On Apr 20, 2015, at 4:46 PM, tmr0195@comcast.net wrote:

> T4 Book 1 QSDS 1.5e , T4 Book 2 Starships SSDS, and T4 Book B FF&S,

Ahh the attempted grand unification of design schemes…Had T4 been given the care in production it needed, these would have been a great set.  QSDS and SSDS started as separate attempts at producing simplified design systems based on TNE’s FF&S.

To use a car analogy, QSDS was good for designing a late 1960’s American car, SSDS would let you design a late 60’s  Chevy Nova, and FF&S would let you design a 1969 2-door chevy nova with the 350 v8, a Holley 4 barrel, a Hurst shifter and fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview.

More to the point, you could take a qsds-designed starship, build out a custom drive system in FF&S and it would plug right in.

In theory, anyway.

As published, a hash was pretty much made of everything. Almost none of the ‘standard’ ships in the T4 book could be built with the design system published in the book, the inconsistencies between QSDS and SSDS were never really well worked out (everyone was give like a month or so between the time the publisher said ‘Hey lets use this in the books, do you guys want to do it?’ and publication.) and FF&S was a disaster.

It was an insane schedule, mainly because the publisher of T4 didn’t know Traveller or give a flying crap, he just wanted to put out some books, stiff the authors and cash out. Much of the two aliens books were recycled from other game systems, Emperor’s Arsenal and CSC used a completely different, inconsistent design systems…I could go on and on.

There were a bunch of folks on the Traveller list who put a huge amount of effort into that version. There were absolute gems in there. There were a bunch of folks who got burned out by the effort and just went away. It’s sad.

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs