TRRAVELLERAVELLER Beltstrike C REDITS C ONTENTS Classic Traveller Marc Miller INTRODUCTION 2 ASTEROID BELTS 3 Loren Wiseman, John Harshman, Frank Chadwick, Darryl Hany, Winston Hamilton, Tony Svajlenka, Scott Renner, Doug Poe, BELTER CHARACTERS 15 David MacDonald, Wayne Roth, Paul R. Banner. EXPEDITIONS, EQUIPMENT & SHIPS 21 Mongoose Traveller THE SCHAEFFER BELT 34 AUTHOR Lawrence Whittaker THE FACTORY 49 SIGNALS TO NOISE 63 EDITOR Nick Robinson WORKING THEM ANGELS 71 ADVENTURES IN CHLAER 80 LAYOUT Will Chapman BELT WAR 87 INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS INDEX 95 Phil Renne, Carlos Martins, Andrew Dobell, Leonel Domingos da Costa, Travis Leichssenring, Carlos Nunez de Castro, Pulcupocalipsis Studio (Vincente Sivera, Jorge Momparler, Alejandro Lizaur) J.B Leto, Ricardo Mendes SPECIAL THANKS Dominic Mooney, Stuart Machin, David Ives, Don McKinney, Adam Gulwell, Roger Calver Beltstrike ©2008 Mongoose Publishing. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this work by any means without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden. All significant characters, names, places, items, art and text herein are copyrighted by Mongoose Publishing. This game product contains no Open Game Content. No portion of this work may be reproduced in any form without written permission. To learn more about the Open Game License, please go to www.mongoosepublishing.com. This material is protected under the copyright laws of the United Kingdom and of the United States. This product is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual people, organisations, places or events is purely coincidental. Traveller is a trademark of Far Future Enterprises and is used under licence. Printed in the USA. 11 INNTRODUCTIONTRODUCTION Part Two: The Beltstrike Campaign Asteroid /astroyd/ THE SCHAEFFER BELT noun a small rocky body orbiting the sun. Background on the Sonara system and, in particular, the Schaeffer Origin: from Greek asteroeides ‘starlike’. asteroid belt – the setting for the campaign. This chapter details the major players, overviews the habitable asteroids and details two Oxford English Dictionary habitats – Shoranan and Vinen. THE FACTORY Beltstrike provides Traveller referees with essential information for The opening chapter of the Beltstrike campaign. Working for running campaigns based in the hazardous asteroid belts found Lothrain Free Company the characters are assigned to survey a in many, if not most, star systems. Beyond the rules and game mining platform the company aims to buy, and then help to get it mechanics, the Beltstrike Campaign is a series of linked scenarios commissioned. set in the Schaeffer Belt. As far as locations go, Beltstrike is not tied into the Official Traveller SIGNAL TO NOISE Universe of the Third Imperium. Efforts have been made to keep the The characters learn more about the Factory’s background – a book as generic as possible so that referees can take the Schaeffer mixture of the disturbing and the criminal. Belt campaign setting and place it anywhere in their own campaign universe. Those referees running a Traveller campaign in the WORKING THEM ANGELS Spinward Marches will find guidance on likely systems where the The recommissioning of the Factory gets underway. A hazardous Schaeffer Belt can be placed. task, not least because betrayal is in the characters’ midst. And an astonishing discovery is made... Of course, the game mechanics and principles can be applied to any Traveller game – whether in the Imperium or elsewhere. ADVENTURES IN THE CHLAER RADICAL With the Factory online, it is down to business for the LFC. The characters are involved in prospecting the Chlaer Radical section of CONTENTS the Schaeffer belt. Part One: Background and Rules BELT WAR The deteriorating political situation on Sonares Prime prompts Maas CHAPTER ONE –ASTEROIDS AND ASTEROID BELTS Industries to lay claim to the entire Schaeffer belt. Tensions run high An overview of asteroids, their composition and how they are and the belt is the scene of armed aggression by the independent mined. Belters against the Maas mercenaries. CHAPTER TWO – BELTERS CHARACTERS HAT LSE O EED Character generation for Belter characters plus information relating W E D I N ? You will need the core Traveller rules to make full use of Beltstrike. to solo belting, free companies and corporations. The Traveller supplements Mercenary and High Guard may be useful but are not essential. CHAPTER THREE – EQUIPMENT AND SHIPS The tools of the Belters’ trade: ships, mining platforms and the equipment needed in the hazardous exploration of the asteroid belt. 2 ASSTEROIDTEROID BEELTSLTS This chapter gives an overview of typical asteroid belts commonly of objects varying in size. In other parts of the belt the density is found in most solar systems. Belts are a common geo-astronomical considerably less, with great distances separating substantial feature, just as gas giants and habitable (or terra-formable) planets objects, but still filled with very small particles and dust. are a common fabric of many systems. Belt characteristics in terms of density, composition, location within the solar orbit and so forth However, given the immense circumference of asteroid belts, even can vary hugely, and it is impossible to account for every eventuality, in the densest clusters, individual asteroids can be tens of thousands so this chapter concerns itself with characteristics that are most of kilometres from their nearest neighbour. Collisions between likely to prevail and be of greatest use in Traveller adventures. major asteroid bodies occur, on average, every 10 million years, which, by astronomical standards, is quite frequent. Where general human visitation is concerned, even in the most concentrated A STEROID BELT CHARACTERISTICS clusters, hitting an asteroid ‘accidentally’ is nigh-on impossible, Asteroids are primordial objects left over from the formation of the and it requires careful navigation to isolate and approach any star system. In some systems they are the remains of devastating given major body. The image of a whirling cloud of deadly debris planetary collisions during the earliest years of the system’s birth, is largely mythical, although, when collisions between major bodies but generally asteroids are the leftover rocky matter that never take place, clouds of dangerous, high velocity debris and dust is the successfully coalesced into a planet. This rocky material was result which can pose a threat to any ship unlucky enough to be originally composed of dust grains and ice that, trapped in a solar caught in its wake. orbit, coagulated into larger bodies known as planetesimals. This period of accretion may have taken up to 100 million years and, It is also possible for larger asteroids to have their own moons, with in some cases, developed into full-sized planets. However, the smaller bodies occupying regular or eccentric orbits around the remaining mass of material, influenced by the gravitational force of parent body. outlying gas giants and the distance from the system’s star, limited the planetesimals’ development. Very few asteroids in a typical Asteroid Composition belt are above 1,000km in diameter; the rest of the material has Planet dwellers consider asteroid belts to be the junkyards of the star been subjected to constant collisions that disrupted accretion and system; the dumping ground for all the material that never made led to the disintegration of the planetesimals. Great swathes of an it into a worthwhile planet. Belters see asteroid belts as a frontier asteroid belt contain material that is little bigger than a pebble or a packed with riches and opportunity. boulder, a great deal of material, due to collision, either impacted with developing planets, fell towards the star itself, or was ejected into interstellar space. System Location Most asteroid belts are found in an orbit between the system’s star and the closest gas giant. Typically this equates to a distance of between 300 million and 500 million kilometres from the star, but may be greater or lesser depending on the system’s age, and number of gas giants present. The typical orbital circumference of an asteroid belt is therefore anywhere between 1.8 billion and 3.1 billion kilometres – a vast, stellar, orbital area that requires considerable resources and logistics to accurately survey and exploit. Asteroids are found further afield within a star system – beyond the orbits of the major gas giants – but these clusters tend to be relatively small compared with the main belt and are the result of collisions during the main belt’s formation which ejected material out of the belt’s orbital trajectory. The density of the belt varies throughout its circumference. Certain areas – clusters – are densely packed, numbering tens of thousands 33 ASSTEROIDTEROID BEELTSLTS ASTEROID BELTS The types of asteroids commonly found in a typical belt vary be turned into starship hulls at any orbital A class starport or similar considerably, but tend to fall into three classes: Silicates (S class), grade of dockyard. M class asteroids are most common in the N Metals (M class) and Carbonaceous (C class). The distribution of zone of the belt and are the targets for most prospectors. these three classes is smooth across the entire composition of the asteroid belt, but for those interested in exploiting the belts, three As an example of the value of M class asteroids, an average earth- distinct zones can be differentiated. sized world of Tech Level 6 or 7 has an average iron ore production value in excess of 1,000 million metric tons. Compare this with an N Zone M class asteroid with a mean diameter of just 1 kilometre: at this The inner belt. This band contains predominately M class planetoids size and density, a 1 kilometre M class asteroid could yield in excess and debris, usually with a high concentration of nickel-iron, hence of 2,000 million metric tons of iron - nickel - ore – which is two to the N designation. The N zone occurs roughly 1.25 times the star’s three times the annual production requirements for the planet.