about the plight of the common person. It thinks in systems, not people.
It’s really a Dark Imperium take, but with a nice chrome finish. It looks nice, but when you start to think about how it operates, and why it would allow for totalitarian dictatorships with in it, I came to realize that, wow, it does not care. Systems generate $$ which feeds the coffers. As long as a system is feeding the coffers, it’s happy to ignore some down right nasty local governments.
Armed Forces:
Navy - Controls space (duh). Transports. Intelligence.
Marines - Boarding actions, and establishing beachheads. Also loaned to Star Port Authority.
Army - Expands beach heads, defends worlds. COACC is a branch of the Army, as is the Wet Navy.
I'd be diplomatic and classify forces into 'Planetary Defense Services' and 'Space Services'. Really, there's no logic to Army owning Air Force or Navy or either of the other owning their siblings. Just lump them in under Planetary Defense and each get to have an 'element' General and they all report to the Planetary Marshal. I guess I know how sensitive who is the senior service discussions are in most militaries.
Yeah, the Imperial Army does have the Planetary Defense Services under their umbrella. They also have the land and expand troops, and the hold the line troops.
Scouts - Commo, Exporation, Research Stations, Black Ops. Extra-border Intelligence.
Civilian Forces:
Ministry of Justice - Hunts down Imperial Fugitives. Imperial Law, Lawyers, Runs prison ships and plants.
Why do they run plants? Is that somehow like running guns? Or was that prisons? (I'm being funny, but I also don't know what sort of 'plants' IMOJ would be running?
Prison Plants. Where they keep rouge Vegans. :D
Star Port Authority - Runs Imperial start ports. Space Traffic Control (and Approach control). SAR in system, with Naval help.
The problem I have with the military doing this job is what my friend (Lieutenant-Commander RCN) reported from Afghanistan. He lamented that the forces there at Kandahar should stop giving lip service to CIMIC/CMA projects ('hearts and minds') because most senior military officers are only trained in kinetic operations and they were no good at conceiving and executing 'hearts and minds' work. He said they should let NGOs do that and we would protect them and stick to what said senior officers understood - BSU (Blowing S*** Up).
The mission profile for a combat ready navy is not the mission profile of a search and rescue and customs regime. If you optimize for one, you get lousy at the other.
This is one strong argument of a System Guard construct (to do boardings, law enforcement, and to support customs/immigration inspections). They can be paramilitary and some help during wartime in system security, but largely they don't need to be full fledged combatants (in terms of ship construction, but also in terms of how they approach every boarding).
Totally agreed. The SPA is the front line for this. However if they are in over their heads, or there is a naval asset that is closer, they can task them to lend a hand. Well, more ask less task.
Ministry of Finance - Taxes, Money Banking, Corporate Law. Imperial Currency. And Intelligence.
I had a good think about Imperial Money a while back and wrote something about it for my TU. I tried to make sense of money in a multi-system environment with every world perhaps having one or more local currencies and the issues surrounding trade and exchange processing (and costs). Also how a 'credit card' might actually work system to system.
To really keep the “feel” of traveller, I still use hard currency for Imperial transactions. Yes, this means that you have to ship cash around (XBoats + mail runs anyone?) and it also means that you can show up with a pocket full of Mcr and buy a starship.
Locals have their own banking with things like credit, credit cards, etc.
IMTU systems TL tends to be “local production” more than anything. Just because you live on a TL 5 planet does not mean that you cannot *buy* a TL12 Mr. Fusion to run your house. Which made collapse/Hard Times all the worse. When folks had to start to rely on local production and not on imported parts, things could get really bad. And it also explains the TL4 vacuum worlds. They just cannot produce anything locally. All of their life support is off world built and shipped in, with a store of spare parts locally.
Imperial Standard is TTL 12, so that is available just about everywhere. TTL 13/14/15/16 gets more and more expensive and rare. For example, had a store called G, it was at a small fraction of Class A starports, and all it sold was TTL16 gear. Stock was limited, and prices were stupid but hey, you could perhaps buy a TTL16 hand computer or a FGMP-16 there. The closer to Deneb sector you got, the more chance of seeing one, and the more chance of them having that thing you wanted in stock.
But, IMTU I also had (rare) cybernetics at TTL 9/10 - after that why use metal, when you could just regrow the lost thing back? So I am a bit of a heretic ;D
I should note that the March/April 2020 issue of Freelance Traveller had
Benedikt Schwarz's take on SAR. You can read the article in the PDF for
that issue, or at
https://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/preproom/starport/03sar.html
I wouldn't object if someone wanted to do a SAR career for Traveller (any
version), or work up some rules for actually conducting SAR operations as
[part of] an adventure...
If it helps for inspiration or to avoid repetition, don't forget that there is _Six Guns 2: Rescue Organizattions_ for Twilight Sector (Martin Dougherty, Terra/Sol, 2011) which includes some nifty equipment, a 50-ton Rescue Cutter (with deck plans), some organizations as you might expect from the title and the Emergency Responder Career with Responder, Space Rescue and Regulator specialities (and d66 Events).
HTH
tc
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