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On Mon, 11/16/15, Kurt Feltenberger <xxxxxx@thepaw.org> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] Five Absurdities of the Official Traveller Universe
 To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
 Date: Monday, November 16, 2015, 7:32 PM

 On 11/16/2015 7:56 PM,
 Kelly St. Clair wrote:
 > On 11/16/2015
 4:36 PM, Evyn MacDude wrote:
 >> Well
 since it is a Science Fiction game based on the Literary SF
 of the
 >> 50's and 60's you
 failed to compare and contrast your absurdities with
 >> appropriate ones from the source
 fiction. Thematically everything you
 >> list is a trope in the periods SF.
 Traveller is a game of Pieces,
 >>
 everybody use different bits, including the Bits of the
 "Official"
 >> background.
 >
 > Beat me to it.  Most
 of the silliness of the OTU can be traced
 > directly to the source material:  space
 opera of the 20th century,
 >
 particularly the middle decades, with some influences from
 before and
 > after.  It's every bit
 as much a period piece/relic of its era as
 > cyberpunk and Space 1889, though only the
 last of those was deliberate
 > as of its
 writing.

 This is, IMO, not
 a bad thing.  I play games to escape "real life"
 and
 to imagine something greater, neater,
 different, and cool; not have to
 worry if
 what I'm doing doesn't square with a formula (that
 often
 doesn't make sense other than to
 standardize something) or if it "can't
 be done" based on current knowledge.

 But that's me.  I like
 the 3I and while I think it has some bumps and
 issues, it's playable.  I think many of
 the issues that are brought up
 are done so
 only because so much time is spent thinking about them.  I

 know that during all the years I've
 gamed, none of my players have
 voiced any
 of the issues mentioned and I'd bet that is the same for
 most
 players.

 --
 Kurt Feltenberger

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Ditto for  me Kurt!

Besides, when studying this world's history, it doesn't take long at all to come across all sorts of seeming anomalies, inconsistencies, incongruities, etc. It's enough to make one wonder if history isn't really just a series of randomly-connected events.
But that doesn't mean that we don't have our 'limits'. For me it was the 'mega-absurdity' of MT. In retrospect I've come to believe that it was a perfect storm of assigning a group that wasn't as well versed in TU canon as they thought they were or should have been, the task of 'shaking up' the OTU by wrecking the 3I. And let's not even get into VIRUS! But that's just me. Still, everyone's gonna' find something if they "spend enough time thinking about it"<sic>.

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