I have decided to completely move to the Cepheus Engine as my go-to sci-fi ruleset, replacing Mongoose/Classic Traveller. Stellagama Publishing will, of course, also publish material for Stars Without Number - and we are now working on some seriously cool stuff for it - but personally I now use the Cepheus rules. I will move Hard Space from Classic Traveller to the Cepheus Engine; we are writing (the commercial) Visions of Empire setting for the Cepheus Engine as well.
Why the change? The main reason is that of copyright and licensing. The current (second) edition of Mongoose Traveller has a closed "Community Content" license onDriveThruRPG. This license is quite nice for fans who wish to write material for the Official Traveller Universe (OTU) and even earn some money from them. However, it is very problematic for third-party publishers, such as Stellagama Publishing, to market materials through for various legal and technical reasons. Classic Traveller - an excellent ruleset - requires an individual license to publish for if you want to write anything commercial. There are the open (OGL) 2d6 sci-fi SRD rules, related to the first edition of Mongoose Traveller, but they are incomplete as a ruleset.
The Cepheus Engine is thus a good compromise. It is quite similar to Traveller in terms of flavor and rules, yet it is completely open-content. This means that we can publish sci-fi material in the flavor we all know and love without stepping on anyone's Intellectual Property toes and without requiring any individual license as Cepheus is under the Open Game License (OGL). The rules are complete and very good - perfect for sci-fi gaming and better still for sci-fi publishing. Check them out!
On a side note, I now have the perfect mapping data and the perfect map for Hard Space... Sold by Stellagama Publishing! This is one of the products I am very proud of, by the way.
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