Visiting worlds I've personally, physically seen through a telescope that are real worlds provides me with a little bit of a thrill. Even if in some cases they've been massively terraformed like Venus.
Lore-time: how comes that "we" terraformed Venus into a jungle world, while Mars is still a desert?
And what about the Moon? No terraforming at all.
The bodies lying around are wearing the same suits mankind was using when they first discovered the Traveller?
And look at the space debris floating in orbit - that ISS look-alikes don't really match with the story of a human civ that was technologically more advanced than our Guardians and their ships are now.
You all know that the "Venus" and "Mars" portals in the VoG don't take you to those planets, but to the VoG in different points in time.
Maybe our ships are more Delorean than Enterprise?
Another thing, regarding the Traveller: isn't it strange that the maximum battle damage it seems to have taken is located on the "south pole", the part directly facing the city it supposedly died defending?
If that really were the case, shouldn't the max damage be anywhere but where it is now? It looks more like the city fired everything it got into it...