Steve Higginbotham:
>Oh, yeah!
>I forgot to comment on the conclusion someone drew that the fusion driv
>probably be used as weapons (like a plasma gun, only bigger). My first cut
>shows a Free Trader having a drive with an energy output of about 30KT/SEC.
>This is hardly a trivial matter. ANd really renders everyone's objections to
>PCs with nukes pretty trivial. After all, the 500T of TNT equivalent in a
>det-laser is pretty trivial next to the 30,000T of TNT equivalent of even a
>small, wimpy drive. Per second. Call it 3MT of damage to wherever it took
>off from. Like the TED's palace. Or pretty much anywhere else that offended
>you.
>
>So stop wasting time babbling about TRIVIA like those det-laser missiles. If
>you really want to disarm your PCs, start by preventing them from getting
>their hands on a ship of any kind....
>
>Think about it....
I've thunk. An it seems to me that what we really need is a couple of
carefully tailored science-fictiony gimmicks to make things work out
properly. I'm thinking about force fields and similar not-very-scientific
whatnots. Item: I don't want just any starship owner to be able to torch
planets at will, yet we have these super blowtorches. Answer: Planetary
force screens. Item: I don't want ship combat to be simply a missile
counter-measure, counter-counter-measure oneupmanship, but with nuclear
missiles being capable of vapourising any concievable metal what can we
do? How about force screens that deflect 99% (or 99.9 or whatever is
needed) of even a contact explosion? Make the generators really expensive
and we solve the problem of making warships much more expensive than
merchant ships too.
Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
[email removed]
- ------------
"A subsector official pompously states that the
subsector armed forces have four Kinunir class
ships in service, each with enough troop strength
to put down any military operations that threathen
the peace of the Imperium."
---Adventure 1, The Kinunir