Back in WWII, "Merchant Marine" was considered a "vital industry" and
if you were a Merchant, you were exempt from military service.
I always figured the Imperium worked it like that - you're making the
trade that make the taxes that pay for everything, so you're a vital
trade and thus they want you to keep doing it.

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 3:30 PM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list)
<xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
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> --------------------------------------------
> On Tue, 8/26/14, Tim <xxxxxx@little-possums.net> wrote:
>
>  Subject: Re: [TML] expected ship traffic
>  To: "tml" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
>  Date: Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 7:35 PM
>
>  On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at
>  10:30:30AM -0400, Jeffrey Schwartz wrote:
>  > CT says everyone must do at least 4 years
>  service to the Imperium.
>  > Universal
>  Service...
>
>  Wow, having
>  never played CT I never knew that!  That's a pretty
>  major
>  difference in the setting indeed.  4
>  years service is probably (even
>  in the
>  Traveller setting) around 10% of an average healthy
>  working
>  lifespan.  So the Imperium
>  essentially collects an additional tax of
>  at
>  least 10% in drafted services from every member world.
>
>  Presumably the vast majority
>  of these people work for the Imperium on
>  their homeworld, or the passenger traffic from
>  Imperial service alone
>  would be millions of
>  people per week for any pop-9 world.
>
>
>  Either way, it's very
>  definitely a hallmark of a Big Imperium setting.
>  It implies worlds politically and economically
>  tied to the central
>  polity and each other a
>  great deal more than I would have expected
>  from what I read in later work.
>
>
>  - Tim
>  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> You rolled a D6 & got either, Navy, Marine, Army, Scouts, Merchant, or Other.
>
> I always wondered about the last two.
>
> An 'Imperial Merchant Marine' vs other, 'civilian' ones run by private enterprises?
>
> Something like a 'Civilian Conservation Corps'?
>
> Then there's the CT subsector, & sector governments. How do they fit in?
> Using CT HighGuard for a chargen there is an 'Imperial Navy', a 'subsector navy' (that's where the 'colonial 'rons come from), &, if the TL is high enough, a 'planetary' one.
>
> MT pretty much' dropped the 'subsector navy' idea by having individual systems actually contributing the forces for the Colonial 'Rons.
> (see the TNS entries covering the fighting in the Corridor Sector after Lucan recalled the Imperial Navy 'rons to help crush Dulinor, leaving only the Colonial 'rons to defend against the Vagr hordes)
>
>
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