More TNE:
I note with some pleasure that gas giant refueling is now
effectively dead.
A free trader requires 280 Kl of fuel to jump. 280 Kl gives it 11
G-hours. So, gas giant refueling, if done under the TNE rules, would
only be profitable if the transit from the GG to the main world could be
done with less than 11 G-hours.
Well, it can. If you use 9G-hours (which will save you all of 350
credits when it comes time to refill the tanks, then the trip from
Jupiter to Terra will take only 56 days to complete. So in exchange for
56 days of yor time, you save 350 credits.
Hopefully, noone in TNE will be stupid enough to consider this a
wonderful way to save money, and gas giant refueling will become a
rather quaint bit of gaming history.
I also note that, in a fight between two unarmoured men, you are
better off using your bare hands (assuming the requisiste skill) than
you are using a sword. This, unfortunately, has always been one of the
hallmarks of the T2K2 system from which TNE was derived. I had hoped
that it was lost in one of the many revisions the system has gone
through, but it was not to be.
One moderately serious technical error though: under these rules,
there are different government ratings in the wilds and the safes. So a
government rating of "7" means one thing on THIS side of the line, and
another thing on the other side of the line. This was NOT a bright
move. Instead, you should have extended the rating scales like was
originally done for the various alien government types...
And turret size has gone up! This was my original solution to the
lack of trade-offs in ship design in Classic Traveller. And after only
twelve years or so, GDW has finally done it. Congratulations, guys...
---Steve Higginbotham