Traveller 'verse: the empire

The empire sounds kind of sinister...

But really it's more 'distant.' It's the paradigm. Hereditary families called nobles look after the somewhat time-consuming and arcane world of interstellar relations...after all, who else has time to sit for 3 months on a starship just to go to a meeting?

The empire itself regulates and protects interstellar trade. Everything else resides in the jurisdiction of its member worlds, which can have any government they like: It has a very, very few rules:

• No non-imperial warships with jump drives (there are some ways to skirt around this, megacorporations have heavily armed route protector cruisers, there are interstellar mercenary corporations...but internal warfare can't interfere with commerce at large without the Empire intervening.
• All tarriffs to member worlds must be lower than those to non-member worlds by 50%; and tarriffs can't exceed 5%.
• No use of nuclear NCB weapons;
• No slavery.

The empire can of course claim jurisdiction in cases of interstellar commerce, and has its own court system. But there is no appeal to the imperial level: a judgement on a planetary level is final, it's final.

The empire supports itself through something like a 0.5% revenue tarriff on interstellar trade, which adds up to ALOT of money, and a fairly large military, though ground forces are not organized on a federal level except in times of war (think civil-war-era USA)

The imperial Credit is the usual medium of exchange in interstellar trade, though member worlds are allowed to issue their own currency, and even make it the only legal form of exchange onworld. Rate-fixing is not a problem, because it's illegal.

So there you have it.

The traveller universe: Technology.

Imagine everything we have now in the cozy early 21st century. Then add a few fantastic items, and a few steps backward.

• Medicine is performed with microsurgery and advanced pharmaceuticals. Infectious disease is not a danger...unless it's bioengineered.
• Strong taboos mean that getting cybernetic upgrades or biotech grafts are unknown technology. Somewhere, somebody knows about these things, or did, but they were a mad scientist and didn't last long outside their own Private Idaho (a small asteroid in the outer belt of the Glisten system).
• AIs and robotics have a similar taboo around them. Outside of table service and simple floor cleaning, people don't really like robotic workers, for two reasons: one, most planetary governments pursue policies of maximum employment, and two, the Imperiums' biggest threat, the Zhodani consulate, is a robot-friendly, telepathic-mind-control government. A branch of the Zhodani government is actually called the thought police.
• Imperial law forbids the enslavement of sentients. No one really devotes much time and money to creating AIs, as they're likely to have some legal problems if they were successful.

So, what is there, since we know what there isn't?

• Compact hot fusion. Buses and trains can and do run on fusion power plants.
• Contragravity devices, and artificial gravity aboard ship...these are very cheap, and so almost all personal transport (motorcycles, cars) are built on this principle, at least on high-tech worlds.
• Superconducting battery/capacitor cells. "Energy cells." Battery-operated devices use universal sizes, kept in place for at least a millenium.  Even cellular communicators have interchangeable batteries.
• Sensing technologies that we can logically expect. Chemsniffers, Biosniffers.  Densitometers are highly sensitive at mapping the interior of objects using gravity sensors. (probably uses the CG tech; though we have crude densitometers using radioisotopes.)
• Gauss (magnetic accelerator) weapons
• Laser weapons.  These were at one point standard issue to space crews (extrapolation), but have never been as damaging as similarly-sized gauss weaponry at the personal scale.
• Bullets are still pretty good for regular folks, and cheaper.
• Flying power armor suits: "Battledress."  Different interpretations of canon have these on almost every regular army trooper, sometimes only on imperial marines.
• 'Reactionless' Thrusters. These require power, and increase an object's inertia. Imagine a rocket that burns nothing. These are pretty much the cheapest way of moving something, and so are ubiquitous. Even on lower-tech worlds, these might be imported and installed in gasoline engine vehicles (unsupported in canon, but believable extrapolation).
• Nanomaterials have developed to the point that carbon fibers and thermal superconductivity are normal for military hardware; some efficiencies in manufacturing may be due to nanoassembly...but...things are still made in factories and sold by retail/mailorder, not asked for in from a household factory.
• Some biotechnology, however most of these advances (in agricultural production) have been made millenia ago, and the technologies are now open-sourced or sold as a service package (chemlawn). Folks are just as creeped out by the throught of putting a rebreather lamprey on their face as you are...so most people just wear masks when they have to.
• REALLY cheap computers, and a large market for specialized devices. IR 'shades,' about as light and expensive as a pair of Oakleys, are available. Brands exist that combine these with handheld cellular devices to lookup products...but a lot of people value their privacy.

The traveller universe: the way it is.

The driving logic behind Traveller is the Jump drive. A ship sublights out to 'shallow space' (at least 100diameters from any celestial body) charges up its jump grid, does some calculations, and falls out of existence.

It remains in Jumpspace (a poorly understood other quantum of reality) for about a week, undisturbed, and pops out somewhere between 1 and 4 parsecs (depending on the quality of the drive) away. A jump always takes about 160 hours.

The implication is a powerful one: Information from another star system is at least one week old. There is no other form of FTL travel in the traveller 'verse. No FTL radio. The capital of the Empire is about a YEAR away from the imperial fringes on 'swift boat' 4 parsec mail carriers.

This means many things: progress has a hard time equalizing itself--to support the technology level we have on earth we need a 6 billion person economy. To support more advanced technology, even larger economies of scale are needed. So there's sort of an upper ceiling on what technologies are out there in the market.

For two, there's lots of nooks and crannies in the universe for the little guy. Because of the information gap, small(er) businesses can thrive because of the agility compared to the interstellar megacorporations.

For three, the only way such a huge volume of worlds (there are hundreds of trillions of souls in the imperium) can be governed is through federalism. In fact, the Imperium is just the interstellar layer of government; anything beneath is the business of its member worlds. The empire simply subsists on tiny revenue tarriffs on interstellar trade, and even with so little, there's a fleet for each subsector of space.

The Traveller Universe: the really brief version.

Humanity has risen and fallen twice, passed through manifold ages of barbarism. It is several thousand years into our future, but that frame of reference has stopped mattering a long time ago.

In the beginning, humanity developed jump drive. The US, Japan, the ESA, China, and a few others invested in a new spacegoing technology that allowed a starship to travel a parsec (~4.3 ly) in a week. the first jump away from earth, we contacted an advanced interstellar empire with materials and nuclear technology far superior to our own...who were, apparently, human in every respect. Of course the nutjobs with their ancient pyramit conspiracies (TM) were very excited, but the reality proved far more pressing than the metaphyscial angst.

The Vilani Imperium was a baroque autarchy, with stagnant corporations so byzantine in their power structure that Earth's political scientists could not pin down where enterprise stopped and government began (and vice versa). Innovation was strictly regulated in the Imperium, leading to software built on ROMs, almost exclusively rerun entertainment, and two thousand years of no progress. The Earth humans already had superior medicine and computers; the vilani weapons and engines had a significant edge.

Several centuries of alternate war, peace, and trade resulted. The Earthlings replaced the Vilani at the top of the empire, but the influence was two-way, like the British in India. Eventually the Imperium of Man fell, too, leading to more than a thousand years of piracy and isolationism on the planets of the former empire.

NOW...
A new empire has risen. It's really more like a federalism, to anyone that cares to look closely...but that's for the next chapter.