The RPSS Endeavour

I can't draw for toffee, so I decided to borrow a pic from a computer game and design a Traveller starship to fit it. 

The RPSS Endeavour
(actually the Arcova Scout Frigate from Sins of a Solar Empire)

So here is the Royal Planetological Society Starship Endeavour

PDF with deckplans and description here.

Adventure Hooks

• The RPSS Beagle III is a national monument of the colony of New Dorset on the planet Aquila, it being the ship which made the first landing on the planet and which established the English claim to colonise it, beating the EU by three months. Marc Ducaille, a proud citizen of Merovin, the Francophone colony on Aquila, says it is all fishy - if you look at the flight plan of the Beagle III back in 2131 the only way they could have made it to Aquila before the EU expedition was if they somehow magicked up a Warp 4 engine. Marc insists the perfidious English had help, alien help... Most of the gubbins of the vessel are gone now, but if you look at these rather fuzzy lidar images surreptitiously taken while on a guided tour of the vessel you will see a strange pyramidal hole where the warp drive ought to be. No human warp engine has a component that shape, so what the hell was it, eh? 

• Chad Baxter, a military advisor to the Orphean League army, used to be in a certain agency - he can't tell you which or he'd have to kill you - and he knows that not all the rackety old Endeavours travelling the spaceways are what they seem. A vessel with that kind of deep space endurance, that kind of 'Astronomy' gear, built by an English academic organisation which, like all such organisations, was riddled top to bottom with commies? Come on, it's a spyship, was meant to be one from the day it was built! Look out next time you are heading off to a warp point, you might see an Endeavour class floating innocuously in deep space with its solar panel out for a second or two, then poof! the ECMs kick in and its gone.

• Szilard Geologic are a new commercial scouting company doing rather well. They started out with a second or maybe third or fourth hand Endeavour and it's been a real lucky charm for them, taking them from one mineral rich planet to another, gold, uranium, thorium, you name it, their little scout the 'Ethelred Bennett' has found them all. Rumour has it that they were on the point of going bust until they did a refit of the vessel. What did they find stuck in its innards? A lost database of planets? A dowsing rod? Who owned it before them? Jack Szilard worked in salvage for a while, is it a reconditioned wreck?

• The English Royal family are a dull lot. It is the tradition that the princes join the armed forces, usually the Navy since it is probably the safest, and they have been doing the same thing for a good four hundred years or more. Except one, Princess Frances, has bucked the trend by a) having a brain and doing well at university without anyone having to pull strings and award her an honorary degree; b) joining the services despite being female and by tradition being limited to showjumping as a hobby and c) saying nuts to the Navy and joining the Royal Planetological Society instead. She is out there somewhere beyond the edge of Known Space and a leak has revealed that she is flying an Endeavour. What do you do with this information?

• While delivering supplies to a forlorn mining outpost on Torch a battered old slave miner tries to sell you a bit of electronic junk. It's a survey drone, a real old one with an RPSS logo. Where is the vessel that launched it? Wrecked out there in Torch's utterly unforgiving deserts? Could there be evidence that the English have a prior claim on the planet? Or data about an undiscovered gold mine? Or even the location of the fabled haven of the 'Torch' itself?