Regarding Star Viking and the NewCoke Traveller:
A virus would be a really silly way to cause the widespread collapse
of computing throughout the empire, on a par with the infamous Space
Opera novel that used giant switchboards with 4-armed aliens to handle
fleet communications.
But how about instead having the breakthrough to AI made, and then the
AI's decide humans are a threat and in the resulting man vs. machine
struggle all computers get a really bad reputation, not unlike Dune's
excuse for the lack of computers in a high-tech setting. Not having
computers also makes it much harder to keep an interstellar bureacracy
running smoothly, so things will fall apart into more manageable pieces.
It also probably signals the death-knell for the huge navies, a desireable
thing in my opinion.
And lastly, if computers are banned under penalty of death then smuggling
them becomes ever so much more profitable!
- --
Carl Rigney
"Fantasy games tend to ignore physics and such, since it hardly ever
applies to PCs anyway." --Trip