On Sunday, May 10, 2020, 04:43:46 PM MST, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
The early low berth rules were very dodgy. You wanted to very fit (high Endurance) and have assurance that a competent medic would be standing by at revival. If you read the Dumarest series by E, C. Tubb (particularly the first book The Winds of Gath), you will clearly see that Traveller low berths were modeled on Tubb's vision of this technology. It's only the truly desperate who travel this way.
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Yeah, & I've always been very surprised at how many low berths 'liner-type ships are equipped with.
I usually just ignored them.
If you think of the low berths as steerage passage and squint really hard, you can justify their presence on liners. The merchants and the nobles are getting wined and dined on the upper desks, while the unwashed masses travel frozen down below. If a few of them end up contributing to the destination as fertilizer, it's no great loss to anyone, is it?
Consider also how common repressive world governments tended to be under the original system generation rules. In most stellar regions, there would be a steady demand for cheap passage out-system by desperate but cash-strapped locals. These would be enterprising (or lucky) sorts who had managed to finangle their way past the extrality line yet had no marketable skills to sell to the megacorps and also weren't qualified to join any of the Imperial services. Once again, no loss to anyone (except immediate family members travelling with them) if they didn't actually make it to the next stop.
A very grim Imperium, I grant you. But it seems to fit most of the cited source material (I've been looking through that link MM posted about his inspirations).