On Apr 21, 2015, at 1:10 PM, David Golden <xxxxxx@pcisys.net> wrote:

> On Tue, April 21, 2015 11:46 am, Bruce Johnson wrote:
>> 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
>
> That seemed to be a consistent theme for Traveller, from the LBB days on.
> We'd hoped to finally break that streak.  I'd hoped we could actually get
> the TML to use FF&S to design ships and vehicles for submission.
>
> What I still can't wrap my mind around is that they took the final draft
> in Word format, apparently without reading it, dumped it into some print
> layout program, and never bothered to error check anything.  A single read
> through would have shown the equations were scrambled.
>
> And to confirm what others have noted, T4 FF&S was basically a port of TNE
> FF&S to the T4 environment.
>

It was a different time and I'm not sure it's fair to judge it by today's publishing toolset. I'm not even sure that it's fair to judge it by the tools that were contemporary to MegaTraveller and TNE. I worked in Personal Computer driven CAD (AutoCAD) at the time. I also did some Desktop Publishing. A PC that could do CAD or DTP was a rare, expensive thing back then. Many DTP tasks, properly printing math equations, were beyond Word and WordPerfect if you wanted to say in the performance envelope of WYSIWYG. That's why programs like Aldus PageMaker had a market.

-- Chris