Bruce Johnson wrote:

>     But you have a point about armor on Traveller ships, but what that causes is big pieces
>     of junk get turned into little pieces after hitting the ship, plus what bits of armor>     they break off the ship, which also gets turned into little pieces and eventually down
>     to dust size which can then play havok with sensors.
True, but that's only one reason. There's plenty of junk - asteroids, dust, Langrange
points, dropped hand tools, and so on, sweeping through the Jump Points all the time.

>     And again, I might remind folks that this has been going on for millenia in most of
>     the 3I…I would posit that most Vilani worlds may even have issues with the dust cloud
>     reducing solar radiation, unless they’ve found some means of collecting it all.

Agree. However, IMTU my Jump Points are usually well out of any gravity well (usually out
in the Kuiper Belt / Oort Cloud) so solar radiation isn't a problem. However, debris in
the Jump Point certainly is. An incoming starship whacking into something solid is
certainly going to feel it. Degree of damage is GM-whimsy :-)

I have independent ships doing the cleanup. The planet or system pays them for the
service, and they get to keep the proceeds of anything they find, e.g. ore, high-Ni
masses, anything. The decision as to whether to risk cleaning up a 'live' Jump Point
I leave up to the GM - one the one hand, collisions are rare, and mostly endanger the
ship already in the Point; on the other, closing down a Jump Point requires a lot of
negotiation with the system on the other side of it.

>     Making the assumption that the technology to clean this up exists, without getting
>     into the details, I can see this as a function of the IISS.  Much like how the
>     US Coast Guard owns the federal ice breaking ships.  One of those tedious jobs that
>     need to be done to keep the Imperium functioning.  A dedicated cleaning ship can
>     make the rounds of several subsectors, and then repeat.

Certainly an interesting idea. How does the 3I charge the system which benefits?
If at all? And of course some systems may be 'dirty', and others 'clean'.

Jonathan