I have an idea. It's a BAD idea. Why? Because it's the kind of thing that
may well end up costing me many man-hours of time that could be spent on
physics, music, or sex. But hell, I put in my time at work, my studio's
not always where I'm in the mood to be, and my wife is going to the South
Pole for three months in about a week and a half and I won't see her again
until around Valentine's Day, so what the hell.
I wish to propose, to the TML, a truly sweeping bit of obnoxiousness that
could get us all arrested on one trumped-up charge or another. I call it
"Gnu Traveller."
For those of you who aren't UNIX-heads, "Gnu" is a set of public-domain
programs, shells, and compilers designed by civically-minded hackers to
fix what they regard as the broken aspects of UNIX. Ideally, one should
be able to use Gnu on any UNIX machine, for free, and get more utility
out of it. (And for those of you who ARE UNIX-heads, don't jump all over
me and send me copies of the Gnu Manifesto with annotations as to where
I got it all wrong-- I really don't care. It's a useful concept, and if
I made a mistake in the details, well, go misjump.) Anyone at all can
write Gnu stuff, but it needs to be thoroughly checked for workability
before it's distributed, etc.
It occurs to me that for those of us who aren't satisfied with the incredible
idiocies of the holes in the MegaTraveller rules, it might be worthwhile to
fix them ourselves, for free, and make them available to interested parties.
A sort of Gnu Traveller, you see? Rob Dean and Steven Kellogg have essentially
overrun the DGP 101 Vehicles book, and Rob and Dow Reider have made some much-
needed corrections and simplifications to the vehicle rules. Dow and I are
looking into replacing the utterly worthless and nonsensical trade and commerce
rules with better ones, and I'm rolling up my sleeves (with the possible
assistance of Dow and Paul Reilly, a General Relativist in my Trav group who
will probably join the TML soon) and fixing the glaring physics errors that
make so much of Traveller starship design difficult to swallow, without harming
the game balance too badly. (no Jump-7's folx) I'm probably going to see if I
can talk Iain Fogg and Mark Cook into helping me redo the weapons skills system
in a convincing manner, and I'd like to tackle the combat system at some point
and add a bunch more weapons to the canonical list....
The end result of all of this is going to be a parallel rules set that may
bear little resemblance to Traveller in places but will at least work in a
relatively consistent fashion. As all of physics is constrained within the
single rule, "Thou shalt not exceed c," we will constrain our rules in the
Miller Principle, "Thou shalt not allow news to go faster than Jump-6." It
may even turn out that the existing Traveller Universe will be no good for
the resulting rules, in which case (sigh) I'll just have to create a new
one. But hopefully the end result will be a rules set that one can use and
not feel vaguely cheated by in one respect or another.
Keep in mind that this is not a going project yet! It's a proposal, to
organize and coordinate the work that other people are doing elsewhere
anyway. It may well be decided that people don't want to go to the extra
effort. Most people may like MT as it is; I certainly can make it work
in its current form. I may hand off the directorship of this idea to
someone else. Or whatever. But I wanted feedback. Please post to the TML
if you'd like to see a Gnu Traveller, and if so what rules you'd like
to see fixed, whether you'd be willing to write or help write new rules,
and whether or not you'd be interested in a new Universe to run them in.
(Also, the Gnu people will probably get mad if we keep using that term,
so we could use a catchy title for this... GigaTraveller? Nah.)
Looking to see if anyone's interested,
metlay