More Planetary Defences

	Going by my previous example, the price of a installation for a
deep meson weapon probably approaches that of the weapon itself.
	Given that assumption, it's likely that putting in a lot of mid-sized
(bay) meson sites is a great advantage to the defence...
	IF they have secure and reliable communications.

	Think on this one, a bit... rather than a 'national guard', give
everyone on the planet a combo pack of the following:
	Laser Rangefinder/direction finder (PRIS Binocs do fine)
	Inertial Locator
	x range masercom (determined by other constraints)

	How is this useful?  Well... Mr. Ikaron is sitting on the porch of his
farmhouse when a company of TL14 Zhodani grav tanks flies overhead.  Mr. Ikaron
has the standard Imperial reaction to psionics, and goes into the house to
check out the news reports and get his 'Designator'.  When he hears static on
the radio AND his cable holovid, he knows something is up.
	Walking outside, he points the masercom at a nearby hill he's been told
has a relay station on it.  Initializing his setup, he then points the
Designator at the nearest tank and pushes the designate button.
	Within about a hundredth of a second, the 3-d position and speed of
the tank has been transmitted out to the relay site, and in another hundredth
of a second reaches the local deep defense coordination center.  It takes
another hundredth of a second for the computer to process the information,
give it a relatively high priority (being an opportunity target, with no
defences, it a pretty good target).  Less than five-hundredths of a second
after Mr. Ikaron pushed the button, one of 100 hundred-ton sized deep meson
sites has been pre-empted from assault-transport bashing and retargeted
for the time being on a tank.  It takes all of about a tenth of a second to
retarget and fire.
	Less than a fifth of a second after the button was pushed, the Zho
tank commander sees the 'laser designation' warning light flash on his control
panel, but before he has time to react his tank explodes, only about 10 meters
from the center of a 50 meter radius meson detonation.  There has been no time
to dodge, not even enough time to slew a point-defence weapon to bear on Mr.
Ikarion, who survives.  Scratch nearly 15 megacredits of tank.

	And the best part is that that collection of equipment needs not cost
more than about Cr 15,000 .  At TL 15, with standard defense budgets, it
wouldn't take that long to have one in every house...

	Traveller large-scale warfare is simply horrifying.  There are soooo
many ways to kill something...

- - -george william herbert
[email removed]