FTL impossibilities, TDR stuff

Well, folks, I talked to a local Special Relativity guru.  Guess what?  All FTL
drive systems that rely on taking a ship out of our space-time and plopping it
temporarily in some "hyperspace" or "jump space" are going to violate
relativity.  (Specifically, you will invariably get reverse time travel.)
Here's why:

FTL, by definition, gets you from A to B faster than light can do it.  Once you
get to B, you can accelerate in normal space back to A until your velocity is
near c.  Start your FTL drive again, and you will arrive back at A in your new
reference frame, moving at just under c, some time before you left.  The only
way to solve this problem is to have ONE reference frame.  That is forbidden
under Special Relativity.

If you didn't follow that argument, here it is in a different form.  Say A is
the Earth, at noon.  Using your FTL, you jump to Alpha Centauri and arrive
there at 1 pm.  Accelerate in normal space toward Earth, get near c.  You are a
real stud and can take 40 G's of acceleration or whatever.  3 pm your time, 6
pm Earth time, but your reference frame still includes the Earth of two weeks
ago.  (Don't forget that information can't travel faster than light.)  Try
using your FTL again.  Whoops!  Back at Earth two weeks before you left.

What does this all mean?  Traveller doesn't work, nothing works, you are
doomed, SFRPG's will never be realistic.

Well, I think this underscores a more fundamental problem than all the physics
problems in Traveller.  Basically, folks, most of you have lost sight of the
fact that Traveller is a GAME.  In fact, it purports to be a ROLE PLAYING game.
If you're in it for space combat, tough shit.  There are many excellent space
combat systems available.  The point is to have fun.  Granted, some of the
inconsistencies grate on people's nerves, but when you get right down to it
there is nothing you can do without violating some laws of physics.

I'm not really flaming the efforts of people to make Traveller more bearable,
but what some of you are trying to do is model reality.  You can't do it.  I've
been watching all this talk about Black Globes and reactionless thrusters, and
I just have to laugh.  As long as you don't get a free ride (i.e., getting
something for nothing), what's the problem?  Who cares about the nitty gritty
details?  _I_ know the rules are "wrong," so do you.  {shrug}

Hopefully, the people who are going to spend all their time working on TDR will
realize that they are trying to fix the more broken aspects of Traveller
(trade, weapons, etc.) without losing sight of the fact that it is an RPG.
I applaud the effort.

As for ASCII, I can see how a lot of people would want to get straight ASCII
text and print it out.  I would recommend that the people doing this use Emacs
or else use a word processor that has an ASCII output option -- you're going to
want to use some kind of formatting for all those wonderful tables.

For those who want a nicer looking presentation -- something you can put in a
flex binder and show to people, or at least have readable -- I am willing to
put in my time and convert the final results into a machine-ready form so that
the docs can be typeset.  Then it is a matter of making the PostScript files
(or whatever) publically readable.  I would also be willing to make hard copies
and send them out via snail mail to whomever is interested in having nicely
typeset docs instead of unreadable dot matrix output.  (Just send me a check to
reimburse me for reproduction costs.)

And since no one on the TDR team is interested, I am willing to help coordinate
development of software for ship design, character generation, etc., assuming
that the TDR people are going to get all the algorithms to be self-consistent,
easy to understand, and amenable to computational algorithm.  Obviously, there
will be nothing to "jabber about and argue over until it dies of inertia" if
the TDR people do their jobs right.  IF.

I gotta see this.

Robert P. Poole                       [email removed]
[address removed]                     MIT Course VIII
311B Bexley Hall                      "We make Idols of our concepts, but
[address removed]                      wisdom is born of wonder."
                                         -- St. Gregory the Illuminator