Traveller-digest      Thursday, August 12 1999      Volume 1999 : Number 950



(R)1996. Traveller is a registered trademark of FarFuture Enterprises.
All rights reserved.

The following topics are covered in this digest:

FW: A defence against near C rocks
FW: First In
Re: MT Task Variants
Fast Food (was Re: PRB)
Re: Traveller-digest V1999 #935
Re: First In
Re: MREs, Disasters, & SD
RE: Ethically-challenged civilians
Re: MT Task Varients
Re: Relief for Newbies
Re: Vilani  Stature, human origins
Re: A defence against near C rocks
RE: Physics photon question/ Solar Sails
Re: Physics photon question/ Solar Sails
re: Ethically Challenged Merchants

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 21:31:55 +0800
From: "Antony Farrell" <Skaran@bigpond.com>
Subject: FW: A defence against near C rocks

- -----Original Message-----
From: owner-traveller@lists.imagiconline.com
[mailto:owner-traveller@lists.imagiconline.com] On Behalf Of Anthony
Salter
Sent: Thursday, 12 August 1999 2:08
To: traveller@lists.imagiconline.com
Subject: Re: A defence against near C rocks


At 06:51 PM 8/11/99 +0100, you wrote:
>I normally lurk and I'm a relative newcomer but I'll throw in my Cr0.02
>
>A near C rock has a devastating effect against a planet, right? So, surely
a
>pebble will have a devastating effect on a near C rock. Put a really tiny
>thruster  and a really tiny computer/radio receiver on pebbles and scatter
>them around a planet, so you can hopefully put a few of them in the path of
>near C rocks if you detect them coming in. The problem of course is
>detecting them, responding in time, and will the resulting shower of near C
>shrapnel be significantly less deadly than the near C rock?
>
>-Brian Caball
>

My contention would be that while it would be theoretically possible to
accelerate a mass to near-C, it would be almost impossible to HIT anything
with it.  You've got a planet hurtling around a star which is hurtling
around the galactic core.  How are you going to hit something like that
with an object that must be constantly accelerated (possibly for years)
before it gets to the desired velocity?

Oh, God, here we go...

Badman

Here we go indeed, if at TL8 we could plot a trajectory for a space probe
(one of the Voyagers actually) so that it comes over the ice cap of Neptune
within 1 second of its planned encounter hitting a rock with the technology
available later - no problem.

After all we Terrans have always been good at hitting things from a
distance, friends, enemies, we don't discriminate wel will hit anyone.

AF

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 21:31:59 +0800
From: "Antony Farrell" <Skaran@bigpond.com>
Subject: FW: First In

- -----Original Message-----
From: owner-traveller@lists.imagiconline.com
[mailto:owner-traveller@lists.imagiconline.com] On Behalf Of John Buston
Sent: Thursday, 12 August 1999 3:16
To: tml
Subject: Re: First In


>>The stars would have to be relatively close for it to be likely there are
no
>>gas giants (i.e. less than three to four times the "snow line" distance).

>Why is that anyway?

Well as I understand planet formation (i.e. dimly) planets beyond the "snow
line" enter a runaway accretion process hence forming gas giants. The "snow
line" is the distance at which water ice can form in a developing system.

>Can a planet orbit two stars and still be in a habitable zone?

Very close together stars, yes.

If the stars are at moderate separation and of vastly different stellar types
then it is possible for a planet to be in two life zones at once. e.g. planet
orbiting a dim M class companion star which in turn is orbiting a bright F class
star. Seasons would be interesting. The eccentricity of the stars orbits would
have to be unusually low for this to happen too.

Where does this put the so called hot gas giants apparently being discovered
in inner orbits? Is there a theory about their formation?
AF

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 08:40:25 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Anthony Merlock" <amerlock@execpc.com>
Subject: Re: MT Task Variants

Eris,
Have you taken a look at the Fuzion rule system?  It's a free "generic"
game engine that combines the "best" of the Hero and the Interlock game
engines.

In Fuzion, stats and skills both fall in the same range:
0   = Challenged
1-2 = Everyday
3-4 = Competent
5-6 = Heroic
7-8 = Incredible
9-10= Legendary
11+ = Superheroic

Task resolution is Stat + Skill + 3D6 vs a target difficulty number (or
an opponents Stat + Skill + 3D6 for contested skills).

It's not a perfect system, but to me it feels more like Traveller than
GURPS ever will (note: I'm not trying to insult GURPS here - I do play
GURPS in a modern-day campaign; however, to me, it's just too rules-heavy
for Traveller.  And, it's not metric....).  I'm currently writing a 
Traveller plug-in for Fuzion (but, it's slow going, due to Real Life (tm)
intruding on my gaming time).

And, Fuzion is free!  You can take a look at it at:
http://www.mecha.com/~conkle/fuzion/index.html

Tony Merlock

> Date: Thu, 12 Aug 99 00:48:17 -0500
> From: "Eris Reddoch" <eris@pcola.gulf.net>
> Subject: Re: MT Task Varients
> 
> On 08/12/99 at 12:14 AM,  trentfs@ix.netcom.com said:
<snip>
> 
> <grin> Folks that have been here for a while probably remember me
> being one of the biggest opponents of the d3 around here so I was,
> at least, half joking.  So, I'm not tied to d3s, it could even be a
> distribution system like, "Roll 3d6 and distribute the points among
> the 6 Attributes with a maximum of 6 in any Attribute."
> 
> What I'm more interested in is that the Characteristic range and the
> Skill range be about the same.  Boosting the Skill range to 0 to 15
> to match the Attribute of 1 to 15 is likely to be more of a problem
> than going the other direction.
<snip>
> Well, like I wrote to Blackice, this debate can go around and round
> generating a lot of heat, but very little light...just like those
> others we've been joking about, so maybe it's better not to pursue
> it any further.
>  
> Eris
> - -- 
> - -----------------------------------------------------------
> "Eris Reddoch" <eris@pcola.gulf.net>    using MR/2 ICE #245
> - -----------------------------------------------------------

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 07:43:27 -0600
From: cos 90 <cos90@powersurfr.com>
Subject: Fast Food (was Re: PRB)

>ObTrav: Any standard fast-food restaurants in your Traveller universe? My
>preferred characters' dining spot is Arg's Groat Burger, a Vargr-owned and
>loosely-based franchise (with widely varying menus based on local tastes
>and law levels) which I first invented for an illustration for an article
>on food in Traveller I did for a fanzine. Arg's soon became a running gag,
>especially stumbling across empty Arg's styrene containers while looking
>for some misplaced device in a closet...

GURPS Traveller mentions a fast-food chain that supposedly has a location
in each and every starport in the Imperium -- and some outside it as well:
Astroburger. Its menu and general style resembles that of a certain chain
found on late 20th-century Terra that is represented by a pair of golden
arches... I of course use it in my own G:T campaign, and the players are
starting to get the idea that Astroburger is everywhere... (latest adventure,
total planetary population is just over 600, and even there, they found an
Astroburger...)



     Glenn St-Germain  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 
cos90@powersurfr.com  http://plaza.powersurfr.com/glenn
        "There is no longer any normal to be"
                                 -- Gary Numan

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 07:49:24 -0600
From: cos 90 <cos90@powersurfr.com>
Subject: Re: Traveller-digest V1999 #935

>Thank you.  I wasn't sure what the word was :)  I don't think I even want
>to know why I should mention pirates.  Oops...just did...sorry, I won't
>mention pirates again.
>
>Badman (pirates?)

Uh-oh, he said the P word. Prepare to be hit by a a jump torpedo
fired by a group of bisexual Aslani females fired from a near-c 
asteroid while barbecuing a K'kree...

(did I miss anything in that list?)


     Glenn St-Germain  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 
cos90@powersurfr.com  http://plaza.powersurfr.com/glenn
        "There is no longer any normal to be"
                                 -- Gary Numan

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 06:54:58 -0700
From: Bruce Johnson <johnson@pharmacy.arizona.edu>
Subject: Re: First In

Black ICE wrote:
> 
> Benyamene' ZeAbe' Akella wrote:
> >
> > > In mail you write:
> > >
> > >>> Canon? Hell I use Vulcans myself!
> > >>
> > >> Vulcans in your canon? Wouldn't the rate of fire suck? ;)
> > >> XRP!
> > >
> > > I dunno, I thought Vulcans had a 20-30 *thousand* rounds per minute
> > > rating. :-)
> >
> > *As* a canon, not in one. I thought he meant pointy eared, green blooded
> > type Vulcans anyway. He didn't.
> 
> Well, if you're going to talk about Vulcan, forge ahead.  It's beginning
> to tire me, though, so I won't play the rubber of this match.
>

That's it..keep pounding on it, make the sparks fly, anvil keep making bad
puns. It's no giant deal to ME!

Bruce

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:21:40 -0500
From: "Smart, David J (David)" <dasmart@lucent.com>
Subject: Re: MREs, Disasters, & SD

tasegeal@juno.com posted:

<snip>
> This brings to mind an odd subject...
>
> Has anyone ever run a scenerio involving a "natural" disaster?
> Earthquakes, Floods, Volcanoes, Plague, Famine, etc....

Yep. F5-type tornado bearing down on a merchie which had grounded
on an unhabited planet in order to divide the loot of a pi***y run.
Their M-drive had been damaged by their target and being repaired.

First time ever for their Engineering-6 lad to roll a critical
failure...

Ah, well.

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:54:40 -0400
From: Thomas Jones-Low <tjoneslo@softstart.com>
Subject: RE: Ethically-challenged civilians

[LURK MODE OFF]
	To drag a real life example into this argument; there was an article in
Time/Newsweek about about a month or so ago describing the modern day
pirates on the south seas around singapore, and how there have been more
than 50 (?) attacks this year alone.  Sorry this is from fading memory.
But is is apparently a serious problem. 
	So to translate this into a Traveller universe we would need: A border
region where the powers that be may argue about who is to patrol where,
a number of low tech systems desperate for modern high tech goods, and a
one or two heavily trafficked ports: Say the spinward main in the
Spinward marches. 
	The other difference is most modern cargo vessels are not armed. So a
group of thugs in a zodiac with a heavy machine gun can capture a full
sized vessel and steal what they want. But the modern vessels are not
armed because the insurance companies will not pay for cargo damaged in
a fire fight...
	The pirates also take advantage of the survival instinct of the ship
captain. If the Pirates take only the cargo, the captain is out a cargo
load, which may be covered by insurance (ooh... This is why piracy is so
rampant, it all insurance scams), vs. being in a fire fight where he may
end up being killed. PC's of course have a different estimation of risk. 
<LURK MODE ON>
- -- 
	Thomas Jones-Low		
	tjoneslo@softstart.com

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 08:38:20 -0600
From: Erwin Fritz <efritz@GLJA.com>
Subject: Re: MT Task Varients

Eris Reddoch wrote:
> 
> Erwin, my point is that the *full* characteristic isn't really used
> much in MT during play.  I know there are a few places they come up,
> but mighty few.
> 

True. One must arbitrarily pick a range for characteristic values. In MT, it's
0-15. One could make the argument, as you seem to, that the real range of
characteristics is 0-3, and you'd be right.

If one simply (and, of course, simple is exactly what it wouldn't be) altered
the MT rules so that all characteristics are expressed as a range from 0 to 3,
then everything would be consistent.

On the other hand, I would find it cumbersome to know that, during CharGen, I
got "one-fifth" of a Strength point, bringing it to 1.2. Decimal attribute
values would be the norm with characters.

This means that in tasks, it wouldn't be as simple as Skill+Characteristic.
You'd have to drop the decimal. Am I nitpicking? Probably. However, the only
beef my players have with the MT task system is that a characteristic of 14 is
worth just as much as a characteristic of 10. If these characteristics are
rewritten as 2.8 and 2.0, respectively, the problem remains. The 0.8 is worth
nothing.

As a referee, I prefer to spend my time working on the creative side of
adventures and the TU. The less time I spend rolling up characters and changing
rules, the better. This means that I use Traveller materials from all sorts of
places extensively, especially my collection of CT stuff.

One nice thing about the MT Characteristic range is that my CT Supplements 1, 4,
and 13 port very easily into MT. I can also run my CT adventures without having
to convert their "tasks". 

But that's just my opinion. YMMV.

> >It gets used in rolls that aren't tasks. For example, I often require
> >my players to do an intelligence check. That's simply a 2D roll, with
> >success being the Int value or less.
> 
> Nope, that's a house rule, right?  You *could* do the same thing
> as a MT Task using the INT/5 value, and I seem to remember that
> Characteristic only tasks for things like this using the X/5 value
> are described.
> 

I could be mistaken, but I've never come across a task in MT that a player can
use to see if his character notices something. I'm not talking about the use of
Recon skill here; characters may nor may not notice ordinary events going on
around them. I usually make people do the Int check (above) for that.

Yes, it's a house rule. However, it works very nicely because of the
characteristic range I mentioned.

> >If you're backward compatible with the older Traveller adventures,
> >you'll need the full characteristics for many of the rolls in those
> >books.
> 
> Sorry, still not part of MT itself.  I can understand having them
> there if you're playing TNE or T4 where they are used a lot, or CT
> were there isn't the MT Task System.  If you're using MT, though,
> shouldn't you be converting the mechanics in those other system
> adventures into MT Tasks before you start play?
> 

See above for my comments on what I'd rather be spending my time doing.

> >The full value of Int and of Educ gets used to determine the maximum
> >skills a character may have.
> 
> >The full value of characteristics is used in modifier definitions.
> >For examples, look at the Enlistment modifiers in CharGen,
> 
> These are both during character generation, not *in play*, I don't
> think the number of skill levels decrease if INT or EDU decrease
> while playing the game.  And while they *are* used in CharGen,

I disagree. I play that rule hard (IMTU, of course). If a character takes a
temporary or permanent hit to Intelligence (as can happen from Aging Effects or
some combat damage), and if that character is maxed out in skills, then I
require the player to drop skills appropriately.

Similarly, if a player rolls to get a skill using collected ATs, but that new
skill would push the skill total over the limit, then the player has to decide
whether the character gets the skill at all, and if so, which other skill to
lower accordingly.

These happen in play.

> enlistment rolls as you mention, I've often wondered why not make
> all of CharGen Task based too.  Then you would roll an Enlistment
> Task. Something like...
> 
>   To Enlist in the Army.
>   Routine. Dex, End.
> 

You could do this, but you'd be altering the probabilities of success from the
given rolls. This may or may not be a good thing.

> >or the Strength modifier used in the Broadsword weapon.
> 
> I'll give you that one, *but* it just says you halve pen (or is it
> dam) if STR is less than 10.  That sentance could just as easily
> have said "if STR/5 is less than 2", couldn't it?  Or if STR only
> ranged from 0 to 4, just "if STR < 2."
> 

You're right, of course.

> >They also get used, if I recall correctly, to calculate the distances
> >characters may jump, either horizontally or vertically.
> 
> Yes, secondary stats that are calculated during character
> generation, not during play.  Or do you modify them if the
> characteristics change due to wounds or injury?  Do the rules say
> you are supposed to?
> 

No, these are generated during play, because the gravity of the world affects
the numbers.

Yes, I modify them if the characteristics change for any reason at all. It seems
logical to me that, if you're wounded, you may not be able to jump as high.

Speaking of wounds, changing characteristics to one-fifth their CT value would
require changing the wounding system. For example, my character takes 2 hits.
After the combat session, I apply 2D as two individual hits to my
characteristics (each hit being one die).

Now, if my characteristics range from 0 to 3, I now have to divide my dice by 5
as well, keeping track of fractions. Or multiply my characteristics by 5, apply
the dice, and then divide by 5.

Both ways seem too complicated.

> I know I'm being picky here, but it seems to me that the 2d6
> characteristic could easily be dumped entirely.  It seems that it
> is really only there because "it's always been there."
> 

The 2D system for characteristics is definitely a port from CT rules, no
question. Whether or not it should be abandoned is where we disagree.

Personally, I like the 2D system because (unlike the D&D game I play) it gives
you a bell probability curve. The rules aren't kidding when they say that the
average character is 777777 at age 18. 

As a player, one knows that the chances of meeting a CCC777 character are
slight, so if there are a lot of those encountered suddenly, then something's
up.

Compare that with the flatter probability curve of using 0-3 values. 

> A lot of us think that using a whole 2d6, plus up to 3 more, (2 to
> 15) like in TNE and T4 gives the Characteristic too much weight.  A
> lot of us think a smaller range of values, say 0 to 3, 4, 5
> (whatever) works better.  The folks that designed MT, obviously
> thought Characteristics should *normally* be used as if they were 0
> to 3.
> 

Hey, it's only a game. If "a lot" of people think that, then they can introduce
house rules. I'm just saying why the MT rules work well IMTU. If they don't work
well for somebody else, then that person should use different rules.


- -- 
Erwin Fritz
Gilbert Laustsen Jung Associates Ltd.
http://www.glja.com

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 15:38:16 +0100
From: Phil Kitching <postmark.design@btinternet.com>
Subject: Re: Relief for Newbies

At 13:44 12/08/1999 +0100, Ewan Quibell <E.D.Quibell@bton.ac.uk> wrote:
>or 
>
>http://www.bits.org.uk/
>
>Ewan

thankyou. I knew someone would be able to decipher my ramblings.

Phil Kitching
- --
  http://www.btinternet.com/~salvo/
  Postmark Design Bureau, Emerging Technologies Division.
 "Microwaving half-baked ideas from across the Galaxy"

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 08:04:42 -0700
From: Bruce Johnson <johnson@pharmacy.arizona.edu>
Subject: Re: Vilani  Stature, human origins

Alan Bradley wrote:
> 
> > From: "Matthew Bond"
> > H. neandertalensis is nowadays (unless everyone has changed their minds
> > again in the last five years) classed as H. sapiens neanderthalensis, ie
> a
> > subspecies of archaic Hom. Sap. There is probably a little H.S.N (amongst
> > others) in all of us.
> 
> I saw "some random TV program" on this a few weeks ago.  It said that there
> had been tests done on DNA recovered from Neanderthal remains, looking for
> common genes.  Basically their results put neanderthals as more similar to
> modern humans than gorillas and chimpanzees, but still different enough to
> suggest they were another species.  I'm not claiming that this is the last
> word on the matter, of course.

Would you like a bucketload of salt with those results? I'd be _really_
skeptical of someone claiming to get enough intact DNA from Neandertal remains
to do anything that detailed. We have bones that are what, 80,000-40,000 years
old? Not very conducive for DNA preservation, even in the teeth.
 
> The other question is, how widespread were neanderthals?  Most of the
> remains that have been found seem to have been in Europe, the Middle East
> and North Africa, at a time when "humans" were scattered all over the
> place.  (I wrote "humans" because I'm not sure if I meant H. erectus,
> archaic H. sapiens or what.)

Well, this gets into the anthropologically sticky argument between the
'out-of-Africa' folk and the 'evolved-everywhere' folk. One side has it that
successive waves of emigration of human species from Africa displaced earlier
populations. This is butressed by the 'Eve mitochondria' studies, and the fact
that we are pretty homogenous, genetically, usually markers of a small
population that expanded. 

On the other hand, we have anatomically modern humans appearing all over the
place far _earlier_ than the aforementioned Eve studies can predict, and in
places that were possibly geographically isolated, leading to the theory that
modern humans arose spontaneously from scattered populations of more archaic
populations. 

On the gripping hand, of course, none of the anthropologists involved are
thinking seriously about Ancient, umm, _interference_, which is too bad, as it
_does_ explain things quite neatly.

> Anyway, what kind of "humans" could have been around during the Ancients
> period?  I'm a little vague on this stuff.  What would you have found in
> different areas, like, say, Africa, India, China, Europe, etc.  As far as
> I'm aware no traces have been found of human occupation of Australia/New
> Guinea (a single landmass at this time) this far back.  What about the
> Americas?

Human occupation of the western hemisphere is reliably dated to only about
20-30ky ago. There is some highly disputed evidence placing human occupation
of South America back that far which would imply (given the 'got here via the
Bering Straight' route) that human occupation of North America occurred much
earlier. Still, no one's claiming earlier dates than about 70ky ago, well
within the 'modern' period.

Of course, _all_ of this is sheer speculation because we have, at best, about
15-20 pieces of the 1000 piece puzzle in front of us, and some of the pieces
look like they might be close to fitting, but that's about it.

For all we know, there _were_ succesive waves of emigration by human and
human-like species out of Africa...after all we have reliable evidence of H.
erectus out to the in China and Maylasia. In fact we have better fossil
evidence of H. erectus there than we do in Africa, IIRC. Throughout the period
of H. erectus (1.6mya - ~250kya) periodic glaciations occured, surely this
opened land bridges to large areas of the world.

Could they have gotten as far as North America? Quite possibly. Obviously,
though, they didn't leave any fossil traces that we have found yet.

When the Ancients arrived on the scene, they found a species of primate that
was clearly sentient, made and used stone tools, was learning to talk, and
most importantly, used fire. That, more than the making of tools, is the key
to humanity's evolution. 

We have many examples of tool-making and use in a number of species, other
primates, sea otters, crows, parrots, but the one thing that first
distinguished us (and still does) was the use of fire.

That's what got Gramps interested in us. We were so malleable still, but had
made the crucial evolutionary leap that put us on the track to higher
intelligence. Fire needs acute temporal senses (you have to make sure you keep
it going..it runs out of fuel, you need to have more on hand before it runs
out.), significant knowledge of using tools (even the simplest means of making
a fire, banging two rocks together, is surprisingly sophisticated). It take a
lot of sophistication to make the conceptual leap from fire=natural disaster
to fire=tool. There is evidence that H. erectus poulations in China had been
using fire for a _long_ time, meaning it had _first_ been used a lot earlier. 

This implies, to me at least, that despite the differences in brain size, the
greater part of the intellectual development of humans, and likely a lot of
the physical development, too, occured in the H. hablis - H. erectus
transition, and that evolution since then has been to a large extent,
incidental; that H. erectus, genetically, was probably very similar to us. 

The biggest differences between H. erectus and us are height, skull and jaw
structure and brain size. the first two are related to long-term changes in
our diet, the transition from a 'nuts and seeds' diet to a more varied one,
but primarily based on softer foods. 

Brain size may be related to the exploding use of technology. As more
technology is learned to need finer control, more memory, and a way of passing
information along: speech. This would support the multiple origin theory,
since the same factors were driving the evolution of a widespread species,
it's not surprising that what evolved was pretty much the same.

The development of speech probably drove brain size evolution more than
anything else, as well as the transition from the robust jaws of H. erectus to
the far more gracile jaws of modern humans. In fact the development of speech
may have driven our dietary change too. Smaller teeth and jaws make much more
varied speech but a diet of hard seeds and nuts more difficult. We may have
_had_ to invent hunting and farming so we could keep talking to each other ;-)

Any _real_ anthropologist on the list is free, of course to jump in and mangle
this with those inconvienent facts that always seem to wreck my theories :-)

Bruce

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 07:46:12 PST
From: shadow@krypton.rain.com (Leonard Erickson)
Subject: Re: A defence against near C rocks

In mail you write:

> My contention would be that while it would be theoretically possible to
> accelerate a mass to near-C, it would be almost impossible to HIT anything
> with it.  You've got a planet hurtling around a star which is hurtling
> around the galactic core.  How are you going to hit something like that
> with an object that must be constantly accelerated (possibly for years)
> before it gets to the desired velocity?

A "mere" thousand km long accelerator operating at around 1 million g
(actually fairly low accel for such things) can boost a projectile up
to around 1% of c in the blink of an eye. 

And from 100 (or was it 1000?) AU it's take about 90 days to reach a
planet at 1 AU. Planetary orbits are *very* predictable.

- -- 
Leonard Erickson (aka Shadow)
 shadow@krypton.rain.com        <--preferred
leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com     <--last resort

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 08:32:01 -0700
From: "Thing" <gduke@orca.esd114.wednet.edu>
Subject: RE: Physics photon question/ Solar Sails

On Wednesday, August 11, 1999 2:42 PM
Anthony Jackson said,

> This is false.  Photons have mass, but no rest mass.  The
> equations of special relativity break down for lightspeed,
> the mass of a massless particle at lightspeed is 0/0 (a
> particle with no rest mass can _only_ move at the speed of
> light; a particle with rest mass can only move less than c.
> A particle with imaginary rest mass can only move faster than c).


So the mass of a photon is just an artifact of relativistic movement? It
doesn't have any mass, but it effects other bodies as if it did?

I found a text talking about solar sails that seems to express this.
http://caliban.physics.utoronto.ca/neufeld/sailing.txt

So does relativistic travel distort space-time to produce this effect?

And if a particle with no rest mass can only move at the speed of light,
then why does light move slower through non-vacuums, and really slow through
Bose-Einstein condensates ?  If photons are truly massless particles, it
would seem impossible to slow down light, unless you could change a photon
from massless to a highly energetic, low mass particle.

G.D.D.
======
"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them
into the impossible." -Arthur C. Clarke

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:05:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: Anthony Jackson <ajackson@molly.iii.com>
Subject: Re: Physics photon question/ Solar Sails

Phil Kitching writes:
 For the solar sail calculation, just use p = E/c for the laser beam and
> assume some efficency percentages to determine how powerful your laser is
> to get 1G or
> whatever acceleration.
> 
> Hmmm, this must breakdown somewhere or the acceleration is constant for a
> constant
> energy input...well as the sail goes faster, the photons hitting it are red
> shifted
> and thus have less momentum but some effect should happen before
> relativistic velocities, so please comment if you spot the mistake.

Actually, acceleration _is_ constant for constant input (in the case of a solar sail, input isn't constant due to redshifting).  You can convert energy into momentum with a conversion constant of c -- but this is a 'perfect' reaction engine, not a reactionless effect.

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

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 11:59:07 -0400
From: Walter Smith <SmithW@HARTWICK.EDU>
Subject: re: Ethically Challenged Merchants

Benyamene' ZeAbe' Akella wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
> Privateers are paid by the ton of kill...  they just flare the hull and
> didi-mau.

Didi-mau? Ex-squeeze me?

And what does "prize crew it" mean?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Some of my brothers in the US Army brought "Didi-mau" home with them, they learned it from men who had been to Vietnam, it means something
like "Get out of there". The soldiers learned it so they could yell it at
Vietnamese soldiers and civilians and kept it themselves as a slang term.

A prize crew is a crew placed on a captured ship so you can bring it home
as a prize of war (or a prize of piracy, if there isn't a war on). To "prize 
crew" something would be to put a minimum crew aboard a captured
ship so you could send it back to base, or (if you are a pirate) off to
a place where it can be sold.

In the official Traveller universe, it may be hard to find a place where
stolen ships can be sold, due to difficulties in changing or forging useful 
transponder signals. A ship stealing operation needs official
connections (to illegitemately get replacement real transponders), an 
unusual amount of technical expertise (to create fakes of these supposedly
unforgeable transponders), or the ability to get the ships across the
Imperial border and to a neutral (or even semi-hostile) state that
doesn't know or doesn't care that the ship is stolen from that big,
well-armed Imperium next door.

IMTU, the difficulty of selling a stolen ship is one reason pirates are
likely to steal cargo and valuables but leave the ship behind. 

Walt Smith

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

End of Traveller-digest V1999 #950
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