various

A few things, firstly on TNE (and I'll try to make this brief):

I've been wondering what is going to happen to the lesser rules supplements
which found their way into the aggregated rules for Megatraveller. For
example .... Animal Encounters? Are GDW likely to provide Animal Encounters
a la Traveller/Megatraveller, which are complex and buggy, but in
combination with a judiciously written computer program can provide
a degree of "biodiversity" (ie lotsa animals). Or will it be like 2300AD
which seems slightly more realistic, but doesn't provide the referee with a
zooful of creatures? Or will these rules be there at all?

Also, it looks increasingly like the character generation rules, which many
people consider the one of the best things about the Traveller system (or at
least I do), will be replaced by the somewhat inferior one present in the
other GDW games. Question: does this include the horrible (again, my
opinion, maybe someone likes it) system for assigning motivation using
playing cards?

Now I don't own T2000, nor do I intend to ... I infer from skimming the T2000
stuff in Challenge that the character generation system is broadly similar
to 2300AD. Comparing 2300AD with Traveller, I generate a considerably less
complex NPC and then graft on as motivation out of nowhere, which generally
leaves him/her a lovesick psychotic, or a power mad hedonist, or ...

Way back in the early White Dwarf days, when Games Workshop licensed and
supported Traveller in the UK, there was an article on NPC generation,
which suggested a secondary character profile, 6 categories including
loyalty, ambition, etc. (can't remember them, I'll find it and post more
detail if there is interest). This produces a far better and more elegant
way of managing NPC interaction, especially in combination with the modern
task systems .. want to bribe an official? His/her loyalty rating is used
as a defensive mod on the task. It's also useful when one comes to generating
aliens - you can add default mods to their initial throw for the secondary
profile, and thereby ease the introduction of alien NPCs.

Otherwise, will there be a pack of playing cards in the TNE box?

Hmm... maybe not as brief as I'd have liked. Couple of other points:

Wildstar's starport generator: in pre TNE days, and especially during Hard
Times, location within the Imperium (or indeed outside) would also be a
factor, how about plus mods for the Vilani main, Core sector, Massilia, etc?
Also, I would suggest taking out the "referee assigned" prosperity factor
and having it generated randomly at intervals, possibly on a subsector wide
basis, to simulate the effect of an economic cycle ("really this is a high
traffic world but the local economy is in a downturn").

Scott (so you're the Perot voter): re your cockpit guide. I think (for
humaniti at least) that manual control systems are more likely to change
with tech level than with locale, given that this should be the greatest
determinant of the level of automation. I would expect at the higher tech
levels that the control systems are more to do with telling the computers
what to do and how to do it, rather than with doing the task oneself. This
is of course up to the point where the transponders form their own union.

Cheers
Mark