Comments on system changes

Before I start this let me say that I am prejudiced towards the
Twilight 2000 system since I am the Eternal Soldier (Twilight 2000 system)
newsletter editor.  However the Twilight system is one of the best systems
I've seen.  I understand your fears about another system change, but the
system works.  The problems with editing and typos that caused such
problems with MT have been worked by the workshop and the recent products
have been at a much more acceptable level of error.  Personally I was
disappointed that 2300 and MegaTraveller weren't more Twilight like to
start with.  At any rate the decision to change to this system has been
made and we will have to live with it, however as has been pointed out
there are tremendous holes in Twilight which will need to be filled for
Traveller (i.e. space flight, trading, vehicle design...).  People should
make clear in letters to Loren what they like/dislike about the
MegaTraveller/Old Traveller systems since we can assume some hybred of
these will be used for the new system.
As for the Computer Virus associated with Star Viking, I have talked to
Frank and it will not be a computer virus as we currently think of the the
term.  (Although I will confess that that was his first thought).  Rather
it will be a program that takes advantage of a rather universal current
architecture flaw and attacks computers in such a way that main processor
replacement is required.  There is an assumption that computer production
is controlled by other computers which are vulnerable to attack.  I also
felt it was important that the failure be masked initially as a straight
production problem/flaw to allow the virus to spread.  It is the
combination of massive loss of main processors along with production
shutdown caused by the loss of main processors (I love catch-22s) that
causes the long night.  Note that since the person initiating the virus is
the Emperor it could be dispersed by him from several key manufacturing
facilities as part of a technological innovation given free to
manufactures or at least something along those lines.

There have been several discussions of miniatures for Star Viking.  Our
current 25mm playtests have virtually all used Hasbro's G.I.Vehicles with
some minor modifications to crew compartments (most on sale for $3.00 or
so).  These work because most of the smaller vehicles are compact anyway.
My companies APCs started out as a one man tank with rockets at the back.
They took about ten minutes to fix up each (cut off the rockets and plate
over the crew compartment the result was virtually a Hammers Slammers
Combat car).  There were also a number of the larger Megaforce vehicles
with the most notable small stuff removed.  The big problems with 25s was
how much could fit on the table and look good.  Since Frank was simulating
several battle on a table at once the 25s were awful crowed.  For the
1/285th scale stuff I suspect that mostly Megaforce will again be used
(since it is about the right scale).   The bad part about these is that
they are die cast and not that easily worked with.
 					Non Cuniculus Est,
					    Tom Harris