Re: Chadwick and stutterwarp

Steve Higginbotham [email removed] makes many excellent
points, ending in

> most important, the first world to develop this will conquer EVERYONE
> ELSE VERY QUICKLY!  So your New Era will be a New Empire about five
> years after stutterwarp is discovered.  Unless you stretch plausibility
> well past the breaking point by specifying that every spacefaring world
> discovers it independently within the period of a few weeks.

But just imagine the excitement of those 5 years as all the other powers
desparately attempt to steal the Secret of Stutterwarp before they're
overrun!

Then all the obsolete jumpdrive warships can be decommissioned to serve
as slow freighters and sold for scrap; the PCs can get their hands on one
without mortgaging their grandchildren; pirates can rip off a few
warps and beat the military expansion out to the slow zones where they
can prey at will on the slowboat navies, until the New Empire catches
up to them.

Note that if you have a Stutterwarp the 100-diameter limit is
meaningless for piracy.  You don't just appear there, you 'warp in,
right?  I don't know if course-matching under stutterwarp is plausible,
I suspect the proper way to do piracy is to have a few guys on the
merchant to take control or disable the 'warp well outside the system,
then offload the best cargo to your pirate ship.  By the time the Navy
answers the speed-of-light distress call, you're long gone.

Besides until things settle down, Stutterwarp Naval ships will have much
more important things to do than anti-pirate patrols.  Once the New
Empire is firmly in place, THEN piracy will be risky, but at that point
you can always release a computer virus or something. :-)

Besides, how many Traveller games last longer than 5 years gametime anyway?
(Except for Metlay's, of course.)

- --
Carl Rigney
[email removed]

"Engine room reporting. We seem to, er, have a problem." -- Metlay