			    TRAVELLER Digest 114

Topics covered in this issue include:

  1) Weapon design	by Hugh Foster <100326.446@compuserve.com>
  2) Alternate Vision - Commentary	by CyHiggin@aol.com
  3) An Alternate Vision of Collapse	by CyHiggin@aol.com
  4) Re: Deep Site Meson Guns	by CyHiggin@aol.com
  5) Re: Ship Aesthetics	by CyHiggin@aol.com
  6) Re: Anti-neutrons	by CyHiggin@aol.com
  7) Re: Deep Site Meson Guns	by "Harold D. Hale" <hdhale@smtpwpo.dayt.tasc.com>
  8) Where are you Traveller.	by Mark Fletcher <mf1@st-andrews.ac.uk>

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Date: 27 Nov 94 04:07:39 EST
From: Hugh Foster <100326.446@compuserve.com>
To: "INTERNET:traveller@mpgn.com" <traveller@MPGN.COM>
Subject: Weapon design
Message-ID: <941127090738_100326.446_BHG37-1@CompuServe.COM>

Here's a thought for you. "Modern" Traveller weapons are bullpup design, yeah
?
Now, if the receiver's back behind the level of the trigger guard, that's
pretty
close to the face, hmm ? Isn't that gonna mean that a leftie is going to get
an
earful of hot brass everytime he pulls the trigger ? Answers on a postcard...

--------< Remember, in Cyberspace no-one can heal your bream... >--------


------------------------------

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 12:58:03 -0500
From: CyHiggin@aol.com
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Alternate Vision - Commentary
Message-ID: <941127125520_7951224@aol.com>

This "alternate vision" of the collapse was developed for my
use for a future post-Collapse campaign, but I thought 
that someone else might find it useful.  I didn't like the
Virus as a sole agent of Collapse, and I thought that 70
years was too short a collapse for most of the post-
Collapse plots that suggested themselves.  Too many
people around who still remember the Imperium.  By setting
it some centuries in the future of a severe collapse,
we have time for any kind of culture we need to have
developed, and just when and how the Collapse 
happened can be vague bits of history for the
archaeologists to decipher.  This allows you to fudge
the exact cause of the Collapse to suit.

Other items allow me to fudge things in other ways.
The Gloire and Antares supernovas re-arranged 
jumpspace, which allows me to move worlds that I 
find inconveniently positioned, or leave them be, if
I liked them where they were.  It also keeps explorers
on their toes -- the old starcharts may not be too
reliable.  There is precedent for this, as readers of
_Antares_Dawn_ and _Antares_Passage_ know.

The change in physics affecting gravitics is something
that Islands future-history developers will find familiar;
yes, it is the same one.  It also allows me to litter space
with old MegaT ships that don't work, and handle the
changes from MT technology to TNE technology without
rewriting Imperial history.  BTW, I *do* use the alternate
tech Thrusters from FF&S.  Yes, it's a weird development;
it's also a big, hairy plothook -- WHY did gravity change?

I assumed that Imperial era jumpspace theory was some-
what flawed -- there is precedent for it, as both the Hivers
and Vilani had flawed jump theory at one time.  In this case,
the flaw caused scientists to assume that no jump ship 
smaller than 1400 kl could be built -- true in MT, untrue in
TNE.  Another addition to jump theory: spinning gravitational
singularities, such as black holes and some neutron stars,
create very high jump potential "hills" in jumpspace.  On
the 2D jumpspace map, these "hills" appear as rifts or 
bubbles of empty space.  There is actually a system at
the center of such rifts, but it is unapproachable by known
jump drives.  Note that such a system is still accessible thru
normal space... and that a supernova creates a new rift.

The Kyatifa journal is intended to be a "drop-in" background
history for any small "pocket empire"; names were kept fairly
generic.

                                 -- Cynthia




------------------------------

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 12:58:10 -0500
From: CyHiggin@aol.com
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: An Alternate Vision of Collapse
Message-ID: <941127125533_7951317@aol.com>


For those of you who don't like Short Naps, and think the Virus
is a load of "Dingo's Kidneys", I present this alternate vision
of the Second Long Night.  
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 The Journal of Kyatifa Ahroun a Malek
                     (c) 1994 by Cynthia Higginbotham

    (material omitted... )

133/021 : 
     We found another derelict today, a dead ship whose impossible 
drives do not obey our Laws of physics, and thus, do not work.  This one,
mercifully, had no crew aboard.  Had they warning, I wonder, before the Final
Disaster struck?  Or were they merely stranded groundside, unable to return
to their ship, but equally doomed?  What must they have thought of this last,
most awful perversion of their universe?  
    We have only bits and pieces of history from before the 
Collapse; so much was lost. No one really knows how long the 
Collapse was; centuries, at least.  The Collapse we call it here in 
the Cluster; the Aslan Borderers call it Whethwyrt, "when the 
universe was corrupted"; I have heard other terms: the Greater 
Maghiz, Nightfall, the Darktime, Endtime.
    What was the Collapse?  What history we have tells of war, war 
on a scale unimaginable to any now alive, war between empires.  Some
tantalizing fragments hint of civil war or rebellion, but nothing 
conclusive.  Was the Solomani Rim a rebel province or a rival 
empire?  No one knows.
    There was war, invasion, lawlessness -- apparently for an 
extended time.  But that alone would not have caused the Collapse, 
though it must have weakened them, set them up for what was to come. 
    Perhaps the War was the "First Disaster" of the Cynilogic Teachings. The
Second Disaster was the Stardeath.
    Stardeath -- the supernovae of two giant stars "in the course 
of one lifetime".  From what we now know about jumpspace, we have
reconstructed what must have happened -- but to our ancestors, with their
flawed theory of jumpspace, it must have been an appalling violation of
reality.  For the stars...moved.  Two spinning gravitational singularities
wer
e created from those supernovae, and they altered the shape of jumpspace
-- as in the distant past, supernovae created the Great Rifts and the
Abyss-Rift.  And thus, stars still fixed in realspace moved, realigned
themselves in jumpspace.
   This was a devastating blow to the Imperial Civilization of our 
ancestors; already the vital economic ties between worlds had been weakened
by long years of the War.  Now the stars had moved, throwing interstellar
trade and communications into chaos. Is it any wonder that worlds abandoned
their distant neighbors and turned inward, relying on their own
self-sufficiency rather than unreliable interstellar trade?  We presume that
this retreat from the stars explains the outposts found stripped and
abandoned;  for those who left the outposts were still able to leave, to
carry off what was valuable.  But it wasn't the Stardeath that killed whole
worlds, leaving vast megapoli inhabited only by the dead and stone-age
savages.
    The Final Disaster is still hard to comprehend; conjecture 
based on Imperial ships and machinery, the Cynilogic Teachings, and the
strangely erroneous bits of technical literature still remaining from the
Imperial period.  One ship could have been dismissed as a fluke, a failed
prototype -- but not all of them.  There is a common thread in much Imperial
machinery --
all based on the same principles, all in agreement with Imperial engineering
texts -- all wrong.  They not only do not work -- they cannot work.
     Gravitics:  the basis for contragrav, anti-acceleration fields, 
thruster plates.  In the ancient Imperial Civilization, the basis 
for those and many other things -- all now impossible.  The very 
physical constants taught in Imperial texts are wrong -- and thus 
all else is wrong.  We were lucky; those flawed texts were 
discovered by archaeologists only a few decades ago, long after we had
redeveloped gravitics from first principles -- merely knowing that it had
been done once, therefore we could do it again. I know of worlds that never
redeveloped gravitics, because they had the help of that fatally flawed
Imperial engineering data.  I 
have heard of a world (Alsace) whose scientists believe gravitics to 
be impossible, because the legends of the ways it was used by 
Imperials are clearly fantastic -- they "know" the universe doesn't 
work that way.  Their archaeologists have various questionable 
theories to explain the few derelict Imperial ships discovered in 
their system -- the funniest one is the explanation that the 
derelicts weren't real ships at all, but votive offerings to the 
gods of space, to invoke magic by building a deliberately impossible drive.
     Another one of their explanations is that the Imperials used a
sufficiently advanced technology that important details are invisible to us.
 This would almost be believable, except that I have read copies of the
surviving Imperial engineering text, and understand what they thought they
were doing.  And those Alsatian archaeologists have never had to explain a
"cemetary
world".
     I've seen one, a cemetary world.  A world where everyone died 
as all the vital machinery failed at once.  Power stations went dead 
or blew up, vehicles, gravtrains, spaceships suddenly fell dead from the sky,
and all the other machinery failed as power died.  
Machinery like life support on methane atmosphere worlds -- sure, 
there were emergency power supplies -- but how fast can you figure out what's
fundamentally wrong with your power plant, redesign and rebuild one from the
ground up -- especially when half your tools don't work anymore either, and
the ones that do work are using your scarce emergency power?  And do you
evacuate a suddenly hostile world when none of your vehicles move?  You can't
walk to another planet!  
    Then there were the habitable worlds, the ones with survivors 
-- if you can call them that.  The die-off must have been horrendous, when
all the supports of civilization ceased to
function -- no food transported, food production diminished to 
miniscule amounts, no water supply save unsanitary natural rivers, 
no public sanitation, no manufactured goods, no nothing save what 
bare hands can produce and bare feet can carry.  After the 
starvation, rioting and disease killed the megalopoli, a handful of 
survivors took up a hand-to-mouth, stone-age existance in the 
wilderness.  With no education available, no source of information 
(the databanks are all dead, remember), they had to reinvent 
everything from first principles.  A few of them have managed spears and
fire.
  Most of them are club-wielding savages who eat raw whatever they can catch,
including each other.  A very few lucky ones have achieved a stable, though
primitive civilization; all such have traditions of one or more Teacher
figures who brought/preserved important technologies like dirt farming, fire,
building, animal domestication, etc.  Our archaeologists have
found the ruins of an Imperial Scout Service base on one such world; they
guess that Imperial Scouts either came from worlds like ours, or had training
in primitive survival.
     Our own traditions agree with the archaeologist's findings on 
the cemetary worlds -- somehow, the Laws of physics affecting 
gravitics changed overnight.  We still don't know how or why; we may never
know.  What worked before, became impossible; and what works now would have
been impossible then.  Proud Imperial worlds whose technology was based on
gravitics died overnight.
     And worlds like ours, that have regained the stars?  Traditions 
and archeology have shown us that our ancestors' worlds were on the fringes
of Imperial Civilization at best.  Home worlds of outsiders, worlds
restricted from participating in Imperial Civilization for one reason or
other -- all worlds that had to rely on their own less-developed
technologies, technologies not based on gravitics but on magnetics,
chemistry, mechanics, atomics, etc.  The bases for our own ancestral
civilizations were not affected by the Final Disaster;  we survived and grew.
     Much was still lost; many worlds had some dependence on 
Imperial technology, but not enough to destroy them.  We fell back, 
but picked ourselves up and continued on.  In some areas, we have equalled or
surpassed the vanished Imperials -- in redeveloping jump theory from first
principles, we acquired new insights that somehow  escaped the Imperials.  So
I assume, for no jump-capable Imperial era ship has been found smaller than
1400 kl.  Instead of jump torpedoes, they appear to have used a network of
unwieldy 1400 kl craft for communications.  We don't know if they understood
the relationship between spinning singularities and the shape of  jumpspace;
there's not a good sample of Imperial jump theory left....

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
                                              -- Cynthia



------------------------------

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 12:58:12 -0500
From: CyHiggin@aol.com
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Deep Site Meson Guns
Message-ID: <941127125536_7951340@aol.com>

From: lewis@chara.gsu.edu

>... We started to wonder how to fight one of these.  
>  Sensors won't be able to see it, sense it is buried under ground, >I
assume it is deep enough to damp out all E-M radiation.  So you >won't be
able to simply shoot it.  

IF you have the position of the damn thing, YOUR meson guns
can attempt to blow it up.  That's where option #2:Treason, comes
in...

>  The buried meson gun will need sensors on the surface to see >enemy ships
so it can shoot them.  But the sensors can be >spread across a planet.  By
the time an orbiting ship can start a >sensor sweep to detect the sensors,
the deep site gun will fire on >it, mostly likely blowing it up or crippling
it.  

Yep.  Why do you think Hi-tech, Hi-Pop Imperial worlds are
nearly impossible to invade?

>The only thing I could think of was to drop troops on to the >surface,
basically below the senors, and have troops run around >trying to find the
dishes and blow them up.  

Since the detector array can be disguised (for instance, as ornamental
features of city buildings), that could be difficult unless you plan to
carpet
-bomb the planet...

> Can anyone figure out another angle of attack.

#1: Put heavy meson screens on your assault landers and 
assault cruisers.

#2: Treason - get someone to betray the location of the meson
gun sites to you.

#3: Obliterate the planet from a distance -- throw rocks, throw
bombs, etc. Do a Berserker number on the world from beyond
meson gun range. (This option reserved for Flag Officers wearing
grey uniforms in large wedge-shaped battleships, or cyborg
psionics wearing black combat armor. :-) )

                                                  -- Cynthia

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 12:58:14 -0500
From: CyHiggin@aol.com
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Ship Aesthetics
Message-ID: <941127125539_7951378@aol.com>

James Kundert: 
>To answer the specific question, I view the tapered cylinder with >flying
bridge (ala Star Blazers and Captain Harlock) to be a >Solomani thing (though
not the ONLY Solomani thing, obviously). >The flying wedge is Sylean (see the
Type S). 

Based on the silohuettes on the "Imperium" counters of Terran
Confederation and Vilani ships, I would say that the flying wedge
is ancient Terran as well.  The ancient Vilani seemed to have
favored spheres for their ships.

>. It is my opinion (backed up by the original Vargr Module) that >the Vargr
 taste in finned ships came from their first contacts with >the Zhodani.

I seem to recall that the footnotes to "Gvurrdon's Story" mentioned
that ancient Vargr ships were simple cylinders, and that their
modern preferences did come from that contact with the Zhos.

You forgot to mention Droyne ships.  I assume that the Droyne
ships pictured in the original Droyne module are actually 
Andor-Candory ships (one of the few Droyne shipyards we
know of), as Droyne tastes seem to vary by planet. (Yaskaydroy's
ships are very bubbly and organic looking...)  Anyway,
Andorian Droyne ships seem to be very Star Trekkish --
somewhat streamlined bodies with long propulsion pods.
                                      -- Cynthia


------------------------------

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 12:58:20 -0500
From: CyHiggin@aol.com
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Anti-neutrons
Message-ID: <941127125541_7951403@aol.com>

Archie Tindell:

>Anti-neutrons do NOT exist, because the negative of a neutral 
>charge is a neutral charge.... the neuton is it's own anti-particle. It 
>may be created through different means, but a neutron is a >neutron. 

Have you ever actually studied sub-atomic physics?  Like, read
the appropriate chapters in an undergraduate physics text?
I think the scientists at Berkeley who discovered the anti-neutron
in 1955 would be rather surprised to be told it did not exist.

Basic principle of anti-matter: matter & anti-matter are symmetrical,
every particle has a corresponding anti-particle.  Reversed
charge is the obvious difference between matter and anti-matter,
but it is not the only difference.  There are anti-neutrinos, too,
which have neither mass nor charge. 

BTW, two neutrons colliding will not annihilate each other; an
anti-neutron and a neutron colliding will, yielding gamma rays and
a neutrino, anti-neutrino pair, if I remember correctly. (Physicists
in the audience can correct me...)

>The TNE book FFS describes NPAWS as a neutralized atom >beam, but this has
the problem of being able to be hit by a laser >and deflected (except if
travelling at light-speed ......

Accelerated particle beams do travel at near light speed -- and
can you imagine the fire control problems involved in hitting
a stream of atom-sized particles travelling at near lightspeed?

                                                 -- Cynthia


------------------------------

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 13:52:05 -0500
From: "Harold D. Hale" <hdhale@smtpwpo.dayt.tasc.com>
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Deep Site Meson Guns
Message-ID: <sed88e6f.050@smtpwpo.dayt.tasc.com>

   Assuming you are facing an omni directional gun site and not a fixed
gun (which could only shoot "up" and therefore has a limited firing arc),
your best bet would be to stand off and let loose with a spread of anti-
radiation missiles.  Not all of them would get through, but hopefully those
that did would be able to punch a hole or two in the planetary defense sensor
net.  Next, you would send in sensor drones (or if you could find volunteers,
fighters) which would assess where the hole were punched.  Finally you would
send in a crusier or other ship armed with a meson gun which would fly
through one of the blind spots you just created to a position in orbit where 
it could wreak havoc on the rest of the sensor sites.  It would still be a
good
idea to send in ground troops as well to destroy or capture any remaining
sensor sites that managed to shut down before they were detected.

   An interesting adventure would involve having the PCs sent in to steal
information on the location of the sensor sites on a planet, or possibly 
the location of deep site guns themselves.  Of course only players who love
a good "cloak and dagger" senario (and have characters they can live
without) should attempt such a mission, as the local military will pull out
all the dirty tricks in their arsenal to make sure that information doesn't
get in the wrong hands....

Later,

Harold



------------------------------

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 19:49:18 +0000 (GMT)
From: Mark Fletcher <mf1@st-andrews.ac.uk>
To: Traveller <traveller@MPGN.COM>
Subject: Where are you Traveller.
Message-ID: <Pine.3.87.9411271918.C10825-0100000@pasta>

I havnt recieved any mail for the Saturday and Sunday. Anybody want to 
forward the relevant digests to me?

Cheers, 

Fletch.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|"Well, Im away to tell children who go    |Mark Fletcher,           |
| to boarding schools, that their parents  |University of St Andrews.|
| hate them. Good night!" Dominick Diamond.|(mf1@st-and.ac.uk)       |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

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End of TRAVELLER Digest 114
***************************
