Subj:	TRAVELLER digest 381
Date:	95-08-17 17:12:53 EDT
From:	traveller@mpgn.com
Sender:	traveller@mpgn.com
Reply-to:	traveller@mpgn.com
To:	traveller@mpgn.com (Multiple recipients of list)

			    TRAVELLER Digest 381

Topics covered in this issue include:

  1) mini-starships	by CyHiggin@aol.com
  2) New Campaign	by herder@ix.netcom.com (Richard Herder )
  3) Islands Clusters	by "Upton, Django" <DUpton@vtrnntov.telecom.com.au>
  4) Traveller in Central NJ	by FKiesche3@aol.com
  5) Space:1889 List and 2300 "List"	by mgood@MIT.EDU (Matthew Goodman)
  6) Mertactor	by Hans Rancke-Madsen <rancke@diku.dk>
  7) File Decoding Query	by FKiesche3@aol.com

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

Date: Wed, 16 Aug 1995 17:40:12 -0400
From: CyHiggin@aol.com
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: mini-starships
Message-ID: <950816174010_55989505@aol.com>

From: library@dss.gov.au (DSS Library)

>JUMP DRIVES

>In digest #373, "Commander X" wrote:

>>: That right boys and girls, if we open our FF&Ses to page 42, under
Important
>>: Note, we see the
>>: following statement:
>>: 
>>: "The smallest J-drive at any tech level is 2m^3 in volume."

>..and Jerry replied:

>>Uhm, but isn't there a rule somewhere in the depths of Traveller lore
>>that states jump-capable ships have to be at least 100 tons?

>I asked this a few digests ago, but no-one replied. Certainly Jerry is
>correct in terms of Classic Trav, but I have not found anything in
>TNE to support a limit (beyond a passing comment in BL).

The 100-ton rule is official only in CT & MT, as far as I know.  The "2 m^3
rule"
for jump drives in FF&S was received with howls of delight around here,
as it made things like the "Leviathan"'s jump torpedoes and Scott "2G"
Kellogg's 20-ton Cessna Jump Trainer legal and possible.  Why bother
asking GDW?  It's your campaign, right?  If you want micro-starships,
use the "2m^3 minimum" rule; if you don't, rule that 100-tons is the minimum 
size for a starship.  Ditto for big lasers...

Our "700-year-after" campaign setting and Steve's TNE/TCS game (same setting,
really) use the "2 m^3" rule; one can build very small scoutships that way.

                                                    -- Cynthia



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

Date: Wed, 16 Aug 1995 14:55:34 -0700
From: herder@ix.netcom.com (Richard Herder )
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: New Campaign
Message-ID: <199508162155.OAA24079@ix3.ix.netcom.com>

I just bought a copy of Deluxe Traveller and have been motivated to 
start a campaign.  Are there any supplements that are must haves?  What 
is the easiest area for a beginning referee to start a campaign? I'm 
not an RPG neophyte, just a Traveller one.  Any help would be 
appreciated.

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

Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 10:00:00 EST
From: "Upton, Django" <DUpton@vtrnntov.telecom.com.au>
To: tml <traveller@MPGN.COM>
Subject: Islands Clusters
Message-ID: <3033A00A@msmailv0.telecom.com.au>


     >>The Old and New Islands Subsectors were unknown until a scout vessel
     misjumped into them in... I forget the year, but it was quite recent.
     The inhabitants had never heard of anyone from outside and noone
     outside had heard of them.<<

     Whoops.  Where's that?  Trillion Credit Squadron?  I knew I shouldn't
     have sold that book! <g>  Reft'll have to be changed to Gushemege or
     Dagudashag. Thanks for enlightening me.
 -------------------------

I think you'll find that it was a battle damaged cruiser that misjumped.
They had to manufacture jump drive components to get back.
When the official scout service contact mission arrived they found that the 
locals had made copies of the drives they helped fix.

Django.

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

Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1995 08:59:18 -0400
From: FKiesche3@aol.com
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Traveller in Central NJ
Message-ID: <950817085915_56482802@mail06.mail.aol.com>

Greetings:

Now that my collection is starting to inch towards "critical mass" again I've
given thought to either running a game or playing in someone else's game.

Any interest in Classic Traveller in central NJ? I live in Franklin Park,
which is roughly halfway between New Brunswick (home of Rutgers University)
and Princeton (home of Princeton University). I've got a **air conditioned**
house with a decent sized dining room table and a overly friendly dog.

Not to mention my wife who might be persuaded to play Traveller again
although her last experience (before we were even married) left her in a
rather embarassing situation (but that's another story).

I'd like to start out with "classic" Traveller until I get a feel for the
rules and the background again. Of course, I would like to eventually move
into the rebellion era, and maybe the collapse era, but we'll see...

Thanks for listening.

Fred Kiesche
(FKiesche3@aol.com)


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

Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 11:15:50
From: mgood@MIT.EDU (Matthew Goodman)
To: FKiesche3@aol.com
Cc: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Space:1889 List and 2300 "List"
Message-ID: <9508171515.AA14226@MIT.EDU>

Howdy!

Yes, there is a Space:1889 list.  To subscribe, send mail to
        listserv@mitvma.mit.edu
with this in the body:
        sub sp1889 Real Name

To see what type of stuff's been on it, you can browse the Space:1889 www
page:

http://web.mit.edu/mgood/www/space-1889.html

About 2300: There's a very low traffic news group:
        alt.games.frp.2300ad
and there may be a list too, I dunno.  In any case I _believe_ it would be ok
to 
post questions and comments about 2300 on this list...

Matt Goodman
Space:1889 List Admin and Webmeister

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

Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1995 18:46:52 +0100 (METDST)
From: Hans Rancke-Madsen <rancke@diku.dk>
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Mertactor
Message-ID: <199508171646.SAA19829@embla.diku.dk>

Christopher Griffen responded amiably to my first comments:
>>The maps in the article "History of the Spinward Marches" (published 
>>in several CT modules) shows that Mertactor was settled by 300 (it 
>>dosen't say how much earlier) and already independent. It was part of 
>>the jump-1 route to Glisten (which was colonized in 298). Of the other 
>>worlds in District 268 (I suppose Plankwell is an official new name 
>>for it?) the worlds to trailing are shown as being within the settled 
>>area. Over half of the planets to spinward are not yet settled.<<
>      
>Not necessarily.  I defer to the Tarsus boxed set which states (I 
>think) that Tarsus, which is only a few parsecs away from Mertactor, 
>wasn't settled until some time in the 400s. It takes years to 
>establish these colonies and many habitable worlds were left 
>uncolonized for years.  The maps to which you're referring show 
>_areas_ that were colonized by 300, not the specific worlds.

I agree that you could make a good case for a planet like, say, Weiss or
Windsor (which lies in the middle of the area shown as settled) not 
necessarily being settled at the time shown, but Mertactor lies on the
edge of the border shown. It may be too complicated to show non-settled
worlds in the middle of an area, but it's quite simple to draw a border
either way around a border world. Surely the edge would've been on the 
other side of Mertactor if it had been unsettled. (Tarsus dosen't prove
anything as it IS on the other side of the egde in the 300 and 400 map
AND is shown as settled on the 500 map. Which fits perfectly with what
other knowledge we have.)

>>Have you ever tried calculating the amount of tonnage you need to 
>>export a significant part of a planetary population? It's quite 
>>expensive even if you export to a world just one jump-1 away. Expenses 
>>rise _rapidly_ if the "sinkhole" is more than one jump away. Mora to 
>>Mertactor is - let's see, jump-4 hasen't been invented yet, has it? - 
>>NINE jumps by jump-3, 14 by jump-2. There's no way such an operation 
>>could have any useful effect (Hmm.. Except as a phony propaganda stunt 
>>to give psycological relief to the people at home (just like the Aslan 
>>ihatei expeditions).
>      
>Or a propaganda stunt to discourage _more_ colonists from coming to 
>Mora from the more settled regions of Imperial space.

I don't quite catch your drift here.

>I didn't say Mora picked up the tab.  Maybe the colonists had to trade 
>tons of their colonization goods to buy more fuel to get them to their 
>new home.

But if it isn't Moran citizens being booted off planet, whet's their beef?
Surely they neither needed, nor wanted to settle on an already inhabited
planet if the had a whole colonization ship with them.

>I don't think the tonnage needs to be calculated.  

Try. It gives one a healthy sense of proportions.

>The colonists have 
>already done it for me when they calculated the tonnage to move 
>themselves from their former homes in the established Imperium.

Again, I don't see why emigrants from, say, Deneb, with their very own
colonization ship can be said to come from Mora if all the contact they
have with that planet is being gouged a bit on the fuel bill (and believe
me, there's a very definite limit to how much the Morans _could_ gouge
them before someone else started shippin in fuel from Jokotre and under-
cutting them).

>Yes, the numbers are astronomical, but have you ever considered what 
>it must've cost the Sword Worlders to immigrate from Terra?!  Now that 
>must've been a pretty penny.  

Yes, but that was colonization, not population pressure relief.

>Expeditions are often undertaken with little consideration for the 
>financial costs.  

Nonsens. Someone will have to foot the bill, and that someone will have to
believe it worthwhile.

>Just ask Kevin Costner.

That one went right by me. Didn't even see it.
       
>Often, such decisions are based on emotion.  It is my feeling that 
>Morans began to feel a bit xenophobic due to mass immigration to their 
>world.  If the Morans _did_ foot the bill, perhaps they felt that, at 
>any cost, it was worth the effort to relieve their burgeoning 
>population pressure.

But you're mixing up two different kinds of colonization. One is what the
Sword Worlders may have done: bought a ship and set off into the wild blue
yonder, never to return (In own my universe the SWs were the remnants of
a defeated fleet, so they didn't pay for their ships, but that's not
official). That sort of colonization is very expensive. Something like
MCr 10 per colonist, I think (if I haven't misremembered my calculations
on the subject of _ihatei_). That's the yearly naval budget of _20,000_
people to send off ONE colonist. Do you really think any government would
be willing to spend that kind of money just to get rid of an insignificant
part of their population? I don't. The other kind is where you (the 
government) build a ship, load it with people (volunteers or "volunteers"),
send it to some other planet, dump the people, _and comes home for another
load to repeat the process_. Now you _may_ be getting into something
managable. Now we're not just building a ship and waving goodbye to it.
Now we're keeping the ship and getting rid of the people for the yearly
maintenance cost, which is 1/10th the purchase price. If you ship to a
planet jump-1 away you can get in 25 trips a year, which brings the total
down to Cr 40,000 per subject (less, because the ship I used to calculate
this with was an aslan jump-3 design; with jump-1 engines and drop tanks
you could propably pack in 25% more people). That's still pretty stiff, but 
not unbeliveably so. After all, this might even truly help the population 
pressure, always provided you impose strict population control (but I always 
assume that, anyway). But the moment you move farther afield the price goes
up. Double the number of jumps needed and you reduce the number of trips
your ship can make per year. For a planet 9 jumps away the price is 4 times
as much (AND, perhaps even more significantly, the number of people you can
expert falls to 1/4).

>>That might work. But even then it dosen't make economic sense to 
>>send them all the way to Mertactor. There were planets within two 
>>jumps-3 of Mora that were outside the Imperium at the time.<<
>      
>My take on it was that many of the worlds were reserved for 
>colonization by people outside the Deneb region.  Sort of like 
>claim-stakers who filed for their colonies back on Core or something.  
>Perhaps Mertactor was unclaimed as yet and the other worlds, nearer to 
>Mora, _were_ claimed.

Dosen't quite sound like the free and easy Spinward Marches I've read
about, but I can't come up with any official statement about it, so I'll
just say: "Well, maybe."

>>Not a correction, just a comment: Mertactor is between 15 and 24% 
>>covered with water. There can undoubtedly be lush and verdant spots on 
>>it, but overall the planet must be quite arid.
>      
>True, but it's also a very small world.  Size 2 if memory serves.  It 
>wouldn't take much in the way of water or atmosphere to make it a lush 
>place.  

No, it wouldn't. But that little water isn't there. 20% of a planet's
surface is 20%, big or small. Two planets with the same hydrographic
percentage is roughly equally lush/arid. (I speak subject to correction
by anyone who knows anything about the subject).

>Maybe the molten core of the planet feeds the surface with 
>chemically rich soil or something.  You just gotta use your 
>imagination!
      
But if so then it's an unusual feature of the planet and deserves to be
mentioned. (Anyway, you can stuff the soils with chemicals as much as
you like; without water it's going to be a desert).

>      >>      Within the last 80 years, the rimward encroachment of aslan 
>      ihatei <<
>      
>      I don't quite understand you here.  However, in defense of this 
>      statement, Plankwell Subsector _is_ on the rimward edge of the 
>      Spinward Marches.  Less than 20 parsecs away, the aslan have 
>      completely usurped entire systems.  In tribute to Alvin Plummera's 
>      mention of the aslan on Glisten, I thought I'd maintain a bit of 
>      continuity between RICE papers and mention them.

It's just that I and several others firmly believe that if everything GDW
has told us about the basic situation of the Aslans (TL, culture, etc.) and 
the way shipbuilding economy works is taken seriously, then there's NO way
the Aslans could even begin to encroach on the Domain back in 1116 much
less actually capture a high-population TL 15 world. And even if by some
bizarrely impropable concatenation of events (one that none of us has had
the highly inventive imagination to concieve) they did manage to grab hold
of Glisten or Tobia there's no way that Norris would accept such a situation,
nor any reason why he should, since he would have all the ressources he
needed to kick them off again. (Well, I suppose that if the Aslans managed
to grab Glisten and Tobia without damaging the defenses AND take over those
defenses then Norris would have some grey hairs coming. Now all you have
to do is to come up with a scenario that allows the Aslans to sneak in and
steal a few score fully manned TCSquadrons and system defenses. Good luck.)

This has been discussed several times before (not heatedly, because we're
a pretty laid-back bunch of people here on TML, but intensely), so I 
didn't want to rip it up again, but I always vince when I see references
to Aslans lording it over Glisten or any other Domain/Regency world. 

>Now that I'm out of defensive position, I'll make a general statement: 
>RICE papers are intended to be a guide where little or no detailed 
>cultural information has been presented before.  I think I speak for 
>everyone who has contributed at least one of these papers when I say 
>feel free to leave as much of these RICE papers as you like on the 
>cutting room floor.  Or disregard the whole thing!

Sure. It's just that I firmly believe that in an "shared universe" like
GDWs Traveller Universe it is not only polite to make every effort
to fit your new material to what has been produced before, it is also,
in the long run, the most expedient thing to do.

>That said, let's see some more RICE papers from others on the TML.  
>Hans, I haven't seen you contribute one yet.  Have at, pal!  There are 
>hundreds of worlds we need to know more about.      

Maybe one day.


      Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
     rancke@diku.dk
------------
        "The referee should determine the nature of subsequent
         events based on the individual situation."
                                _76 Patrons_, p. 8

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

Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1995 13:29:21 -0400
From: FKiesche3@aol.com
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: File Decoding Query
Message-ID: <950817132148_56639921@mail06.mail.aol.com>

Greetings All:

For the technologically inept (i.e., me) can anybody tell me how to translate
the files that can be found using FTP at FTP.MPGN.COM? I'm most interested in
getting and reading back issues of the Traveller digest and the XBOAT digest,
as well as using any Excel related items that are there.

For specs: I'm using AOL's FTP, downloading onto a Compaq computer running
Windows 3.1. I've got Word and all the usual MS programs (Exel, etc.).

Any help gratefully accepted.

Thanks.

Fred Kiesche
(FKiesche3@aol.com)


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

End of TRAVELLER Digest 381
***************************
