More on Skills - Gambling Skill

The Gambling skill is part of the Technical Skills group, which I covered briefly here. Here I'm going to examine it more closely and see what we can get out of it. 

The rules say a PC with Gambling skill is "well informed on games of chance and wise in their play. He has an advantage over non-experts and is generally capable of winning when he plays." The skill description is the same in TTB, BK1 and ST. 

Gambling skill is offered in only three of the services, the Marines, the Army, and the Other. Gambling provides a one-time DM on getting Mustering Out cash, which especially in the Other can be very lucrative. 

Mechanically, the skill's employment is broken down into simple die throws, one for Organized/casino games and the other for private games. Stake limits are also provided. That's all. Any other details are left to the player and referee. Sweet!

"Drat. It's armored with collapsium."

From H. Beam Piper's The Cosmic Computer:

"The armor was only a couple of micromicrons thick, but it would stop anything. It was collapsed matter, the electron shells of the atoms collapsed upon the nuclei, the atoms in actual contact. That plating made eighth-inch sheet steel as heavy as twelve-inch armor plate, and in texture and shielding properties, lead was like sponge by comparison."

That, fellow Travellers, is collapsium. None of the Classic Traveller rules sets describe what starship hulls or vehicle armor is made of. That's fine, referees can make stuff up that works for them. But why not use a substance that has some SF pedigree, like Piper's super-strong metallic shielding? It's the sort of stuff you encase your ship's fusion power plant or jump drive in.

The only reference to this type of material I could find was in Striker, as shown here:

Taken from the Design Sequence Tables in FFE 005: The Classic Games