Exactly. I always figured the CT "nozzles" were actually Cavorite-enriched parabolic resonators designed to channel the luminiferous ether. :) As soon as you're actually shooting some sort of matter out of a nozzle to move your ship, you've broken many of the ship design assumptions of pre-TNE Traveller, and as a consequence, broken a lot of other canon as well.

On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 3:27 PM, Edward Swatschek <xxxxxx@bitslayer.net> wrote:

On 2017-10-09 05:11, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:

I've always wondered if TNE stuff like Heplar, etc, were an attempt to get away from MT's 'plates' & back to CT's 'nozzles'.

For myself I never did care for MT's take on the subject so I stuck with CT for that.
Besides, I really liked those CT deckplans w/ the M-drive nozzles in the back.

Also, since it only takes a extra 1/100th of a G, above local grav, to actually lift -off w/o anti-grav (which *everybody* must have anyway) it really shouldn't be that much of an issue.
The way I play it, the vessel lifts, like a grav-sled, &, after achieving the proper height, zooms off.

The nozzles vs plates thing was an aesthetic choice - in either case they were reactionless drives so it didn't make much of a functional difference in how they were portrayed.

I think by switching to heplar and other reaction-based thrusters and getting rid of anti-grav thrusters (changing to contra-grav instead) they were trying for a harder SF feel for the setting.

--
Edward Swatschek
xxxxxx@bitslayer.net

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