I am afraid I fell down on the job slightly and missed the Saturday
Traveller seminar at Origins. If anyone who was there would like to upload
a brief discussion of what went on, please do. Marc Miller said afterwards
that there wasn't much of importance discussed...
I did spend quite a bit of time talking to Tom Peters of DGP during the
convention, who was sympathetic to what I think of as 'our viewpoint'--
leaning in the direction of introducing as few bizarre technological
results as possible in the course of making a playable game. The following
answers are not official, of course, and I'll make a few remarks below about
his recommendations to those of us concerned about these things.
Gravitics: Inertial compensators have no particularly good explanation,
but the idea that they are doing whatever they do through more applications
of gravitics as opposed to some other force is probably correct. Thrusters
are just grav drives that work beyond gravity, not some special new force
that 'really' works on the volume of the ship, so my scheme of calculating
accelerations at 650tons per thrust unit is probably good. Despite mention
of a '6-G barrier' to grav acceleration, this is probably more of a design
trade-off barrier than a physical limitation to grav performance.
Streamlining: Take the Fugate comment in the Question and Answer section
of MTJ#2 with a grain of salt regarding streamlining. Apparently Mr. F
has a tendency to 'shoot from the hip' on these answers, and we shouldn't
rewrite 'Traveller Physics t.m.' to account for his answers. While pushing
a USL hull through a gas giant atmosphere would be a bad idea, there is no
real reason that you couldn't land one (very slowly) on a typical inhabitable
planet. Airframe hulls don't provide lift, although there is room for a
small rule expansion to include lifting hulls (or wings).
Tom Peters suggests that we send letters to Joe Fugate about these sorts of
things cropping up in the Q&A section--for example, in this issue there was an
answer to a question about 'low signature' for Gauss rifles, which included a
note about it being possible 'if the bullet reached supersonic velocity' in the
gun barrel. Except for rocket projectiles, I know of no bullets which accel-
erate beyond the gun barrel...Joe is apparently a computer programmer by trade.
I went ahead and handed out our email information in various places, telling
the Traveller 'pros' that we would be all too happy to help them avoid these
sorts of problems in the future, and otherwise volunteering the use of our
compiled expertise.
Is there anyone out there with a very capable computer who could port the
daily list to GEnie email to send to the DGP and GDW people? I could theor-
etically do it, but it would involve downloads and uploads with a 300 baud
modem and transfer through a capture buffer of only 18K, which is a problem
for the bigger mailings. Wilson?
A lot of Traveller books moved through the auction. As a result of buying a
few things that I was missing as part of larger lots, I now have spare copies
of Double Adventures 1-3 and Gamelord's Desert Environment supplement. These
are basically 'free to a good home', so contact me by email if you have a
real _need_ for them. Didn't Metlay recommend DA3 for beginners?
Reprints: DGP plans to reprint the World Builders Handbook as soon as the
AI project has recouped enough money to pay for the print run, hopefully by
the end of the year at the latest. So those of you without a copy should be
patient.
Rob Dean