Black Globes:
Someone said the energy absorbed can't be used in the new rules.
Ignoring that, it should still be advantageous to fire all your
weapons while inside the BG. Since most of your weapons aren't
operating at 100% efficiency, a lot of that energy is going to
be converted to heat, most of which will heat up the ship and
thus not place a strain on the capacitors from reabsorbed energy.
That is, assuming the energy to fire the weapons came from the
capacitors.
P.S. If you don't like the physics violations in Traveller,
don't even think about White Globes. It's basically a Black
Globe which absorbs all incoming energy, yet somehow the
person/ship inside can see out.
Reactionless Drives:
The greatest benefit of reactionless drives is that you dont'
have to solve a differential equation to figure out the speed,
range, and acceleration of your ship when you have x tons of
fuel left. Is there a way to achive this simplicity with
Fusion Drives? And keep in mind a ship loses a good deal of
mass during a jump.
Gravity Field Warps:
Is this truly mass-independent? If you can generate a gravity
field with x amount of energy, and it doesn't matter how big
the mass influenced by the field is, with a sufficiently large
mass, you can gain more kinetic energy than x-- another perpetual
motion machine.
btw, I like the idea of a gravity field warp (it's the unofficial
explaination for the Star Trek "warp drive"). It always reminds
me of the cartoons where someone is holding the top of a door or
birdbath and pushing the bottom with his/her/its feet, and the
door/birdbath keeps moving forward.
TDR:
You need not start a company immediately to publish it. Just
make sure the stuff you send to GDW is in parts (pretty simple
considering the amount of overhaul proposed). Then have GDW
sign some legal form saying the authors have full rights to
any future publication. Then if people love TDR in the GDW
publications, you can work out future details through snail
mail and have full rights to a *complete* version of TDR.
I agree with ASCII. Anybody can read it and print it out on
the fanciest printing resources he has access to. And if you
guys do eventually publish, most printing shops have to convert
it by hand onto their own machines anyway. I think the stuff
that prints Tex at 1200+ dpi costs about $4/page. Dunno about
bulk rates.
Is there going to be TDR mailing list? Will it go the way
of past mailing lists whose problems were, as someone told me,
"All they ever did was talk about considering discussing the
planning to lay the foundation of starting to begin to get
something done."
- - --
John H. Kim
[email removed]
[email removed]