Been lurking a while, time to throwm my bit into the ring...
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[]Date: Wed, 20 May 92 02:26:26 -0700
[]From: R. Dired [email removed]
[]Subject: (4168) Hmmm....
[]
[]On the same topic, one thing that always bothered me was that population was
[]random, no matter how bad the conditions on the planet. 99 billion on a
[]size A with atmosphere F is kind of hard to believe (much less that many on
[]size 1, no water, no air)! Why not have modifiers to the population roll based
[]on the other rolls? Say, something like this:
--- Chart deleted ---
I would also suggest some sort of population/area vs. tech limit. We have
5+ billion on "one earth area" at TL8 and we are starting to hit the edge
of the envelope...I don't think it would be possible to sustain that many
people with victorian era (TL4.5) technology, much less with TL1 (possible
due to the +1 mod for pop 9). I think we'd be lucky to stuff 5 million cavemen
on earth at TL0. I am re-starting a Trav campaign, and as such have written
an "update" program that I can plug in a spinward marches UPP and have it spit
out my persoanl alterations.
[]Also, TL 9-B should reduce the effects of tainted atmosphere to tolerable
[](say, carginogenic, or perhaps a simple lung-wash is needed every month),
[]C-D should make it nothing but a faint odor, and E+ should eliminate tainting
[]altogether. Remove the requirement for atmospheric type (make it 0-9) for
[]industrial worlds.
But the tainting should still reduce the population a tad...
[]Anyone want to reinterpret the TLs to make it more sane? I don't mean changing
[]any number, but making Earth 1992, say, 4, and making higher numbers just
[]more specific high-technology. Ship design is going to be re-done anyway,
[]and all the high-tech weapons are silly to begin with.
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Scott "2G" Kellogg sez...
[]}maximum armour value at TL15 is 115 (maybe), which translates to about
[]}224 meters of hard steel. Sure it's using bonded superdense, and is
[]}thinner - (from Striker) it's actually only 16 meters thick. A
[]}hundred ton ship would have 100,000+ tons of armour, which SHOULD have
[]}a volume of 6690 Kl, or 495 displacement tons. Pretty amazing stuff,
[]}eh?
[]
[]Yeah... I'm not sure what to use really. It seems to me that you should
[]be able to just slap thicker armor on there if the design will still float.
[]I dunno what to say. Max armor *I* know of at TL 6 was around 18 inches of
[]steel in the torpedo belts of battleships. I think that qualifies as
[]armor 46 (?) Not Armor=70!
This is probably the big bugaboo about armor maximums -- limit the thickness,
not the rating.
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Date: Thu, 21 May 92 10:24 EDT
From: [email removed]
Subject: (4186) Re: Fuel and Armor
[]Here's a question for you...If you carry your fuel as ammonia, what do you do
[]with the nitrogen after processing? Vent it to space? Store it for those
[]times when you use wilderness refuelling and recombine it with the H2 so you
[]can store it as ammonia again?
[]
[]If you vent it, would it be possible to detect a ship by the cloud of nitrogen
[]it leaves behind it? Or would it be a trail of N? Would it leave enough N
[]to detect, perhaps by the wavelengths of light it absorbs from the local sun?
[]How much N would be contained in a tankful of ammonia?
Vent it as reaction mass...
-- Burton Choinski
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[] / \ Postscript or BIOS, Burton Choinski, QA Engineer []
[] (( )) we'll spark new life [email removed] []
[] ( \ / ) into your system and []
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[] )^( Phoenix Technologies, Ltd. Cambridge, MA. []
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