Quote from: Aos;377712I believe I will have to acquire a copy of the Traveller Book.

You won't regret that purchase. TTB is probably my single favorite book ever published for an rpg.

One of the bonuses of Traveller is that it has a long running fan base and there is a ton of free material for it.  Classic, Mega, and Mongoose are similar enough that most things made for one will work ok for the other (though the starship creation rules have changed many times which affects things if you try to seriously pit fleets against each other).
 
Like any game with mountains of fan material, 80% of it is utter crap.  But opinions vary on which 80%.

The Traveller Book is great and was my copy of Classic Traveller for a long time. It's companion the Traveller Adventure isn't too bad either.

Here is ship designed using MongTrav however it can be easily adapted to Classic Traveller. The Luminous Nebula a Far Corsair

http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/beta/Luminous%20Nebula.pdf

QuoteOriginally built on a 200 ton hull, this spaceship was designated a Far Yacht. The Luminous Nebula was built for the Duke of Pretoria of the Deneb Sector in 1078. The Duke prized performance and range over comfort. The original crew consisted of a pilot, an engineer, a navigator, a steward or aide, and the duke. In 1083 during the confused fighting of the Fourth Frontier War the Luminous Nebula was lost on the Vargr frontier when it had the misfortune of being captured during a Vargr raid. The Duke and crew were ransomed back but the Luminous Nebula was kept by the Vargr Warlord. It's first use as the warlord’s personal transport. He grew tired of the spartan quarters. In 1093 it was converted into a Jump-5 capable Far Corsair. Space was converted into two turrets, and fuel processing equipment. The most extensive modification was to the fuel tanks. The tanks were divided into two segments. The first segment was made to hold 40 tons of fuel and outfitted with a 3 meter wide hatch connected to the two ton cargo hold. It was outfitted with the piping and purge ports allowing it to be converted into a cargo hold in a day. However conversion back to a fuel tank is more involved and requires a week of labor and supplies equal to the monthly maintenance cost. The second fuel segment allowed for a Jump-3 to be executed. The the Luminous Nebula served a succession of Vargr Warlords until 1100 when it was recaptured by the Imperium and
auctioned off.

Quote from: estar;377722The Traveller Book is great and was my copy of Classic Traveller for a long time. It's companion the Traveller Adventure isn't too bad either.

I ran TTA back in the day and had a great time with it (it was probably the high-point of all our Traveller play). Looking back in retrospect it has some fairly serious railroadiness issues (as is true of anything written by the Brothers Keith that's not "Lords of Thunder") that I'm not sure I'd be willing to stomach given my current preferences in such things, but there's so much material and so much potential in this book that I'm sure if the Referee was willing to invest a bit of effort into tearing up some of the tracks (perhaps converting them into a nice roadway, where there's still a preferred path, but the players always have the option of going offroad) that you could still make a very nice and satisfying 6-12 month campaign out of this one book.

Quote from: jibbajibba;377629The gold in Traveller is character generation. The Career system has been the biggest influence on my homebrewed games.

There are some issues.

Basic characters, just don't stack up next to characters from High Guard, Mercenary or Scouts. so I felt that was a shame as the characters from these games are almost totally superior.
I also felt that there was space for Law-enforcement or crime as careers (and indeed I made them up ) and I understand the Mongoose stuff expanded into these areas.

Lastly the dying whist making a character is daft and So i replaced that with a 'tragedy' table. When the chargen system kills you instead roll on the tradegy table and you get some other random thing, ranging from divorce to loosing a limb or developing a mental illness. (as an aside I developed a Blessings table as well so you forgo a promotion and roll on there to get anything from a kid to an inheritance to a lottery win).

But there is no doubt the chargen in Traveller is up there with the Amber auction as one of the most inovative and fun in any system.

It is suited to a certain type of Scifi. So Lensman, the Stainless Steel Rat, Starship Toopers, that era of Scifi works incedibly well.

The stuff on building star systems is excellent for sandbox play. The stuff on Ships for me is a bit too hard-fi. I don't mind the engineering or the complexity of it (put me in good stead when i was building cars in Cars Wars later on) but the ships you end up with are hard-fi ships not space opera ships. It might be accurate that your fuel takes up 80% of your ship but a suitcase sized dilitium crystal or power cells mean you can have more fun and ship combat for me was a bit flat.

Actually the more I think about this the more I feel like running a game of Serenity using Classic traveller or even looking out for the mongoose stuff..... hmmmm

Quote from: thedungeondelver;377358Someone gifted me with the original boxed set (three little books, I guess that's how everyone was angling after the release of D&D).  Is it any good?

I suggest sticking with the basic character generation in the first three books but you also really need Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium to complete the game, in my opinion.  The second half of that book contains lists of pregenerated characters (fairly useless even at the time) but the first half of the book adds another 12 (mostly civilian) careers (Pirates, Belters, Sailors, Diplomats, Doctors, Flyers, Barbarians, Bureaucrats, Rogues, Nobles, Scientists, and Hunters), a few more standard ship types, and bow weapons.  The extra character careers really broaden the options available to the players for PCs and to the GM for NPCs.

You can get the entire set of Classic Traveller books from GDW from Far Futures on CD-ROM and use Acrobat's booklet printing option to print out your own classic-sized booklets (Acrobat's page selection lets you shuffle pages around and print pages twice, so it's generally possible to align the pages as necessary for them to print as a booklet).  If you really like that, then I also recommend the JTAS CD-ROM (Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society, the original Classic Traveller magazine from GDW) and the FASA/GameLords supplements CD-ROM, which contains some good stuff from GameLords and FASA.

FYI, the Starter Traveller PDF on RPGnow, which covers much of the material in The Traveller Book, was free a few weeks ago.

Quote from: jibbajibba;377629Basic characters, just don't stack up next to characters from High Guard, Mercenary or Scouts.

With the rule which states that total skills and skill levels may not exceed the character's INT and EDU scores, then the only difference is that expanded generation characters may be a term or two younger than their basic counterparts.

However, there is a balancing factor for that.

Quote from: jibbajibba;377629Lastly the dying whist making a character is daft . . .

Dying during chargen is one of the balancing mechanisms of the game: you wager your character's continuing existence against a gain in skills and mustering out benefits.

Expanded generation characters have more opportunities to die in a term than basic generation characters, so the wager of survival against skills must be made more often.

In my experience, gamers who ignore the death-during-chargen and INT + EDU rules are the ones who end up believing the system needs to be 'fixed.' However, if you just play it as written, it actually tends to work out pretty well.

Finally bought Mongoose Traveller today.  

I've had LBB Trav for a long time, and very much like the game, and have found if nothing else that Chargen is always a fun way to pass the time.

But I've thought something that was more or less in spirit with the LBBs, while fleshing out a few of the systems to something more modern player friendly, would go a long way towards my chances of ever actually playing it in real life.