That this topic has generated more discussion than all of the others combined is encouraging for me. If I need any further motivation to continue posting about rather than privately developing this with my occasional begging of help from Alexis, there it is. So thanks.
I approached this all with the full intent of posting my first essay on implementation today. I realize now that I'm not quite ready. For one, I need to translate my pen and paper maps digitally for demonstration purposes. For another, I haven’t run through the process quite enough so that I’m comfortable speaking to it. For thirds, I've got a D&D game Sunday to prep for... and maybe a Traveller game tomorrow. That’s not to say, however, that there is nothing worthy of posting or reading about. It’s just that plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy. We adjust. We adapt. We overcome.
And progress has been made.
For starters, I’ve decided that there will be a material standard backing the Imperial credit and it will be some kind of “unobtanium”. I was beginning to lean that way and recently re-reading my initial post about MTU was the final straw. I’ve copied an excerpt below:
“The Imperium. Yes it does exist. On the surface it’s not a whole lot different from what I understand to be the features of the OTU’s 3rd Imperium. Scratch the surface, though, and you see a confederation of human-dominated client worlds affiliated under an Imperial Bureaucracy that is only a few centuries old. This order was founded after a long period of limited inter-stellar communications between the nations of Earth and their affiliated stellar colonies. An economic collapse on Earth brought on by a bloated planetary financial system spurred the colonies, increasingly self-reliant and more desirous of self-rule, to declare independence from their parent nations. Many years later, as Earth had recovered, a successful military coup established that planet’s current central government. A reinvigorated military-industrial complex moved outward to re-conquer the former colonies. These Unification Wars established the Imperium as it is today in the MTU. Its nobility are the descendants of military commanders and senior corporate officials.”
The bloated financial system referred to above could be one beset by the problems of a floating inter-system currency and short-sighted monetary management and policy. When the Earth government re-established itself, it was with it in mind that the currency would be fixed to a material standard. This material, rare in the galaxy, is a required element for the manufacture and operation of jump drives. The fuel is free, yes, but you need “unobtanium” to make it do anything. What that all amounts to in technical terms can be techno-babbled or figured out later. The important part for our economy is that this thing is needed for inter-stellar travel, but the actual consumable fuel remains hydrogen. Therefore, the Power that would presume to govern at an inter-stellar level would need to control the access to and distribution of this material and when determining their hard currency, could logically relate its objective value to a certain amount of this material.
This, of course, isn’t the first time this concept has been embraced in science fiction, possibly most famously in Dune (all due respect to Mr. Cameron and his film that I have yet to see). It’s great from my perspective because it not only adds some depth and verisimilitude to my economic system, it also provides oodles of great hooks, motivations and background details for the game. The party (player) stumbles upon a small cache of unobtanium… two systems are at war over mining rights for a newly found source of unobtanium… pirates have been successfully raiding heavily guarded cargo ships hauling valuable loads of unobtanium… the mining of unobtanium was halted on Shithole IV due to an outbreak of (disease, native unrest, volcanic activity, etc…). Those hooks all existed before, but now they mean something and have far-reaching effects. They become just the sort of status-quo altering events that players worth their salt should be getting involved in somehow, if the campaign is to be a memorable one. Why muck around trying to pay the mortgage hauling spare parts and dilettantes around the sector when one big score of unobtanium will set you up for life? Swing for the fences, people.
I’ll change the name of this unobtanium at some point. I’m not trying to be cute.
But before I do that, a few things need to be determined. How much unobtanium is there… how much unobtanium is one credit worth…how many credits are in circulation? Am I missing anything?
I haven’t yet decided, by the way. I don’t want to do so off-hand or casually. But let’s explore it a bit. A gram of gold appears to be selling lately for $38 USD. I’ve read somewhere that an Imperial credit is about the purchasing power of $5 USD current day. Let’s just go with the latter and bump the former up to an even $40. So gold’s value in Traveller credits would be 8 credits for a gram. How much more relatively valuable should unobtanium be? 10 times? 100 times? 1000 times? Why not a million times? I mean, we’re talking about the ability to bend space here…
My next step in zeroing in on something tangible will be to do some research on how much gold there is (or should be), how much jump drives cost in the Mongoose rulebook, figure out how much unobtanium is required for each kind of drive and then figure out some numbers from there. Comments welcome below.
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ReplyDeleteLast paragraph above should be "determine how much unobtanium there is", not gold. Have a great weekend folks.
I think in the OTU, unobtanium is called Lanthanum or something like that... It's something needed in the "jump coils" or somesuch.
ReplyDeleteI think you can pick any arbitrary numbers you want for the value of unobtanium in credits, and the amount of unobtanium needed in a jump drive (presumably some quantity per ton of jump drive).
What may be easier to decide is how many credits are in your imperium. Then just pick values that make the quantity of unobtanium interesting.
Now here's a thought, perhaps the imperial credit (or maybe the kcr) is actually a coin, with a few grams of unobtanium in it. Now you actually have a verifiable medium of exchange across interstellar distances that does not depend on instant (or relatively instant) communications.
While Alexis made a good point about travel being much harder than in his 1650 times, travel in the Imperium is still far more comparable to travel in the 1600s than in current times, and I hazard to say that Traveller suggests a comparable amount of travel between systems as one might expect between distant kingdoms in the 1600s (but much less than say occurred within Europe itself).
Frank