If you haven't heard, Mongoose Traveller is available this week from all good stores! This is the core volume around which Marc Miller's Traveller 5 is being built.

You can find details and previews here, on the Mongoose Website.

We would be delighted to have reviews for the BITS newsletter, and would also encourage to send your reviews of this (and BITS products, obviously) to sites like RPG.net.

BITS Members can find the latest edition of the newsletter available in the Member's section.

The price is $35 (there will be a print edition with less material later on) and there is a PDF with more details here. The main Traveller-5 web-page is here. Pre-orders get a number of freebies now.

We are pleased to remind you that we are attending Dragonmeet 2007 at Kensington Town Hall today (1st December) from 10.00am.

We have the usual trade stand full of new and second hand Traveller merchandise, dice, figures and other fine products manned by BITS Director Andy Lilly. Usual BITS member discounts apply at the show.

The BITS Demo Crew are also be present running a series of new adventures including the Angels Share scenarios (In Search of Angels, The Rock and Ice Work) in both morning and afternoon slots. Throughout the day we will have exclusive previews of the new Traveller Starship miniatures by Ad Astra and will be running demo games of our Power Projection: Fleet starship combat game.

BITS Members can find the latest edition of the newsletter available in the Member's section.

We are pleased to announce we will be attending Dragonmeet 2007 at Kensington Town Hall on 1st December from 10.00am.

We will have the usual trade stand full of new and second hand Traveller merchandise, dice, figures and other fine products manned by BITS Director Andy Lilly. Usual BITS member discounts apply at the show.

The BITS Demo Crew will also be present running a series of new adventures including the Angels Share scenarios (In Search of Angels, The Rock and Ice Work) in both morning and afternoon slots. Throughout the day we will have exclusive previews of the new Traveller Starship miniatures by Ad Astra and will be running demo games of our Power Projection: Fleet starship combat game.

BITS will be attending GenCon UK 2007 between August 30th and September 2nd at Reading University (http://www.genconuk.com/).

BITS Director Andy Lilly will be bravely manning the trade stand with a wide range of Traveller merchandise including our own range of Little White Books, with our most recent release Cold Dark Grave by Dom Mooney and Universe software and a good selection of new and second hand gaming products.

On the gaming front Richard Talbot, Neil McGurk and Peter Trevor will be running a range of 3 new Traveller RPG adventures during the 3 timed slots at 9am, 2pm and 8pm.

We will also have a demo table of Traveller: Power Projection Fleet and Escort with games timed during the day at 9.00am and 2.00pm.

All our slots are now bookable via the GenCon website and cost two gaming tickets per game.

BITS are also looking for a brave volunteer to help run some of the sessions so if you are attending GenCon or just even thinking about it, drop an email to richardtalbotuk at yahoo.co.uk or bits at bits.org.uk (or use the contact form on the site here) and let us know! GenCon do provide some benefits for GM's depending on how many slots they run so check out their website for more information.

Peter Trevor's Traveller: Universe can now be purchased directly from BITS via our webshop on eBay.

Full details about Universe can be found here.

BITS Members can find the latest edition of the newsletter available in the Member's section.

You can read the review here. We love to know about reviews of products (bad or good), so please feel free to let us know if you see any, or produce a review yourself. RPG.net have also reviewed GDW's MegaTraveller Rebellion Sourcebook and the Classic Traveller Double Adventure Chamax Plague/Horde recently.

If you'd like us to post links to reviews to Traveller products other than the BITS ones here in the future, just let us know through the comments.

BITS are proud to announce closer ties with yet another game publisher. Following on from our collaboration with Jon Tuffley at Ground Zero Games to produce our much-applauded Traveller starship combat system Power Projection, we are now beginning printing of the Power Projection: Fleet rules through Ken Burnside at Ad Astra Games in the USA.

We continue to have stock of the original UK printings of both Power Projection: Escort and Fleet, but this agreement allows us to produce and distribute the updated version of Fleet more easily in the USA. We will continue to stock and distribute the original UK printing to distributors, mail order customers and at conventions, but will replace these with the US-printed version over time.

We will only be printing Fleet at Ad Astra; though Escort is a useful, and fun, lead-in to Power Projection, the economics of printing meant it wasn't worth producing Escort in the USA: for our first out-source to Ad Astra we wanted to focus on the complete rules set in Fleet and see how it went.

We intend to collaborate further with Ken and his team at Ad Astra on future projects, just as we continue to work very closely with Jon at Ground Zero Games with our upcoming Power Projection: Reinforcements book.

Andy Lilly
http://www.bitsuk.net/
http://www.powerprojection.net/

This is a conversion of the Traveller T20 Saberwolf Block 1 Fleet Destroyer into a Power Projection SSD. If you want the full details on the ship (the blurb and High Guard style stats and picture), you'll need to buy the excellent Traveller's Aide #7: Fighting Ships from RPGNow or QLI directly.

Have fun blowing things up!
Dom

We are shipping (by mail in the US; by air letter post to destinations outside the US) the Classic Traveller CDROM today (Jan 3) and tomorrow (Jan 4). I want to thank you for your patience on this; we’re proud of the content and we think you will like it.
 
The JTAS CDROM (if you ordered that one) will ship by Jan 31. More CDROMs are in the works…
 
Marc Miller
Far Future Enterprises

Comstar Games have just launched their own online store, and are running a 40% price reduction promotion for a limited time. Now, Comstar publish Avenger Enterprise's Traveller 1248 range, and this is included in the promo. The PDF versions of the first two releases are around $9 each (less than a fiver) at the moment. If you're not sure about 1248 as a setting, it's a good time to check it out. And if you've already got the paper version, you can get colour maps and the opportunity for better quality printouts than the print books contain by getting a copy. We don't know when this promo ends, but thought we'd mention it in case you haven't seen it already.

There is also a new supplement for Traveller 1248 with Small Merchant Ships in.

Updated 27 December 2006: The initial 40% off sale has ended now, but there is still a 25% discount on PDFs and 15% on print material in an 'End of Year Sale'.

Jesse DeGraff, Andrew Boulton, and Wayne Peters have teamed together and released a 2007 Calendar for Traveller, which can be purchased from Lulu. $2.50 from every sale goes to Children's Charities, according to the website info, although it isn't specific which charities. If anyone has more info, feel free to let us know.

In the UK they are retailing for around £17 each, and should be generally available. You can also get them as PDFs from DriveThruRPG for $15 each.

The first book gives an overview and history of the whole of Charted Space 46 years after the Traveller: The New Era setting, space that is very different, but in some ways feels more like the Imperium of old. There is also a small campaign setting in the book. The second book gives details on the four sectors of space that are occupied by the Fourth Imperium, plus details on the various institutions (especially the military) which may be found there.

BITS Members: we are hoping to have a review of this in the next newsletter in the near future. If anyone has a copy and wants to review it, please contact us.

We're happy to announce to BITS members that the latest issue of the BITS newsletter, the Autumn issue, is now available for download through the secure Member's section of the site. All members were emailed a username and password yesterday. If you're a member, and haven't seen this email (from the YahooGroup), please let us know via the contact form and we'll try and sort things out.

Dom (BITS Webmaster)

It was modelled by Nick Bradbeer, and shows the ship before any textures or details are added.

Several years ago, Avalanche Press Ltd re-released the game Imperium in a new edition called Imperium Third Millennium. Imperium was originally published by the Conflict Games Company (which became part of GDW) and presents the period and battles described in the recent GURPS Traveller supplement Interstellar Wars when Terra was fighting for survival against the Vilani First Imperium.

The main rules remained unchanged, but some of the conflict rules were 'updated'. The graphic look of the game was also modernised.

However, Avalanche have announced that the remaining Imperium Third Millennium stock will be destroyed after 4th July 2006 to create space for new games. They are clearing the remaining stock at $7.50 a box (75% off). With the strong pound/dollar exchange rate, this may well make a good saving, even with the $25 shipping to Europe.

Our eBay webshop, AncientTomesUK, is now restocked with 101 Corporations and Power Projection: Escort after they have now been reprinted. If you are a BITS member, don't forget to contact Richard via the eBay messaging system to give him your details. He will verify these and then apply your discount when he invoices.

Dom (BITS Webmaster)

Salute is only 12 days away now, and we're getting ready for some games of Power Projection, and meeting up with the Traveller Wargaming fans. Sadly, Power Projection: Reinforcements isn't ready, but please come and say 'hello' and enjoy a game with us! Details of this London based convention can be found by clicking on the links.

Just to reassure all our avid followers out there, the "little white books" of Traveller are still in production, with 101 Starcrews being our latest Traveller supplement. However, as each of us on the team grows that little bit older, our time for Traveller becomes necessarily constrained by personal commitments to our partners, children, jobs, etc. Of course, should any of us ever win the lottery, we'd be able to give up our jobs and do this full time. Alternatively, if any of you out there have a few million pounds to spare, please get in touch.
 
Once again, welcome to our site - I hope you find it useful (please send us your comments). We hope to keep it regularly updated with information on our latest work, including new products and our planned attendance at conventions.
 
Andy (Chief BITS Disorganiser)