Greetings all,
A few odds and ends I've been chewing on.
Did you all get to see Patriot Games? Good flick, not as good as the book,
but it was pretty good. It did give me an idea for Traveller. There is
one scene in there where they are watching an assault on a desert base at
night using overhead orbital surveillance cameras.
The images they get are almost good enough to identify individuals. It
seems to me that if the troops involved carried Identification Friend or
Foe Transponders (as we assume is carried in combat armor and battle dress)
You could easily target individuals on the surface of a planet from orbit.
The images were THAT clear. I'm not even sure you'd need transponders.
You could see what they were wearing, and if the uniforms of the troops
were sufficiently different, it would be child's play.
"Yes sir! We've got the Zhodani General targeted!"
The old line in the 60's was "We can read the numbers off the liscense
plates with the spy satillites." Well, we know that isn't true, but
given a passive array that we say has 'Interstellar' range, I can see
there being a LOT better resolution than what we have today.
That means that just about every ship that carries a laser would be
absolutely DEADLY to ANYONE on the ground. You wanna assassinate Lucan?
Just go into orbit around Capital and wait till he steps outside!
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Another odd point:
The maximum listed speed for a man wearing a grav belt is 300km/hr.
Why? Drag? Skydivers travel MUCH faster than that.
Case: I forget when it was done, but sometime back in the 50's-60's they
were experimenting with high altitude ejection. I remember hearing a guy
talk about setting the world record for the highest parachute jump on some
documentary or other. He said that on the way down he actually went
supersonic. When he got into the thicker atmosphere, he slowed way, way
down before he pulled the chute.
Now there is an unstreamlined object (If I ever heard of one)
travelling supersonic and it was accelerating at 1G.
YEEE HAAA! What-a-ride!
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Andrew Bond asked about the Imp. Encyclopedia.
The designs in there are a mess and are full of typos errors and all
sorts of things. The 10 ton fighter there is clearly impossible.
You mentioned similar errors in the vehicle archives? OUR vehicle
archives? Not in MY designs! Where! Where! I may make the occasional
typoxsh#4, but I don't think *I'm* guilty of common sense mistakes like
the ones in the Imp Encyclopedia.
As for where those weird anti-matter pods come from? Who knows?
Who cares? The design system was very well thought out past TL 15.
TL 16 is pushing it and 17 is right out. Plus with the corrections
made to the fission plants, they are more economical cost and fuel
space wise than the listed antimatter stuff.
Scott 2G Kellogg