Great Space Battles (1979) is the second volume in Stewart Cowley’s Terran Trade Authority series, and the only one to feature a co-author in Charles Herridge. This book uses art produce by artists from two different agencies — Young Artists and the Sarah Brown Agency. You can start to feel the patchwork quality in illustrations in this book but it is still remarkable how consistent the works are overall.

Where the first book is an exercise in cataloging fictional spacecraft, this one is more concerned with fleshing out the details of the universe through war stories. The primary narrative concerns the Laguna Wars, which pit humanity against the city-ships of an alien foe. Secondary narratives involve humanity’s space civil war, various colonial border conflicts and some good old space pirates. For real, I would be shocked if no one ran a TTA campaign with Traveller at some point (I’ve never gotten my hands on it, but worth noting that there is a TTA RPG that came out in 2006).