On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 11:05 AM, Tim <tim@little-possums.net> wrote:
>
> On the whole though, I pretty much ignore all of the Traveller
> timeline.  It's occasionally useful as background flavour but most of
> it is clearly intended *only* as background flavour, with most of the
> numbers being pretty meaningless except to fill in broad swaths of
> otherwise undefined time with something or other.  The history is
> pretty obviously contrived to prop up the "current" setting, and avoid
> conflict with known real-world history.  For example: the Vilani
> expanded their empire for 4000 years, conveniently stopped just a
> parsec or two short of Earth to fight internal wars that dragged on
> for 1500 years, then commanded that all further exploration would
> cease for all of the next 1500 years.  Anything else would mean that
> they encountered Earth "too early" or "too late".
>
> Similar large blocks of time are arbitrarily allocated for most of the
> other interstellar-capable races, fairly obviously filled-in backward
> from the current setting rather than worked forward from their
> origins.
>
> What's more, they essentially all expanded into monolithic
> interstellar societies that then ceased expanding.  Supposedly due to
> the difficulty of maintaining coherent government across a vast space,
> but instead of dividing into multiple less-coherent polities (some of
> which expand, some don't), they just stopped.  All of them.  Does that
> seem likely?
>
> That's even without considering the really implausible bit: all those
> species just happened to independently discover jump drive within a
> few thousand years of each other (except the one that is conveniently
> gone now).  A few thousand years is an eyeblink in the lifetime of a
> species -- and they all blinked at once.
>
>
> I love Traveller, in many different ways, but I don't have any faith
> whatsoever in 99% of its backstory.  So from my point of view, using
> that backstory's historical development to extrapolate the mindset of
> societies and species in the current setting is totally ridiculous.
>
>
> - Tim

I heartily agree. This is a fictional backdrop to add flavor not
historical fact. Besides it can be also fun for the players to stumble
upon a new historical "truth" that can change their history.

--
Joseph