Of course. But I don't think you'll ever get it down to zero, short of worldwide realtime surveillance of every vessel. And in Traveller, especially during wartime, the opportunities for loss are much, much, MUCH greater than here on the surface of a small rocky world. Just consider for a moment how many tens of thousands of shifts are adrift in deep interstellar space following misjumps to empty hexes! The odds of a given misjumped ship ever being found are tiny.

Although this does make me wonder if there are salvage operators who specialize in scouring deep space for such derelicts. Jump out into the black near a known icy body, start refueling, then crank up the active sensors and wait for returns...for days, weeks, possibly months. When you get an interesting return, microjump to it. 99% of the time it's another lump of ice and rock; start refueling, repeat until you strike it rich or run out of provisions.

Some ships found this way would be recent enough and in good enough condition to sell to refitters; others, old or interesting enough to sell to museums.

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 12:21 PM, Greg Chalik <mrg3105@gmail.com> wrote:

But, a lot fewer vessels, and for that matter, aircraft, are lost without trace now than for example even a century ago, never mind two centuries.

Greg

On 16/02/2016 5:14 AM, "Phil Pugliese (via tml list)" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:

This email was sent from yahoo.com which does not allow forwarding of emails via email lists. Therefore the sender's email address (xxxxxx@yahoo.com) has been replaced with a dummy one. The original message follows:

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Exactly, amongst many other things!

Excuse my previous excessive convolution; what I meant to say was that I cannot accept that it will ever be impossible to lose any sort of ship.
Either now or in the future it will always, always, always be possible to lose, w/o a trace, any sort of vessel...

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On Mon, 2/15/16, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] Instant city
 To: "tml" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
 Date: Monday, February 15, 2016, 10:44 AM

 On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at
 9:09 AM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
 wrote:
 So, I do
 not accept that it cannot be possible that, w/i the TU, it
 will still be possible to lose ships w/o a
 trace..
 If
 ships can NOT be lost without a trace within the TU, then
 how do we explain all those accidental colonies which
 started out as the survivors of crash-landed ships?
  
 --
 Richard Aiken
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Craig Berry (http://google.com/+CraigBerry)
"Eternity is in love with the productions of time." - William Blake

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