On 14 Apr 2020 at 11:07, Kenneth Barns wrote:

> With speed of communication being limited to speed of travel, it is
> highly unlikely that the Traveller Universe would be able to implement
> any meaningful increase in border protection in response to a
> pandemic.  Which means we either face a full biohazard assessment and
> quarantine for every traveller every time they pass through a starport
> (where that is possible), or no pandemic border security at all.

Well, it helps that there's more than one speed of travel. Getting
the word ahead of a ship travelling at J1 or J2 is fairly easy.

A J3 ship makes things a lot harder. But even there the X-boat
network will eventually get ahead of things.

J4 ships. That's a problem. fortunately, those are more likely to be
serving "more advanced" worlds. And there's still the "there's no
such thing" J6 message network the Imperium doesn't talk about.

J5 or J6? Fortunately those are *rare*

But yeah, realistically, most planets would do like we did around
1900. There'd be a health check at the port of entry. And if you were
lower social class, you'dprobably spend some time in quarantine just
in case.

Y'know, that might be another reason why starports have an extrality
line. And checkpoints for entering/leaving. Means you've got a list
of possible vectors. Also means that while you can't do much about
any ships that leave before the disease is noticed, you *can* track
folks who were in the port at the right time and get them isolated
(if it was brought in on a ship), or lock down the port and isolate
folks who've been outside.

Won't be anywhere * near* perfect, but it'd let you get *some*
control on things.

Also, hopefully you can send out ships with warning messages to the
ports that possibly infectd ships were going to.

Ideally, ones that can jump there and back without refueling. But
even if they haved to refuel at the far end, that can be done with
minimal risk. So they jump back to their starting point and either
stay aboard to finish quarantine, or go into quarantine downside.

Best of all is if you have ships that can jump beyond those
destination systems to get word ahead of the possible plague carrier.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com