>     Permission requested to include this as an "In A Store Near You" for
>     Freelance Traveller?

I should be honoured. Permission granted.

To respond to some of the other points...

To the comments about law level and so on: it's your TU, you play it any way you want.
I am not Marc Miller (honest!), this is not canon. I probably run a more law-abiding
campaign than others on this list. My "Wild West" planets are way out in the borderlands,
and my peace-loving, politically stable, and highly civilized planets really like to keep
themselves that way, and tend to frown upon unauthorized potential threats to social order
and good governance. If there's any part of my posting you don't like, don't use it, or
change it to your own taste.

Actually it was the vibro part that I really had in mind to be illegal - without that
these are all just high-tech versions of a current-day dive knife. (Hmmm. Does crystaliron
rust in salt water? Should I be ducking? :-) )

One of the pictures which came to my mind while writing this was of someone holding up
a dinner plate and just carving strips off it, a bit like a Brazilian Churrascaria or
Rodizio (but not as tasty :-) ). Sure to break the ice at some sort of party!

>     The reference to Chobham armor doesn't make sense to me.

Perhaps I should have said "advanced composite armour" or some similar hand-wavy term.
I was trying to get at the idea that some of the blade types might cut metal more easily
than ceramic, or vice versa. Hence a armour made of multiple layers of different stuff
might be more difficult to cut than one which is the same all the way through. If you
don't like that idea, don't use it. For "metal", "ceramic" and so on, feel free to
substitute sexy-sounding words from your TU.

For more on the real thing see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chobham_armour

>     It's worse than that, crystaliron, superdense and bonded superdense
>     are common construction materials at these tech levels.

Well that's an interesting point. It's reasonable (to me) to suppose that a starship
probably has a lot of spare power to keep its armour nice and hard and tough and shiny.
Ditto battle dress, and so on. But civilian uses like buildings? Maybe. I can conceive
of an earthquake-rich planet where the skyscrapers have their own little fusion reactors
on their roofs, so there's no central power distribution system. When a tremor hits, the
grav drives built into the structure of the building fire up and stabilize it. Just the
thought of having a skyscraper jump six inches into the air and hang there until the
ground stops shaking is entertaining (to me, but maybe I just need more friends :-) ).
So in that case yes, perhaps you do have spare power to stabilize anything that needs
stabilizing. Although I think I would have my Vilani build their skyscrapers out of
spun diamond, just in case of total power loss.

To get back to the point, I wrote that a CrystalIron blade was a TL-12 item. Perhaps at
this TL they need a stabilizing field, but at TL-14 manufacturing techniques have improved
to the point where such a field is unnecessary. Feel free to modify this as you prefer.
Or throw it away completely.

>     The explosions are unnecessary - they gave me the vibe of a D&D 'game-balance" artificial rule.

Fair point. That's my personal style. I like having plusses and minusses. Every gun in my
campaign can misfire. If you prefer something else, go for it. I hope that my posting will
serve as a starting point.

>     The whole point of crystaliron is that the crystal structure is *stable*.
>     (and other perfectly reasonable points)

No objection here. So do away with the need for a stabilizing field for it. Or say that
it is stable, but the crystal matrix can get deformed in use, and so needs to be reset
from time to time, usually by sticking it into a holder overnight. The same might apply
for any other normal atomic materials - if your diamond blade gets chipped, the magic
nanotech holder will rebuild it in 1D6 days.

Jonathan