Jim and Rob have raised queries about starship armor. I hope that this
eventually gets codified on the TDR SIG, but one worry at a time....
Rob, there is NO reason that a local navy can't make an armor-8 ship.
Turn the "impossibilities" in the rules into "not really a good ideas"
and there you go. But be sure to add tasks for the ref to nuke the
resulting rattletraps with passing chunks of matter....
Jim, active defense against micrometeoroids is essentially impossible;
there is a large class of rocks that are too small to see, much less
shoot at and vaporize, that could hull a thin-skinned ship at high speed.
Armor (especially (turn up the gain on the Physics Nullifier, Dow!) "bonded
superdense") is the easiest way of dealing with said problems.
There are circumstances where one must take one's chances, though. Anyone
ever see "Conquest of Space"? It was a 1950s movie about the first manned
mission to mars, about 50/50 lousy filmmaking and truly visionary ideas.
There's a scene where a passing cluster of micrometeoroids whips by the
outbound ship at a fairly high relative velocity while two of the astronauts
are outside performing some sort of instrument adjustment. Ross Martin takes
a high-V frag through the vacc suit and dies horribly. I was about six years
old the first time I saw that film; it scarred me for life. |->
metlay