This is excerpted from a reply made by Geo Gelinas on GEnie to another
player. Thought y'all might be interested in it.
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I am enclosing in this post an except from a letter by Dave
Nilsen. I hope it answers some of your questions about the nuclear
pumped missiles. The actual yield of each weapon can be found on a
table in the starship weapon portion of the equipment section. Re:
nuclear detonation lasers. I understand your misgivings, and let me
say at the outset that your concerns about the overabundance of nukes
is well-taken. However, the use of the Imperial Laws of War to explain
why nukes were never used before was, I always thought, a very
artificial and unsatisfactory device. Nukes would have been easily
obtainable at Imperial tech levels, as they are now. But we will need
to come up with more convincing reasons for why people don't use them
than the long arm of the law. I would think that the vivid example of
84 years of civil war and virus rampage (there are still hundreds or
thousands of radioactively hot worlds) might have convinced people to
be a little more thoughtful.
Second, HE missiles and deadfall ordnance are still in wide use
for orbital bombardment. However, HE missiles just don't make any
sense at all for starship combat. I kept trying to keep them in, but
they always required a lot of unconvincing rationalizations that, at
the end, were only to retain HE missiles because we used to say that
there were HE missiles. Why don't they work?
First of all, those eenie little 50 kg missiles we used to know
and love are a pathetic joke in a game that now uses reaction mass for
vector movement. A 50 kg missile has no capacity for maneuver, and
therefore no capacity to hit a target. Therefore, missiles need to be
bigger in order to have the range to hit targets at the range we used
to tell people they work at (remember how missiles were supposed to
work better at longer ranges, while lasers, etc., worked better at
short ranges?). Bigger missiles equal bigger targets for point defense
batteries, and equal fewer missiles carried by the firing vessel. Once
we worked out the physics required for lasers to hit targets at the
ranges we had always blithely assumed lasers could hit targets at, it
became absolutely ludicrous to assume that a missile would ever get
close enough to its target to actually make physical contact with it,
as an HE missile would. All of a sudden, it was pointless for ships to
carry missiles at all, except for planetary bombardment. The only way
to keep missiles in the game at all was to make them detonation
lasers. This also had the effect that Traveller will be easier to
dovetail with 2300 when the time comes, but this was a by-product of
the other requirements, not the cause for the decision.
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Kerry Harrison
[email removed]