Re: Fusiondrive Control Incorporated

Bertil:
>   Yikes! Force fields as a 'every ships item' in Traveller. Somehow that
> idea does not excite me.

OK. I don't insist on force fields. If you can make the game universe work
with more realistic means then that's splendid. Everything else being
equal I'll take realism over wierd science every day. But that's a big if:
everything else being equal. I'll take fun gaming over realism every day.
If a realistic economic system makes piracy totally uneconomic then bugger
realism. If a realistic starship propulsion system makes private fusion
blowtorches as common as trucks then stuff realism. If a realistic weapon
system is all-offense/no defense (or vice versa) then boo to realism.

>>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.
>
>  I think "BAD IDEA to run the fusion drive in an atmopshere and BAD IDEA
>to run it within a km or three from a solid object" takes care of this.

How bad an idea would you say that driving a truck full of explosives into
a fortress wall is? Yet fanatics have been known to do just that.

>  Possible holes: Vacuum worlds, 'Suicide ships', and the rockets in
>missiles:
>
>  Hole one does IMHO not need to be plugged. It has been noted in several
>canonic sources that they *are* intensely vulnerable, so this won't change
>anything.
>
>  Hole two is made a little smaller by that ships are expensive, even more
>in TNE and the trouble in arranging a remote control or whatnot,

I thought that TNE rules was to be applicable to any Traveller period. That
ships are going to be few and far between for a few decades after 1200 is no
use in the general way. I personally hope to justify privately owned ships
in Aoreriyya by 1210.

>and the
>remainder of it does not need to be plugged, since you can (probably) get
>the same effects by blowing the powerplant.

That just means that power plants needs a fix too.

>  Hole three is plugged with doubletalk (but not as bad doubletalk as
>cheap, common and generally magic 'force fields':).

If force fields exist at all I see no reason why cheap, common force fields
is any worse doubletalk than expensive, rare ones. As for the magic part:
sure they're magic, but are they any more magic than jump drives, psionics,
and contragravity?

>  The enthusiasm over the missiles may have given the wrong impression but
>at medium ranges, against any vessel with a energy weapon, the missiles are
>IMHO balanced wrgt the other starship weapons: This is mostly because you
>can shoot them down *at any point of their journey*, and this translates
>to several times during a 'typical missile journey'.

Slice it any way you like, unless you can come up with a cheap, common, and
effective way to protect communities from a nuclear missile then cheap,
common nuclear missiles are BAD, BAD, BAD in a gaming sense. Since (as far
as I know) nuclear missiles _would_ (realistically) be cheap and common in
a high-tech environment I think some protection is in order. And note that
I advocated that such force fields should be expensive: To be found in
cities and on warships, but not in towns and on merchant ships.


      Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
     [email removed]
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