I just watched the film Black Sea, starring Jude Law, and got me thinking that the plot is ripe for a Traveller adaption (apologies if this has been pointed out before). A bunch of not-so-young British submarine crewmen are laid off by an Evil Firm specialized in salvage operations and in the following meeting at a bar, one of them explains that his crew located a fabled WWII submarine full of gold (which, since in the movie it was sent by Stalin to Hitler, necessarily had to be the gold the soviets stole from Spain in the civil war, but that is another story). Unfortunately the firm could not recover it because a newly-erupting military conflict put it in a disputed zone in the Black Sea, with the Russian navy patrolling nearby. The crewmen manage to get a reasonable investor and get their hands on a rusty old bucket of a sub and set to recover the gold themselves, never mind that the one with the hint commits suicide before they leave. The investor sends them a corporate overseer, who is of course useless, and the crew needs to take a group of Russians in because the sub they will be getting close to location is Russian. The plot is that the Evil Firm has set them up (the investor was an actor) so that they will take all the risks and when they emerge away from the Russian area, the fleet of the other involved country will be waiting to impound everything, sharing the profit with the firm. Unfortunately, before that can happen tensions between the Russians and the Brits explode, the rusty bucket sends them to the bottom, etc...

I have absolutely no idea how realistic the submarine action of the film was. But substitute starship crew for submarine crew, Zhodani or Vargr for Russian, add a bunch of Vargr NPCs instead of Russians, locate it in an asteroid belt to reproduce the navigation difficulties, and you have an instant Traveller salvage adventure with a couple of twists.

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Carlos Alós-Ferrer
Chair of Microeconomics, University of Cologne
http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de