VDES,NE,GEN: Armor, Editing & Coyns

In response to Tuesday's batch of messages:

 "Les Howie"  [email removed] says:

 >This is a good analysis.  To tell you the truth, I like the feel of being
 >able to armour my dreadnaughts in proper Fisher fashion.

 I'm afraid I don't get the Fisher reference.

 ...
 >Thats fine.  If there is no magic "torpedo" for frying big ships, torpedo
 >boats do not serve a lot of purpose.

 But your own paragraph on tactics indicates part of their role:
Overloading point-defenses and scrubbing surface features.  The standard
missile in TNE is capable of a lot of mayhem, and will scrub surface
bits off of _any_ ship.  The more ships (of any size) you've got firing
these things at the enemy, the less capable the enemy will be to
respond.
 The levels of armor described in Steven M Bonneville's
([email removed]) post almost, BUT NOT QUITE, return
us to the days of MT, when anything without a meson gun was harmless
above a certain level.  In TNE, with all of a ship's surface features,
it is quite possible to get a mission kill without penetrating the
armor.  Nothing is completely invulnerable.


 In the "Death Star" post, Les provides the following numbers:

 >Lets assume that we can design the weapon with an ROF of 100.
 >
 >This gives us a discharge energy of 2.26e24 Mj.  Working at
 >TL 14 and selecting a tunnel length of 250 m (to give a short
 >range of 10 hexes, the other calculations fall out:
 >
 >3a Effective Tunnel Length 300m
 >3b Tunnel Volume           5.62e24 m^3
 >3c Cross Sectional Area    2.25e22 (a diameter of 8e7 km !!)
 ...

 Even the Ringworld Meteor Defense System is only twice this diameter,
and that's only if you consider the Ringworld itself as the barrel...


 [email removed] (David Johnson) then asks, in response
to my request for editing:

 >>   All I ask is that the participants start editing in a more
 >> ruthless fashion
 >
 >How am I doing?  :-)

 Much better.  Thank you.  (-:


 Finally, Hans Rancke ([email removed]) asks at great length about
Droyne Coyns:

 >Now, going down the list here are the symbols I came up with for each coyn:
 >
 >Void	    Nothing engraved. A blank disc.
 >Soil	    A massive cliff.
 >Air	    A white cloud (ie. the outline of a cloud).
 >Gas	    A black cloud (ie. a filled-in outline of a cloud).
 >Water	    A foam-flecked wave.
 >Fire	    A flame.
 >
 >(Except for the Void and the Fire I'm pretty dissatisfied with these, but
 >they are the best I can come up with. Any suggestions?)

 Perhaps an irregular dirt clod or a symbolic plant growing from the
ground for Soil.  The few Coyn faces we've seen suggest an extremely
symbolic style, IMHO.  The more this can be followed, the more mystified
your players will be.

 >Beast	    A ferocious six-limbed carnivore in mid-jump[6].

 Or perhaps just a paw-print.  Save the ferocious carnivore for the
most dangerous (in your opinion) of the major races that replaced
the animals.

 >Achievement  A brimful cup.
 >Defeat       An empty, tipped-over cup.

 Or a mountain pinnacle with a tiny figure, and a chasm into which a
figure is falling.  The various ways of showing these two are boggling.

 >The Hissayt, Emissyob, Ayvaylk, Bestoy, Nebbay, and Hayyarm are various
 >six-limbed herbivores and omnivores once important to Droyne hunters. I
 >had descriptions of them all worked out, but those notes seems to have
 >dissappeared.

 Since the major races eventually replaced these, they may also represent
specific forms of danger, or specific concerns that the Droyne must
watch for.  Grandfather replaced the original Coyns with new ones that
had different pictures but meant much the same things.  Perhaps the
Droyne once had to worry about the overbearing habits of a particular
omnivore.  This animal had a ever-expanding territorial sense, and was
forever competing with others of its kind to expand that individual
territory.  The Coyn depicting this beast was replaced by the Humaniti
Coyn (or perhaps the Aslan Coyn) as Grandfather's warning.
 Looked at in this way, the Major Race Coyns might also represent
personalities: the Militant (K'Kree), the Meddler (Hivers), the
Curious (Humaniti), the Random (Vargr), and the Migrator (Aslan).
These may still have been represented by animals from Eskayloyt who
embodied these (or other) personality arch-types.


James Kundert [email removed]
              [email removed]

There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was much faster, much faster than Light.
She departed one day in a relative way,
And returned on the previous Night.
   --Albert & the Heart of Gold