And, of course, the other side of this is that everyone in the universe will know about all the threats from standard technology, as their cultures have been living with it for thousands of years. What countermeasures (technical and tactical) have evolved over that period?

Just for example, a run-up to a significant fraction of c is going to take much more than a week. So if you dot the Oort cloud with sensors looking for suspicious objects accelerating into the inner system, and give each that's more than a light-week out a jump-capable message torpedo, you can get word to the main world within a week, and a week later have a fleet arrive via in-system jump at a position where they can intercept the intruder at its predicted position two weeks after detection, and destroy it before it's within 50 AU of its target. Heck, jump a few 12G missiles with good homing systems out there, that will do the job just fine.

Obviously, that takes a lot of money and hardware. But the Imperium and its worlds have a lot of money, hardware, and time. Don't you think there's a defense shell like this around the major hi-population worlds?

On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 8:59 PM, Kurt Feltenberger <kurt@thepaw.org> wrote:
On 7/24/2015 11:42 PM, Christopher Hilton wrote:
I don't disagree, I do the same thing. I'm assuming that this thread is about some peoples need to neuter the tech in Traveller so the players can't do something really anti-social like run a Type S to 0.2c and then smack it into a world, or, to steal from Niven, start a fusion drive a tens of meters over an some sophant's inhabited home and hover for a few minutes. Is that the case?

If it should be possible, then it should be possible.  If the PCs want to waste a world with a Type-S, and there's nothing in the rules that say it can't be done, then it should be possible.  The very calculation used to determine travel times pretty much codifies that this *can* be done as there doesn't appear to be an upper limit on potential velocity.

The problem is that the rules were not written by scientists, but by a couple guys who wanted to recreate the SF they'd been reading for years.  Many of the issues that have been brought up were probably never even considered when the rules were written.  I mean, look at where the game started, three little black books, and then look at how those three little ingots have been heated, beaten, quenched, heated some more, beaten some more, and quenched some more until the rules for building a starship consist of more words than the entire original game.

If the players are clever to use something in a novel way, I say let them do it.  The rest of the world will adapt and they will need to remember that whatever they can do, others can do and what they come up with might be pretty damned nasty...

--
Kurt Feltenberger
kurt@thepaw.org/kfeltenberger@yahoo.com
“Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not living enough." - Me
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Craig Berry (http://google.com/+CraigBerry)
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