Being in the main a collection of sundry assorted replies,
comments, missives, notes, bon mots, and cetera...
Liber Secundus:
Garbled Manta Stats: It would appear that the "Eat-The-First-
Few-Characters-In-Every-Line" gremlin has struck again. One more
time:
RCES "Manta" Fuel Skimmer
Rate: 400
Total Volume: 5600
Price (MCr): 119.57359
Configuration: Dome/Disc SL
Armor: 31
700 MW TL-12 Fusion PPlant, C-G TL-12 Hi-Eff, TL-12 Dynamic
Linked controls, TL-8+ Avionics, 3xTL-12 Model ST Computers,
60,000 Active EMS TL-12, 60,000 km TL-12 Passive EMS Processor,
60,000 km TL-12 Passive EMS Antenna (fixed), EMM Package,
300,000km Radio, 1,000 AU Maser Communicator, Basic Life Support,
Artifical Gravity/G Compensators, cargo hold (60 cubic meters,
usually converted into improvised living quarters for long
duration missions), small cargo hatch, Fuel Tank (cargo), Airlock
(4), Scoop.
600 thrust megawatts, 24.75 GHours.
Crew: 12 (8xEngineering, 1xElectronics, 1xManeuver,
1xMaintenance, 1xCommand).
Bridge Work stations: 3
Engineering Workstations: 8
Black Globes will be in FF&S
-------------------
[email removed]
> how does a character accquire level 0 skills, aside from the
default skills?... training? points?
> Not at all?
Technically speaking, not at all (training and points all give
minimum of 1 point, and only with skills you already have).
I think this comes under the heading of ref's common sense. In
my games, I'd give a character a skill zero if said character
succeeded one or more times at an unskilled task attempt (only 1
for an impossible success, never for any number of automatic
successes, etcetera).
------------------------
Jack Dietz,
[email removed], [email removed]
> Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow.
What a blast from the past! John M. Ford and I _founded_ EGBT.
For a while I was giving out EGBT pencils. I was going to get
some EGBT lollipops [fnord] made up but they turned out to be too
expensive in the small quantities I wanted.
------------------------------
Lee Eilers
---mas@vortex.lgs.lsu.edu
> the Finnish in WWII had a excellent 20mm Anti-Tank rifle,
> called the Lahti, I believe.... I'm not quite sure how
> they handled the recoil, or anything else about it,
> however.
Antitank rifles (ATRs) were common in the late 1930s and early
1940s. The British, Soviets, Germans, Japanese, Finns, and Swiss
all developed one (there are undoubtedly nations that I have
forgotten). All I know about the Lahti is what you have already
stated, but every photo I have seen shows ATRs being fired
from a prone position. Recoil on the 20mm Soluthurn (Swiss) ATR
is said to have been particularly punishing.
------------------------------
Mark F. Cook:
I really don't want to start a flame here, but I cannot let
this pass by without comment.
Let me see if I have this straight:
You think we (Dave Nilsen/me/GDW) ripped you off on the basis of
a couple of names and a similar function? Isn't this going off
rather half-cocked?
> I *am* however, curious to know where the idea for this Manta
>'fuel skimmer' design originated, since I designed almost
> *exactly* the same ship (with the same class name) for the
> TML PBEM over TWO YEARS AGO.
Unless you posted the designs publicly on the TML, no one at
GDW has ever seen them. We do not receive the PBEM campaign stuff
(Mike Metlay offered, but I declined...I had too much to read as
it was). I've had access to TML for about 18-24 months, so the
designs may have been posted before I started monitoring. In any
case, I don't remember anything of the sort.
What makes you say it is "almost *exactly* the same ship"? The
fact that it shares a name and skims fuel? Our Manta is a
detachable-fuel-tank-with-an-engine that flies ahead of its
mother ship, skims fuel, and returns to the mother ship. Does
yours do this? Our Manta design displaces 400 tons. What's the
tonnage of yours? Ours is 33 meters long with a dome/disc
configuration, has a crew of 12, no weaponry, and no fuel
refining facilities. What about yours? Is yours jump capable?
What kind of sensors does it have? Why was it named Manta
(because of its shape, or is MANTA an acronym for something)?
> I also find it convienently coincidental that the clipper it
> supports is named after *another* starship in the very
> same long-running (5 years), international Traveller PBEM
What is this other Aurora-class starship...how big is it, how many
crew, what does it do, etc.? I could claim, on the basis of equally
strong evidence (the name alone, with no notion of function, size,
or anything else) that you took your Aurora from the Tsarist
Russian naval vessel or one of the four WWII era vessels of the
same name). Aurora is not an uncommon name for ships.
The Aurora-class clippers are named such because one of
the names for the Reconstruction Coalition was the Dawn League,
and Aurora was the Greek goddess of the dawn.
> Where *exactly* did Dave (Nilsen, I assume) get these ideas?
The basic design of a modular ship occured to Frank about 1977
(to the best of my reccolection), but we never did anything with
it. The Clipper (aka Long Ship) has been around for about as long
as the notion of the Star Vikings. Dave came up with the idea of
the flying fuel tank. I would not be at all surprised to discover
that dozens of people have come up with similar notions.
The class of clippers was named Aurora about 1-1/2 to 2 years
ago, I believe. _I_ named the skimmer "Manta" in March or April
of this year, when I converted Dave's notes over to a BL design,
because the plans that had been drawn up by an outside artist
(who has never seen your PBEM material either) showed the ship
with a fanciful resemblance a manta ray (the only other options
were "Stingray" or "Fifty Mission Crush" neither of which trips
off the tongue like :Manta").
A drawing of our Clipper (side view), with the fuel skimmer
attached, appears in Brilliant Lances on page 44 of the Technical
Booklet, and a top view is shown on the counters for the game
(but you don't have BL, so that doesn't help much)..
> It looks to me as though someone took the original (PBEM)
> Manta gas mining ships and modified the designs to use
> the new TNE ship design rules.
I think you are jumping to an unwarranted conclusion here.
------------------------------
Glenn E. Myers
> I had the impression that grav actually imparted some maneuver capability.
The short answer is that it used to but it doesn't anymore,
something else needs to furnish thrust. In unscientific terms, C-
G negates the weight, but provides no motive power (unlike the MT
thruster plates).
------------------------------
Andy Lilly
> Would anyone be interested in the novel which I am currently completing?
Perhaps. Email me a land adress and we'll get back to you.
>If anyone has any advice on how I can become rich selling the
> rights to this book, I'd be interested to hear from them.
Sadly, few people ever get rich from a single book.
------------------------------
Paul Murphy
[email removed]
Email me your snail mail address, and I'll send you a catalog
and ordering information.
------------------------------
J Roberson
> Back to the Aslan thread brifely. . .did anyone metion that
> the name of the Christ-figure Lion in "Lion Witch & Wardrobe"
> was named Aslan?
Marc told me once that the inspiration for the name Aslan came partly
from the lion/Christ-substitute in C. S. Lewis' Narnia novels, and
partly from the Turkish word for "lion" which he said was "arslan."
Vargr, BTW is, I think, "wolf" in some Slavic language (Russian?).
Bye for Now...
Loren Wiseman
for GDW, Inc.