As I get the mail in bundles, and as the current bundle (vol. 44, issue 7)
had several things I felt like answering, I've decided to answer them all
in one message and save postal costs.
> Archive-Message-Number: 4593
> From: [email removed] (Andrew Fong)
>
> Essentially, with Traveller we assume there haven't been any evolutionary
> changes in humans. Given current genetic engineering developments, would
> there be human variants in the Traveller universe ?
Evolution by genetic engineering: probably possible. Whether it would be
desirable to create some form of super-race, and what the rest of humanity
would do to it, is another question. See oblique references in Star Trek II
(Eugenics Wars), some of Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's work (Saurian
supermen), and what everyone thought of the Aryan master race.
Evolution by natural means: I don't think this would happen, especially in
the time scale involved here. Doesn't evolution tend to take rather a long
time, more than just a couple of thousand years, in advanced life forms?
Besides, natural selection is being overridden by society's tendency to care
for its weaker members - there is no natural selection, for example, to help
humans evolve into a species which does not get AIDS.
> From: [email removed] (Joe Block)
> Subject: Weather Prediction
>
> Having just experienced Hurricane Andrew, I was wondering if anyone had come
> up with rules for weather prediction. Also, how would one determine damage
> to grounded ships if a big storm hit while they were dirtside?
I'd be inclined to say that storms of that magnitude are acts of GM, and as
such don't need rules. If you want a storm that cripples the PC's ship,
just have one. You can, of course, have a world on which such storms are
common, and let the weather expert PC figure out how such a world can
exist while the social science PC can tell everyone why anyone settled on
it in the first place.
> From: [email removed]
> Subject: Mobile Planetary Defences: Meson Subs
>
> On the topic of deep meson sites:
>
> Check out the vehicle archives. In there somewhere is the Herbert Dean
> class Meson Submarine. Essentually, a sub with a spinal meson gun.
And if you build something similar with its own internal power plant and
manoeuvre drives, you get the same capability plus the ability to act as
an SDB, mainly because what you have is an SDB.
> She sits on the bottom connected to a geothermal power station. There
> were supposed to be lots of these stations available, and the subs
> maneuvered from station to station changing their position rather like
> the old idea of having the MX missile on railway cars.
An SDB could switch off its drives and do the same thing.
> The geothermal plant will leak no neutrinos for the attackers to find.
> And her operational depth is below 1 kilometer, out of range of
> densiometers, and even if somebody brings a TL 16 densiometer to bear
> on you with a penetration depth of 10 km, the sub is the same overall
> density as the water it displaces, and in addition, is sitting on the
> bottom. VERY hard to find.
So the attacking ships go underwater as well and play "Hunt for Red
October".
As a matter of interest, could one of the physics experts tell us how big
a geothermal plant would have to be in order to provide enough power to
drive a meson gun?
- --
"Keyboard? How quaint!" - M. Scott
Adrian Hurt | JANET: [email removed]
UUCP: ..!uknet!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian | ARPA: [email removed]