Please pass this on to Frank Chadwick:
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Dear Mr. Chadwick:
I agree wholeheartedly with GDW's refusal to rewrite history and
include stutterwarp as a previously existing technology; thanks
for giving the nod to us old fogies. I can also see why SW is a
tempting thing to have for combat purposes-- it'll simplify the
rules a lot and eliminate several types of weapons and screens
that are no longer useful. (I am an unrepentant delta-vee combat
fanatic, but hell, I can always play ALBEDO when I need a fix.)
The one thing I wish to caution you folx against is the artificial
limitation of stutterwarp to a particular type of craft or purpose.
If stutterwarp is demonstrably better than standard M-drives for
survivability, speed, and (in emergencies) travel to nearby systems
after a misjump dumps you two parsecs from the nearest star, any
starship owner with an IQ capable of allowing him to feed himself
is going to make the switch. The reasons behind keeping these people
from having such a device had better be damn plausible and damn
convincing. Allow me to suggest a few, in the light of the TNE milieu:
1. Sheer cost. Not everyone can afford a meson cannon on his ship;
the easiest and most practical way to limit the spread of SW drives
is to make them ridiculously expensive to build.
2. Drive size. If a SW plant masses 600 tons, you can bet no one is
going to retrofit it into a cargo vessel that still hopes to make a profit.
3. Late design date + collapse of interstellar communication. If
the SW drive was invented by someone in one part of the galaxy,
it would take years or decades for the secret to spread. There's
actually a good historical precedent for this, that would make the
whole introduction of the new technology very clean and exciting in
the new milieu, but I can't discuss it here because it involves data
from the recent GDW writers' conference that I can't disclose. I'd
appreciate it if you could contact me about including this in TNE....
There is also the question of whether you really want to risk the
potential confusion inherent in a dual space combat system. If SW
makes for a clean, easy to use system, why ask for trouble by tacking
on another, more complicated set of rules for delta-vee combat,
especially one that groups of novice players with their smaller ships
will be forced to use? Unless said delta-vee system were TRULY simple
and fun, you would be tacitly suggesting to groups of players that
they can only have fun if they're on a big warship. I'm not flat out
against the idea, I just urge caution and a great deal of playtesting
of any proposed dual setup.
Thanks.
- --
metlay | and she's a master of return hitting
atomic city | giving rhythm to her posts
| so you read her and think hey it sounds good
[email removed] | and wish her posts had a soundtrack too (f. ercolessi)
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Postscript to Wildstar:
I wasn't boggled at all. Your system makes sense, in a core area where
starship travel is unlikely to be disrupted in any major way. I still
can't see it being that effective in the Marches, or another frontier
area where schedules are so iffy....
Nice try, but it doesn't feel right to me.