100 diameters and other odds 'n' ends...

George Herbert:

>>Yes, I read the article.  Fascinating.  But wrong.  100-diameters from
>>Sol is only 139,190,000Km.  Which is closer to the sun than Earth is.
>So all you'd really need is a lab about 1,300,000Km from Earth.

>Actually, no, the asteroid belt is the likely cantidate for that.
>The 1.3 million km. excludes both the Moon and the terrestrial Lagrange
>points.  Any Mars bases we make are within _it's_ 100 diameter limit.
>The only place likely in the solar system clear of major 100 diameter
>zones is the asteroid belt.  We aren't likely to build permanent bases
>anywhere else.  There's nothing out in random deep space to make
>putting bases there likely 8-)

George, I didn't say that we would build a base there.  I said we
COULD.  Going out to the asteroids is all very nice, but it is also all
very UNNECESSARY in order to develop jump.  Especially since we would
get a good look at the oddities of flat space during those eight month
voyages to Mars in Hohmann transfer orbits.  And almost that entire orbit
is outside the 100-diameter limit of everything (except possibly the
Galaxy as a whole).


Wildstar:

<starport/traffic generator>

I liked your generator.  I didn't agree with the modifier for worlds
within J-1 of wherever, since I disagree with the notion of J-1 traffic
being significant (how many one-cycle steam engines are still in use in
the US Merchant Fleet?  They're a 150 year old idea, and J-1 is ten
thousand years old.  And was superseded much more than 3500 years ago.)

However, this is a minor quibble.  A slightly (only slightly) more
serious quibble is the extra information you are adding into the
standard hex display - those hexes are crowded enough as it is.  They
really don't need anything else stuffed in there.  The extra information
either needs to be relegated to the world listings, or a different way
of listing the information needs to be developed, so that required
information is not buried under a cloud of teensy little
base/starport/GG/whatever symbols in each hex....

---Steve