I was sent down a bit of a Classic Traveller rabbit hole by a comment on a post over at Grognardia recently, which mentioned a CT book that I hadn't heard of before - Book 0: An Introduction to Traveller, published 1981, which I happened to have around on the Classic Traveller CD from FFE. I haven't read it properly yet, though I did skim the sections on preparing to referee, changing the rules, and the bit mentioned in the Grognardia comment on the proposed setting:
Once the referee has decided the general features of the campaign, it is a good idea to jot down a one or two sentence summary of conditions for later reference, such as "The subsector is located on the fringe of the Moladon Federation, a loose organization of 300+ worlds governed by a federation council. Half the worlds in the subsector are in the federation, the rest are petty one or two world nations. The federation is currently in a period of stasis, between expansions, but plans to eventual1y absorb all worlds on its borders. The last war was over a century ago, but minor skirmishes are constantly taking place, especially between the larger outer states. Tech levels within the federation are between 5 and 12; outside they are between 1 and 9. Federation naval power is just strong enough to suppress piracy within the borders, and there is a great deal of local planetary autonomy."
This is a very different interplanetary government from the Third Imperium! Yet it does show up in an official, GDW, Classic Traveller source. It's also a lower tech level than I would've expected from CT's generation system; with 300 inhabited worlds, I would've expected the Moladon Federation to have at least one TL 15 world. In order to get the distribution described, the generation rules were likely not adhered to rigorously. Which is fine and all, but interesting to see in an official product.
The size of the proposed federation is also interesting. At 300+ worlds, and an average of 40ish worlds per subsector, you're talking like eight subsectors - about half a sector.
This ties to something else from the Classic Traveller Apocrypha II CD - an article by Marc Miller which was originally published in the Jan/Feb 1979 issue of The Dungeoneer (which was Judge's Guild's competitor to TSR's The Dragon magazine I guess?) titled Dealing with the Concept of Empires. FFE's Guide to Judge's Guild Traveller notes that "The first glimpses of the Third Imperium can be seen in this early article." Dealing with the Concept of Empires describes several stages of development and coordination of interstellar empires operating under Traveller's assumption that information cannot travel faster than people (which The Concept of Empires describes as "the most basic assumption of Traveller"; Book 0, discussing changes referees might make to the rules on page 34, likewise cautions, "The speed of communication should never be allowed to exceed the speed of
travel. This is a basic tenet of Traveller..." I hadn't seen this put so emphatically before!).
Dealing with the Concept of Empires outlines four stages for the development of an interstellar polity. The smallest and most centralized is the federation, where all worlds are within a single jump, limited to maybe a bit over one subsector with jump-6; 60 worlds or so. The government of a federation can project its authority and exercise state power efficiently within its whole territory.
Up from the federation is the confederation, at a two-week travel radius and with slightly weaker central authority. This works out to 4 subsectors, or about 160 worlds under default density. Sadly this sort of government is almost a footnote in The Concept of Empires. This is a particularly interesting size to me in light of my observations on time, distance, language and culture for D&D; a two-week travel radius is about the size of many medieval kingdoms, and at scales larger than that I'd expect languages to start diverging. I'm rather sad that this size of interstellar polity didn't get more attention.
Up from that is the empire, with a "communications radius" of two months, comparable to that of the Roman Empire (some quick googling also suggests that London to India was 6-8 weeks during the Age of Sail). At jump-6, this is claimed to cover about 225 subsectors and maybe 9000 star systems. This requires, though, that the central authority is not in "constant, immediate communication with all of its component worlds", and leaves opportunities for mercenaries, as central imperial authority is only brought to bear against exceptional threats, and cannot afford (logistically, practically) to intervene in every small local conflict that might arise within its borders.
Finally, up from the empire you have what Miller terms Imperium, where travel delays for information are so long that travel from one end of the Imperium to the other might exceed a human lifetime. In such a situation the central authority cannot effectively govern the periphery and must cede most authority to local officials and perhaps to designated "agents", dispatched by the central authority to then wield power on its behalf at the fringes over a period of many years, "perhaps even [with] drug-induced longevity" (an interesting perspective on the level of power required for access to anagathics). This is the premise for Miller's 2020 novel, Agent of the Imperium, following the adventures of one such agent. This conception of an empire much too vast to administer, with delegation of authority to dispatched agents, seems to be the original vision of the Third Imperium.
Miller's closing remarks are about the possibility that the essential function of an imperium-scale government is really communications, the Imperial Postal Union. This strikes me as a delightfully laissez-faire sort of imperial government; you can do most anything as long as you don't mess with the mail, but if you do, that's when the marines in battle-dress start taking an interest.
I think these sizings are also interesting for non-government entities. Can a mega-corporation meaningfully run operations with more than a week or two delay in communications? On a sufficient scale do you end up with many wholly-owned subsidiaries, each operating largely independently across their respective subsectors until an Agent of the Board arrives from HQ?
In any case - something which is surprising in the combination of these two documents, Introduction to Traveller and Dealing with the Concept of Empires, is that the proposed Moladon Federation is much too large to be a federation in The Concept of Empires' terms - "300+" planets instead of 60. And at TL12, Moladon probably isn't using jump-6, so it should take them even longer to get to the periphery than the federation proposed in Concept. I'm not sure what to make of this. Concept preceded Introduction by two years. Did something change in Miller's thinking about interstellar coordination? Was Concept's definition of "federation" never especially canonical (probably the most likely explanation, really; it was just a magazine article, not a book). Was it just a slip? Has the Moladon "Federation" actually grown into a confederation or small empire in practice, but kept the old name out of tradition? Is it more of a Stellaris-style federation, of multiple smaller interstellar governments each with high state capacity over their own one-subsector territories, all joined in a big mutual defense pact? It's interesting to think about.
edit: it turns out that Book 0 was written by Loren Wiseman, not Marc Miller. So that's a pretty good explanation - maybe Wiseman never read Concept.
I did find something else interesting though while looking into the "what TL do you need for jump-6?" question. In my previous post on jump tech level restrictions in CT Book 2, I noted that drives and powerplants for jump-6 100-ton ships are actually possible at TL 9, with the limitation on jump range for 100-ton ships really being in computers. I was looking at the 1977 version of Book 2 and was really confused why I would have thought this, because the Jump-6 program is only size 2! Apparently this was changed in the '81 version of Book 2, where jump program sizes now increase linearly with jump distance and jump distance is quickly bottlenecked by computers, as I had seen previously. I think by the '77 rules, jump-6 100-ton starships were totally doable at TL-9, which is pretty wild. But since Introduction to Traveller was published in '81, presumably for the '81 rules, this doesn't give Moladon a free pass on jump-6 at TL12. Digging out the '81 rules instead, though, I think you only need a computer-4 to handle jump-6 plus Navigate, which is doable at TL-10. So I guess holding together an interstellar government with J-6 X-boats is pretty doable earlier than I would've thought. The fact that the worlds outside the Federation cap at TL-9 sort of makes sense in this light; they are the ones that don't have jump 4-6 yet and are largely stuck in their own little clusters, unable to project power very far.
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