Re: Starports

> Also what about the construction of a station in the middel of an empty
> sector to provide a refueling point for long distances.  If many systems
> are at a Jump-4 distance such a station placed halfway would allow Jump-
> 2 ships to make the journey.  The station would need to be regularly
> supply by tanker ships and their fuel prices would be greatly inflated.
>

This exemplifies one of Traveller's basic assumptions: that an interstellar
society would only be interested in the worlds oribiting stars and not in
the space that lies between them.  I think it indicates how a choice of
notation (the hex based star maps) can affect the development of a design.
By having a world-based generation system rather than a star based
generation system the designer of Traveller made a blunder of cosmic
proportions (pun intended).  In the SF genre this was a common assumption
as well (up until the late 1960s).  It was believed that all colonisation
would be of worlds not of space itself.  O'Neill's work on orbital colonies
led to a new viewpoint.  An interstellar civilisation might actually prefer
to live in space stations rather than on the surface of a world.  For a
start, there's a lot more energy (in the form of solar radiation) available
to it.  And many industrial processes would benefit from zero-g conditions.
Plus, there's plenty of room to expand.

Of course, one of the reasons for prefering space colony life (the cost
of transporting people and goods out of a gravity well) disappears when
you have cheap anti-grav.  But even so, you'd expect a lot more space-based
colonies than Traveller depicts.

Not that this is a problem for the New Era:  the Virus got them.


Jeff Zeitlin comments:
>   When your empire gets too large to allow for this, you need a
>   simple, clear, automatic method of replacement.  Thus,
>   inheritance.  Thus, monarchy.
>

The people of the Regency might not be too keen on this.  After all, look
what happened the last time someone had to decide who got to inherit the
Throne.  Perhaps voting is the easier option after all.  It may be slow,
but what the hell are you in a hurry for?  With a large Empire the
ability of the central government to make decisions that actually matter
(rather than just rubber stamping those made by government agencies) is
extremely limited.  What did Strephon actually do as Emperor?  Until
the Rebellion he hardly figured at all in the lives of most citizens of
the Imperium.  He was just a figurehead, a symbol.  The day to day
running of the Imperium (and any large government) is in the hands of
its' civil servants.  And no-one elects them.  Nor do they inherit their
positions (although there's some doubt about that).

The discussion about the legitimacy of the Regent's claim to the throne
is beginning to resemble Imperial Law 101.  Putting on my Machiavellian
hat, I'd propose that all this stuff about legitimacy doesn't matter one
whit if you've got the power to enforce your will on the population.
Legitimacy is just sugar to make the pill go down a bit easier.  As an
example, the legitimacy of the Third Imperium to call itself the Third
Imperium has always struck me as a brilliant piece of manipulation on
the part of Cleon Zhunastu.  His claim that the Sylean Federation was
somehow the heir to the Second (and by implication First) Imperium
just because one of the last claimants to the Throne happened to live
on Sylea a thousand years ago is like Balastroni in Italy today claiming
to be the Roman Emperor and the legitimate ruler of all of Rome's former
territory in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.  He can claim all
he likes, but that doesn't mean that anyone will bow down before him.
Calling the Third Imperium the Third Imperium was simply an attempt to
convince the rest of the interstellar population emerging from the Long
Night that the Sylean Federation somehow had a right to rule them.
Undoubtedly this claim would have been meaningless except for Sylea's
economic and military strength (in other word's the rest of the
interstellar community didn't have much option).

Another example: the Right of Succession by Assassination seems to me to
have been invented by the Imperial Moot as an expedient measure when
faced with a powerful pretender to the Throne who they couldn't stop.
If some bozo turned up at the Capital with a huge fleet
of warships, killed the Emperor and then declared himself/herself the
new Emperor what was the Moot going to do?  Yup, legitimate the new
Emperor by declaring a "Right of Succession by Assassination" clause in
Imperial Law.  This was a convenient way for the members of the Moot
to avoid being killed themselves.

Quite why Norris has continued to call himself Regent for the 70 years
following the events of Arrival Vengeance I don't understand.  Is he
waiting for a legitimate heir to appear?  From where, exactly?  Since
the AV crew met the real Strephon and Norris believed him to be the
real Strephon and the real Strephon bequeathed the Throne to Norris
(for what it was worth, Strephon may have been ruler on paper but
by that point he certainly wasn't ruler in fact) then Norris (on paper)
is the Emperor and so is whovever he decides to pass the title on to.
Whether anyone else outside the Regency will accept this is moot.  But
then, they didn't accept it at the time of the Rebellion (hence the
Rebellion).  Personally, I think that all this debate about legitimacy
is a waste of time and bandwidth:  we're rehashing  a problem that couldn't
be resolved 70 years ago.  I don't think that it can be solved now either.


Ray Pullar