On Tue, Oct 07, 2014 at 08:39:32PM +1000, Kenneth Barns wrote:
> And the progress from spaceflight to STL interstellar exploration
> (200 years), and from jump drive development to interstellar
> expansion, was even more rapid than the Solomani progress at these
> stages.

The Solomani progressed from their first spaceflight to jump drive in
120 years, started expanding pretty much immediately, and developed
jump-3 in another 150 years.

The Vilani took 800 years to discover jump drive after their first
spaceflight, about 4000 more years to discover jump-2, and didn't
develop jump-3 at all during the subsequent 3000 years.

So I'm not sure where "even more rapid than the Solomani progress"
comes from.

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