
-------- TML Message #633 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 633
From: ("45252-Peter L. Berghold") wrgate.wr.tek.com!uunet.uu.net!allegra!violin!violin!plb@tektronix.TEK.COM
Subject: Some ruminations
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 9:36:49 EDT


Hi gang,

I was mulling over the idea of warm up times for starship power plants and I 
came to the following thoughts:

Warm up time is going to be highly dependant on the size, age, and maintenance
record of the power plant in question.  Larger, older, and less maintained 
power plants are going to take longer to come on line than a smaller, newer,
well maintained power plant.  

I think of my 77 Plymouth Volare station wagon.  It has a "slant 6" engine in
it, a medium size, very reliable motor.  Because it is old and its previous 
owner didn't take very good care of it, it tends to be a little 
cantankerous in the morning.   A freind of mine has a souped up Chevy (size of 
motor unknown, just very souped!) and because it is a complex beasty it 
doesn't want to start on any but the nicest day and it complains at that!

What is my point?  I am just trying to say that you really can't have a hard 
fast set of rules about starships run up times.   I think a great deal of 
flexibility has to be applied to the question.


Pete

- -- 
/* - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  */
/*		Peter L. Berghold					*/
/*		System Administrator					*/
/*		AT&T Red Hill Systems Administration Group		*/
/*		1F138	+1 (201) 615-4419				*/
/*		EMAIL (UUCP):	{uunet!allegra|att}!violin!plb		*/
/* - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  */


	(**** Transaction from an old campaign *******)
	GM: Your 100T scout is currently surrounded by 150+ Vargr 
	fighters.  Your turret fire control system has failed.  
	What are you going to do next?

	Player: CHARRRRGE!!!


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-------- TML Message #634 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 634
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 11:53:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: (Eric Edward Moore) em21+@andrew.cmu.edu
Subject: Taxes


A while ago, I asked a friend of mine, who knows a lot more about 
economics than I do, and is also an avid Traveller player to help me
come up with a way the interstellar taxation system works.
This is how I/we work it.
	1) The imperium takes a slice from the military spending of
		all member planets to help pay for the navy etc.
	2) Most if not all planets have their own internal taxation 
		(income taxes/property taxes etc.)
	3) The Imperium prohibits import duties on all member planets
		except for small income tarrifs, which are
		discouraged.
	4) The imperium imposes a value-added tax on all manufacturing
		on Hi-Pop worlds.

Mostly we find that your average wandering free trader does not have
to pay too much in the way of taxes, as 1 and 4 don't apply to them at
all, and they rearely have to pay income taxes at home and the tarrifs
can be assumed to be built into the price system.  There are always
exceptions. "What do you mean I owe seven years back income tax I
haven't been here in seven years.  Oh yeah, you gave me citizenship
didn't you?"

	-Love Kisses and a Neutron Bomb
		-Eric the Finn

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-------- TML Message #635 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 635
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 11:56:06 EDT
From: (Dan Corrin) dan@engrg.uwo.ca
Subject: Black holes


This subject came up (Actually I brought it up :-)) on the star system 
generation group, and I was wondering about everone's opinion on this:

What does everyone assume about stellar phenomenon? There has never been a
place for generating black holes, neutron stars, nebula, dust clouds, 
pulsars etc. in the rules.

I have always assumed that there were a lot more stars than are actually drawn
on the map. The other "unmapped" stars would only be of passing interest to 
Scientists (1 month research trips and unmanned montioring probes). All of 
these "stars" would have two things in common:
a) no fuel to speak of (interstellar hydrogen, occasionaly a comet or two) 
b) no solid surfaces to put bases or other strucures on.

Therefore they are not placed on the maps as jumpspace effectively ignores 
everything between the entry/exit points (The navigator worries about 
them and their possible influence but not anyone else).

I seem to recall some rules (Leviathin/Zhodani module? I'm going to have to
bring my rules into work...) That seemed to make it extraordinarily difficult
to map the area that you are in. I believe that even with today's
technology, we could map the majority of the imperium without leaving earth
(albeit only star locations).
This inconsistancy (as I see it) could be accounted for if there was other
stellar objects that are not of interest.

	-Dan

						Dan Corrin
	dan@engrg.uwo.ca			System Manager
	D.Corrin@uwo.ca				Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
	Unbeliever@uwovax.BITNET		University of Western Ontario
	...!watmath!julian!engrg!dan		London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 5B9
						(519) 661-3834



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-------- TML Message #636 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 636
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 11:32:30 EDT
From: (Greg Givler - QA) givler@cbmvax.commodore.COM
Subject: Re:  Taxes



>Subject: Taxes
>Date: Mon Oct 16 14:33:12 1989
>Message-Id: <8910161433.AA23308@agora.hf.intel.com>
>From: Richard Johnson <richard@agora.hf.intel.com>
>
>How about some discussion of taxes?  What are the tax rates across
>the Imperium?  How are taxes collected?  What devious methods have
>been devised to get people to "volunteer" some portion of their
>just (or unjust) profit?
>
>Richard

Any follow-ups to TAXES, please send them to me for inclusion in the
Trade and Commerce digest.

Also did everyone get a copy of the latest one Vol 8.

If not let me know. it was the begining of a replacement system 
for Trade and Commerce.

Greg

- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Givler                        Q-Link: GregGivler
QA Analyst                         CompuServe: Greg Givler 76702,647
Commodore QA (Software)            GEnie: G.Givler
215-431-9100                       INTERNET: givler@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Life is pain, Highness, anyone who says differently is selling something"
 - The Dread Pirate Roberts -- The Princess Bride
===============================================================================


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-------- TML Message #637 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 637
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 09:51 EDT
From: 09NILLES%CUA.BITNET@cornellc.cit.cornell.edu
Subject: Old fashoned rockets


Here is something that I occured to me on this great discussion about trying
to get bast the 6-G barrior.  What ever happened to the good old fashoned
ROCKET!!.  They aren't bothered by any warping in the time/space/whatever
fields.  They just shoot and shoot.  I would be intersted to see if someone
can come up with a viable versions.  They would obviously be limmeted to
ships about 600t and smaller simply because they would take up so much room.
Admittedly their main disadvantage would be size.  But they have two advantages
and that is:a) alows you to use a manuever 6 plus the rockets to get that total
of manuever 12.  b) cost.  They would still be cheaper per manuever then a
manuever drive.  Though another disadvantage is a wpn hitting the O2 tanks.
plus they couldn't be fully refueled at a gass giant. Minor things, but when
you need that extra burst of speed in the middle of combat.

Another minor problem is getting the inerial compensators to work for those high
G's.  but then again modern fighter pilots regularly are under sustained 5-6G
manuevers.  Then bring in the 6G compensators would bring the 12G acceleration
to a simple 6G felling for the crew and passengers.

Yea I know some of this doesn't make sense, but when you right on the fly, not
everything can work out perfectly.

dave
09nilles@cua.bitnet

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-------- TML Message #638 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 638
From: (Adrian Hurt) adrian%cs.heriot-watt.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Subject: gravitics handwaving
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 19:03:33 BST



Jim Baranski writes:
> RE: very long file about gravitics.
> 
> Very interesting...  But it seems like an awful lot of handwaving to explain
> something that should be very simple.  I'd much prefer discussion on how to
> make the subject reasonable and simple, then handwaving on how to make it
> complicated... :-)

Well, the simplest method is as follows.

Grav-plates utilise gravity-type forces to overcome the 'real' gravity
produced by a planet, and to provide thrust. Repulsors use similar forces
to keep enemy missiles away. What's their theory of operation? I don't know,
go and ask a gravitics scientist!

After all, how many computer users could give you a detailed account of just
how little lumps of silicon deliberately made impure to create junctions
can do what computers do? Do many jet fighter pilots have any knowledge of
the chemistry of jet fuel? Do many starship pilots really know the inside
story of their manoeuvre drives?

If the PC's want to make life difficult for the referee by going and asking a
gravitic scientist, then the scientist (after giving them an appointment -
he's got more important things to do, after all) gives them a nice long lecture
involving enough 3rd order differential equations to make them sick of
gravitics for the rest of their lives.

Almost all SF has some kind of sufficiently advanced technology to make the
story interesting - in Traveller, it's gravitics, nuclear dampers and jump
drives. It isn't really necessary to come up with long explanations of how it
all works. As far as the PC is concerned, all that is important is that it
does work, or that he/she can apply a suitable skill to repair it if it
doesn't.

Or, if you must invent long explanations for everything in order for it to
be plausible for you, then you'll have to also write long essays on just
what is involved in such skills as Starship Tactics, Demolition, Admin, and
all the rest. And no cheating by saying "Well, such things are understood,
but I'm not an expert".

 "Keyboard? How quaint!" - M. Scott

 Adrian Hurt			     |	JANET:  adrian@uk.ac.hw.cs
 UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian     |  ARPA:   adrian@cs.hw.ac.uk

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-------- TML Message #639 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 639
From: (Bart Massey) bart@fatal.tv.TEK.COM
Subject: Re: Gravitics
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 15:01:39 PDT


[I changed the subject line to be more meaningful than "Digest #xxx" --
James]

> It is critical, especially in jump-capable vessels to have
> space-time as smooth as possible in and around the ship.  The
> amount space-time is warped represents how much is not known
> about the ship's present position, or its destination.

> In general, "relativistic effects" means we become totally
> uncertain about everything; we can't "know" anything without
> altering the conditions upon which we "know" it.

I'm not sure what you mean by all this, but I think you may
be confusing space-time distortion with Heisenberg
uncertainty.  The former is a relativistic effect, and the
latter a quantum mechanical one.

One of the beautiful features of Einstein's formulation of
special and general relativity is that the effects of
space-time distortion are deterministic, in the same sense
that classical mechanics is deterministic:  If you have
complete information about the state of a system at time T,
you can perfectly calculate its state at all future times
T+t.  (Note that the notion of time here *is* a little
confusing -- suffice it to say that any relativistic system
is completely causal, i.e. time flows forward only, and that
it is always possible to synchronize all the "local clocks"
to any causal "master clock", which you can then think of as
"the" clock...)  Indeed, for any reasonably advanced society,
the calculations shouldn't be much more difficult.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a fundamental feature
of quantum mechanics.  Quantum mechanics, unlike relativity,
is a completely non-deterministic theory:  Even if you could
have complete information about the state of a system at time
T, you could only calculate the *probability* of the system
being in some other specified state at time T+t.  (In fact,
for *any* state, the probability of the system moving to that
state is nonzero -- just so low that it will "never" happen
in the expected lifetime of this universe!).  But
Heisenberg's principle says that you can't ever even
*acquire* complete information about the state of a QM
system.  In particular, let the probability that a particle
has a given velocity be P(v), and the probability that it has
a given position be P(x).  Then P(x)P(v) <= C, where C is a
magic constant.  Thus, the more certain you are about *where*
a particle is, the less certain you are about where it's
going, and vice-versa.

Thus, the above-quoted statements probably should invoke QM,
or even QCD, the merger of QM with relativistics.  However,
this opens up a whole 'nother nasty can of worms for the
gravitics theorist...

Comments or criticisms, anyone?  I'm sure there's some real
howler lurking in my comments somewhere... :-)

					Bart Massey
					..tektronix!videovax.tv.tek.com!bart
					..tektronix!reed.bitnet!bart


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-------- TML Message #640 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 640
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 16:42:27 EDT
From: (Dan Corrin) dan@engrg.uwo.ca
Subject: Re:  Taxes


<Richard> 
> How about some discussion of taxes?  What are the tax rates across
> the Imperium?  How are taxes collected?  What devious methods have
> been devised to get people to "volunteer" some portion of their
> just (or unjust) profit?
> 

There is some interesting information about taxes in Trillion Credit
Squardon. There is a section on incomes from planets for a campaign game.
If I remember correctly the revenue was 500 Cr per person modified by
government and state of hostilites. This represents just the naval budget.
(Hence the importance of high population worlds to the factions in the
imperium. I have always presumed that this naval budget is split between
the local, Subsector and imperial navys. In this case the imperium gets
money for its fleet in return for protecting the planet (The only thing
the Imperium seems to do for local planets). This implies that the imperium
gets its cut from the locals, but doesn't care how they come up with it in the
first place. In this case the planetary government can call on Imperial/Subsector 
forces to help retrieve tax money from citizens or visitors who are reluctant to 
pay.
At 500 Cr per person just for the military (navy), the average family of four
pays 2000Cr per year, then we add in local taxes for the government, which vary
but I usualy use 4x this amount. Resulting in a net Cr8,000 per year. (If I 
remember correctly some crew members only make Cr1,000 a month. - They better not
have large families!)
To answer your questions directly. The imperial portion would be the same,
across the imperium, (but the locals may not collect it equally). Taxes are
collected according to the government type of the planet in question.
Deviousness doesn't have to come into it. If you don't pay duty etc. no trading
impounding of ship/cargo, etc. (This does bring into question who the full-time
starship crews pay their taxes to?)

> 
> How does a small-time operator deal with differnt governments, taxes,
> and probably weights and measures, as he/she ploys commerce around
> the many worlds?  Is there a widley accepted bookkeeping method?
> 
If you are dealing at a starport, the imperial reguations regarding
trade would be used (another service provided to the planet!) And a standard
mechanism for payment of taxes, calcualting weights (eg. Imperial Litre :-)),
and paperwork. If you are dealing outside of the starport, you had better have
a good legal skill. (A good incentive to always use the port facilities, even
if there is a slight charge...)

			-Dan Corrin

By the way. If you calculate the income from the high population worlds, in the
Imperium, a fleet of 11000 BatRons can be easily maintained.

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-------- TML Message #641 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 641
Subject: Re: Black holes 
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 89 22:15:29 PDT
From: (Leonard Erickson) leonard@tessi.UUCP


I remember checking some of this out once. The Traveller rules have stars
spaced approximately correctly. (Ie ave seperation in the range of a parsec
or two).

The problem is that the distribution of stellar types is such that the vast
majority of star are class M dwarfs. These require space based observatories
to locate if they are even a sector away! 

At least it is fairly simple to determine stellar positions given a medium
sized (say 20 inch?) scope on a jump capable ship. Do a full 360 degree
photo survey. Do a Jump-1. Take a second set of photos. Run them thru the
computers to see which images moved and how much. Plot the positions. 
Continue.

Black holes and neutron stars require a supernova to form. These require rather
large (and thankfully rare!) stars. I've seen estimates that place the lethal
radiation zone around a supernova at 15-30 parsecs. So a supernova would *kill*
a sector in all directions! The effects include what amounts to a massive
EMP. So unless your whole planet is using Fiber backup electronics...

We do have a small nebula down in the Aslan area. Except for the small
nebula ("planetary" nebulas) they tend to be sub-sector to sector size. It's
not surprising that there are so few in the mapped areas.

An old neutron star or a "brown dwarf" would have interesting possiblities.
A brown dwarf might be able to keep a small *very* close in planet warm enough
to be habitable. And it would be dim enough that it might not have been mapped.
This would make a great adventure....

"The pirate base *has* to be close! Those ships can only do jump-2."
"But there isn't anything that close..."  :-)


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-------- TML Message #642 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 642
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 89 10:48:45 EDT
From: (Dan Corrin) dan@engrg.uwo.ca
Subject: Re: Black holes


<Leonard> 
> I remember checking some of this out once. The Traveller rules have stars
> spaced approximately correctly. (Ie ave seperation in the range of a parsec
> or two).
Yes, but the average seperation is also in 3D space, so we are losing a number
of stars for our 2D representation. There can be many excuses for this
simplification, but as I mentioned, I assume that these other stars are not
interesting, and (for a simple model) vertical movement is unnecessary.
> 
> The problem is that the distribution of stellar types is such that the vast
> majority of star are class M dwarfs. These require space based observatories
> to locate if they are even a sector away! 
The charts for star creation do not give this distribution, and a viewing a 
sector at a time is good data collection, unlike the core exploration rules
in the Zhodani module.
> ...Do a full 360 degree photo survey. Do a Jump-1. Take a second set of photos. 
> Run them thru the computers to see which images moved...
Perhaps a Jump-6 or two would survey the area faster.
> 
> Black holes and neutron stars require a supernova to form. These require rather
> ... So a supernova would *kill*
> a sector in all directions! The effects include what amounts to a massive
> EMP. So unless your whole planet is using Fiber backup electronics...
The supernova doesn't bother us if it occured 500 Million years ago, there is
no data on the density of black holes as they are so difficult to detect, there
could be ones lingering arond from the big bang (assuming you subscribe to
that theory). There could be a blackhole/neturon star in every sector, or even
every subsector without any having been formed since the time of the Ancients.

Your last point was very good...i think I'll use it in my next campaign...

		-Dan

    dan@engrg.uwo.ca				Dan Corrin
    D.Corrin@uwo.ca				System Manager
    Unbeliever@uwovax.BITNET			Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
    ...!watmath!julian!engrg!dan		University of Western Ontario
"That Lame-braned freeway idea could only	London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 5B9
be cooked up by a 'toon" -Eddie (Rodger Rabbit)	(519) 661-3834
 




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-------- TML Message #643 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 643
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 89 10:27 EST
From: METLAY@vms.cis.pitt.edu
Subject: on "invisible" star systems



A nuclear astrophysicist's view of Dan Corrin's query:

>From a Traveller standpoint, all of the unusual stellar phenomena about which 
he's wondered are utterly unimportant. Why? Two reasons: scales of stellar
population, and the distribution and density of unusual star types. 

The population distribution of stars with respect to size, age, and light/heat 
output (i.e. luminosity) is a well-understood function, essentially an 
exponential "pyramid" with the brightest stars at the top and the dimmest at
the bottom. For every fairly bright star such as Sirius, there are hundreds
and hundreds of dim red or brown dwarfs like Barnard's Star; for every very
bright star like Acrux, there are hundreds of Siriuses. The problem with the
current star system generation tables is that if they reflected the true
population distribution of stars in the primary galactic medium, they'd bore
the average gamer to tears, because on a 3D6 table you'd need to roll a 3 or
an 18 to get anything other than a red dwarf, and then you'd have to roll a 3
or an 18 to get anything in spectral class any higher than F, and so on. From
the point of view of a "pointillistic" star system setup like Traveller or
2300 (i.e., we can only go so far before our engines poop out, so every star
system becomes an important stepping stone), the universe becomes an
intricately detailed and dishwater-dull place. |-> [In all fairness, a
"wide-dispersion" game like Space Opera (i.e., our drives have infinite speed
and range so we can pick and choose which worlds we settle) tends to lean
heavily on bizarre systems and unlikely planetary groups; hence the
Space-Opera nature of the game, where if there's no air to breathe normally
outside your Laser-Blazer stellar interceptor craft when you crashland on
Xymox IV, it MUST be a plot device.] In other words, it's unreasonable to ask
Traveller for a "more realistic" star system population distribution; if it
got any more realistic we'd die of boredom, and as it is its departures from
reality are vital if we're to have more than a fistful of inhabitable worlds
in the 11000 star systems of the Imperium. 

The fallacy in Dan's argument is as follows: Why shouldn't it be possible to 
see everything we need to chart, he asks, considering the fact that we can see 
so much just from Earth with today's telescopes? The fact is, we really can't 
see very much at all! Our vision relies on apparent luminosity, a quantity 
which is heavily dependent on temperature and proximity in a synergistic 
fashion. What this means is that while we see a mixture of red, orange, 
yellow, white, and blue-white stars in our sky, they by no means reflect true 
stellar populations: nearly half of the red dwarfs that we know of can be fit
on the Traveller:2300 Near Star Map with its 50-light-year radius, and the 
bright star Deneb in Cygnus, 1600 miles distant, is used as an example of a 
one-of-a-kind bright star in a stellar population not only by us, but by the 
Vilani as they ply the routes of the First Imperium not far from where we sit, 
by the Aslan as they make their first tentative steps toward the Tlaukhu, by 
the Vargr as they howl their unanswered questions to the moons of Lair, and to 
the Droyne as they look up from their mud huts and beg Yaskoydray to come 
back. As a bright star, Deneb stands alone; the star charts of the Imperium 
reflect this. The Solomani Rim chart features many stars of lesser but still 
bright magnitude; that's because we know they exist. In the neighborhood of 
Terra there are three dozen tiny red stars that we can see; if we extrapolate 
this to the rest of the galaxy, we assume that each yellow star is surrounded 
by red ones, and each yellow-star community is part of a cluster that 
surrounds a white star, and so on. 

The Near Star Map, by the way, is lifted from an excellent reference on this 
sort of thing, the Gliese Catalogue of Near Stars, including the Van 
Biesbroeck catalogue, the Ross and Wolf star lists, the American Catalogue, 
and the little-known but very worthwhile Vyssotsky listing of red stars, which
cites a lot of bizarre little details about some of our nearest neighbors; the
true interest in the piddling dwarfs in our back yard comes not from their
size and heat but from their odd behavior. Many are actually multiple star
systems, with companions too small to see; others are variables that flare up
from time to time in bursts of killing heat. There's a lot of interest here,
but one has to dig for it. 

And what about nebulae, neutron stars, and black holes? Forget them. They're
so rare and distantly spaced, and so noisy by their presence, that in the era
of Traveller we'd probably know about many times as many of them as we do
now, but the new ones we'd have found would all be even further away from us
than the ones we know now. There are fewer than a hundred pulsars in our sky,
and none of them is closer than the Crab, which is (I think; let me look it 
up) beyond the range of the Imperium's survey maps. The three X-ray sources
believed to be black holes, Cygnus X-1 and X-3 and Scorpius X-1, are even
further distant, their companions blue supergiants that dwarf even Deneb. It's
just not feasible to try to generate them randomly; they'd never come up in a
local area like ours. (There is the possibility of localized dark matter, like
brown dwarfs and black holes without companions, but the former would barely
perturb a jump route unless they happened to move through EXACTLY the path of
a jumping ship, which is ridiculously unlikely, and the latter don't make much
sense from a cosmological standpoint.) 

It's my opinion that the star system generators should stick to areas where 
any number of guesses might be perfectly okay, as in planetary groupings; we 
only have one system on which to base our guesses as of now, and it'll be a 
couple of centuries before we get out to Agidda and learn differently from the 
Vilani. In terms of creating stellar groupings, it's unreasonable to have more 
than a miniscule chance of anything more unusual than a single or multiple 
main-sequence star group. Giants, maybe once in a great while; Supergiants, 
almost never; Black holes, no way.

I hope this clears up the question; if not, then I've bored an AWFUL lot of 
people. I'll be glad to argue this point with anyone who thinks I'm wrong from 
a standpoint of realism, but have your references ready: I have mine. As for a 
game-fun standpoint, I believe in doing what needs to be done, of course, but 
there are a lot of ways to spice up a new sector than to sprinkle Wolf-Rayet 
and RR Lyrae stars everywhere just to freak out navigators....

metlay				| HOW TO DIE YOUNG, #586:
Traveller Mailing List Historian| 
				| Politely inform an Imperial Marine that 
metlay@pittvms.BITNET		| there are clinics for treating people who
metlay@vms.cis.pitt.EDU		| look like him....


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-------- TML Message #644 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 644
Subject: Cold Iron starts
Date: Sun Oct 15 19:15:21 1989
From: richard@agora.hf.intel.COM (Richard Johnson)


When I was in the Coast Guard, we had three general readiness levels,
called "alpha", "bravo", and "charlie".  Within each readiness level
was a number identifying time before we could actually leave the pier.

The cutter I was on would typically be assigned a "bravo-6" condition
when in port.  This meant no one could be further away than would let
them get back to the ship, be at their duty station, and have all their
assigned areas ready to leave within 6 hours.  Usually this was within
3 hours of the base.

Alpha periods were almost always assigned to short-endurance boats.  The
readiness level depended on the weather and expected activity (they would
be expected to respond more quickly on say, memorial day, when there 
was a lot of (drunk) people boating).  IF there were a storm warning, or
whatever, typical response time was from 30 seconds to 5 minutes.  The
longest "alpha" I ever heard of was 2 hours.

Charlie periods were typically time spent in the yard.  No one expected
the ship to get underway at all.  There was some fiction about being
able to get underway within two weeks.  Of course you can guess how 
likely this is if you're in dry dock, with engines dismantled, part
of the hull removed, and half the ship's wiring stripped out.

Richard

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-------- TML Message #645 --------

Archive-Message-Number: 645
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 89 11:42:20 -0500
From: wrgate.wr.tek.com!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!gslisa!gsliss!jcunning@tektronix.TEK.COM
Subject: taxes




A couple of thoughts tumble forth from my recolletions of days
long ago:

1. A fellow High Passage writer once asked Marc Miller about
taxes once when we were at a convention. He wanted an idea of 
how such a system would work and how to incorporate it into the
game if it would make a difference in some gaming situations.
Marc grimmaced, made various gurgling noises, sat silently for a
few seconds, and then finally suggested that we foget the whole
thing as it would be a lot of work to figure out such a system and
it would only add marginal things to the game. He stated that for 
official purposes, we should consider taxes factored into the game
system.


2. Re: taxes and Trillion Credit Squadron: There is also a taxes
system in good old Striker, and the two are very, very different.
I remember computing a budget for a medium sized world using the
Striker system (or was it TCS?) and computing that the world would
be able to build and maintain several hundred Tigress class 500,000
ton dreadnoughts per year. This discovery was very humorous, as
we were designing the Old Expanses Fleet at the time. We figured
that using the official rules we could easily build a fleet that
could take the rest of the Imperium by force with no trouble.
Mr. Miller was not amused by the fact that the design rules made
this possible, and told us to more or les ignore the system.


				Jim Cunningham
				Traveller Relic



All opinions and material above is the responsibility of the originator.
Submissions: traveller@dadla.wr.tek.com, or uunet!dadla.wr.tek.com!traveller
Administrator: traveller-request@dadla.wr.tek.com (James Perkins)
The TML is made possible by facilities provided by Tektronix, Inc.

-------- End of TML Messages --------

