The official Traveller background is silly at times, and wildly inconsistent both within and across versions. That's to be expected from a system that was not planned in any meaningful sense of the term. Like many large software systems, Traveller reminds me strongly of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California -- it's huge, but it got that way through slow, haphazard accretion. Like the Winchester house, Traveller makes no sense from a design point of view, but has an undeniable majesty and charm in part by virtue of its sprawling inconsistencies.

I think the only reasonable position is to admit that Traveller makes little sense as a coherent narrative, nor as a treatise on possible galactic-scale political economy, but also to recognize that it can provide the context for some very enjoyable gaming if everyone involved is content to refrain from exploiting its many weaknesses.

On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 9:44 AM, Jeffrey Schwartz <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 8:41 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 1:22 PM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
Besides, when studying this world's history, it doesn't take long at all to come across all sorts of seeming anomalies, inconsistencies, incongruities, etc. It's enough to make one wonder if history isn't really just a series of randomly-connected events.

History isn't what actually happened in the past. History is a story assembled from a certain limited number of data points that relates what we *think* happened in the past, to which we then ascribe various causes and consequences which may actually have been mere corelations.

The above means that I have no trouble swallowing Grandfather quixotic history or it's unlikely side effects. The few lines we have about Grandfather are merely the most important points for latter galactic history, not the detailed process by which these points were gained. For example, when Grandfather "took over the world" this doesn't mean that his first step was necessarily to gather an army and conquer the planet. It merely means that he was able to exercise effective final authority sufficient to support his various projects. Perhaps he set up something like the Illuminati and the simply let all the boring bits (Presidents, cabinets, armies, the Young Droyne Scouts, etc) totter along without his august attention.

If you were immortal, then even at minimum wage you could just keep putting money into the stock market, and eventually you'd own pretty much everything...

The power of compound interest.
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Craig Berry (http://google.com/+CraigBerry)
"Eternity is in love with the productions of time." - William Blake