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Subject: TML Bundle #225: Table of Contents

-AMN- --Date--- --Sender--------- --Subject-----------------------------------
2743  09-Aug-91 Mike.Metlay@ORGAN NOT ANOTHER POST ON STARSHIP AGILITY?! Well, 
2744  09-Aug-91 "Robert S. Dean"  Re: (2742) MT Starship Combat rules... << In 
2745  09-Aug-91 d9bertil@dtek.cha Re: (2742) MT Starship Combat rules... << > =
2746  09-Aug-91 KELLOGG@ducvax.au Auxillury bridges << The subject came up how 
2747  09-Aug-91 "Robert S. Dean"  Re: (2742) MT Starship Combat rules... << Sco
2748  09-Aug-91 cmaddox@imsa.edu  Proposed article about TML << [Or... TML visi

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

Archive-Message-Number: 2743
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 91 01:04:56 EDT
From: Mike.Metlay@ORGAN.MUSIC.CS.CMU.EDU
Subject: NOT ANOTHER POST ON STARSHIP AGILITY?! Well, no, actually.


Hi, gang. After many delays, a spare evening here in lovely Atomic City,
Oak Ridge, Tennesee... (amusing story: I'm standing in line to get lunch,
the first day, and there's this young guy in front of me, about my age.
He turns to make polite conversation, and suddenly reads my name tag again,
getting this weird grin on his face. "Michael Metlay?" he asks me. "Where?"
I says, looking behind me. That widens the grin a bit, but then HE sez:
"Traveller Mailing List?" You could have knocked me over with a feather!
Turns out that TML Digest-reader Martin Jarrio from Georgia Tech is here
attending this workshop/conference in Oak Ridge too! You meet TMLers in 
the WEIRDEST places, man....)

Anyway, here's a little something I've promised folx for a long while. Since
my alternatives to writing this stuff are watching TV or putting even MORE
hours in the day into my dissertation, I figured I'd get it out of the way.
Don't be surprised at the length of the intro-- it contains a lot of stuff
that was NOT in the first four stories. I'd like to give credit to W. Dow
Rieder (Grant) and Alex Wilce (Fell) on the TML, and David Turner (Jaeger),
Boris Bartlog (Kherkhoulloth), Paul Reilly (O'Connor) and Rob Packard 
(Sanchez) off it, whose actual gaming sessions from 1989 to 1991 provided all 
of what you're about to read. I redid the dialogue because my memory isn't
that good, but the rest is mostly as it happened. When my thesis is out of
the way, I plan to pick up the game again, and we'll see more from these
guys!

metlay

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

SYNOPSIS AND CHARACTER INFORMATION

The Suleiman Cluster is a grouping of a dozen or so worlds within a mutual 
Jump-1 of one another in the coreward section of the Solomani Rim. One of
the most recent arrivals onto the shipping scene in this bustling little
stellar village of industry and agriculture is the fledgling line of 
Hortense, Luttner, and Grant; for the past ten years or so, this scrappy and 
inventive shipping line has managed to accrue a good two dozen ships of 
varying sizes and solidify its place in the Suleiman shipping business. Its
founders are William Hortense, Rachel Luttner, and Khagariilian Grant, three
Free Traders who pooled their resources (Hortense's administrative savvy,
Luttner's technical expertise, and Grant's brokerage/trading genius) to build 
their struggling concerns into one strong company. This move took the 
established fleets in the area by surprise, and the competition has been hot 
and heavy ever since. They include, for future reference, Rekuta (the local
Tukera affiliate), Whitestar/Concord (the local branch of WhiteStar Lines, 
the Solomani Rim's biggest non-megacorporate sector line) and Belvane
TransTech, a fiercely competitive interface line run by the inimitable
Myra Belvane (you need a description? Put Joan Collins in a vacc suit. A
TIGHT vacc suit.), whose fiery passion for Bill Hortense was often at odds
with their economic thrust and parry.

About 2 years ago (1117, the beginning of the Solomani push into the Rim),
Captain Grant sold his share of the company back to Hortense and Luttner and
went on the market to purchase a Far Trader. Grant was tired of the grind of
business management, and longed to hit the road again. On the war-torn and
mysterious planet Easter, Grant assembled as unlikely a crew as the Rim had
ever seen, as he followed a tip by a young StarPort authority secretary that
there was more to one of the ships in mothballs than met the eye....

For technical support, Grant chose Wu-Shun Sanchez, a fanatical tinkerer
whose soft-spoken optimism was often mistaken for an advanced coma. His 
career had been rapid and unswerving in its progress--downward. From a 
promising start as a corporate trainee in Tukera, Sanchez was busted down
to WhiteStar, the Solomani Rim's main sector-wide line, then to the
subsector subsidiary WhiteStar/Concord, then to an interface line, and
finally to HL&G, where his easygoing attitude finally found him a home.
Grant, not much of a yeller himself, found Sanchez a pleasant alternative
to the whiskey-swilling imbeciles who learned engineering etiquette from
James Doohan, and took the tech with him to aid in his selection of a ship.

Security went to Daryavayush O'Connor, a downpowered cyborg warrior
from FSO, the little-publicized and much-feared Free Space Operations
branch of the Imperial Navy. The FSO specializes in operations similar to 
those performed by the Marine Commandos, but are renowned for taking on
missions the Commandos consider too dangerous with equipment they consider
substandard. Everyone, but EVERYONE, in the Imperial military machine 
considers the FSO to be dangerously loose cannons, and with good reason--
they are actively recruited into IRIS upon retirement, if they live that 
long. (Interestingly enough, I predicted IRIS by about six years when I
created the FSO and their parent organization, the Shadow Fleet, in 1979--
but GDW informed me that a secret organization of this nature wouldn't
fly. Harrumph.) O'Connor was a native of Iddamakur, the primitive and vicious 
archipelago once used by the Solomani as a prison camp world. His eye, arms,
throat, and part of his brain were replaced by artificial implants as he
recovered from various war traumas. He was, in a sense, the perfect security
system. 

No one knows where Grant found Kherkhoulloth, the Vargr navigator. Kherk was
a deassigned Imperial Scout, stranded far from the Antares Sector where he
was born. He'd travelled the xboat routes for decades, and had been just 
about everywhere coreward of Capital. Now, he was the ultimate Vargr specimen
- - --scrawny, unwashed, cowardly to a fault, and a recreational drug-user whose
exploits were legendary in their monumental stupidity. But he had one fetish
that outwieghed all others: he was stonecold sober when he plotted courses, 
and could do a Jump-5 from inside an asteroid belt in under three minutes and
miss his target by less than a kilometer every time. Grant hired him.

During the search for a suitable used ship in the Easter shipyards, Grant and 
his team became embroiled in a battle to set up a new xboat route from 
Estigaribbia to Suleiman via Easter, in case the encroaching Solomani broke
the existing routes to the Vegan district. HL&G, attempting to expand its 
influence by tying in an Imperial subcontract for xboat service to the new 
route, was struggling with WhiteStar/Concord and with Myra Belvane's, erm,
PROMISING young niece Tiffany, who were attempting to secure the contract for
themselves. HL&G supported the claims put forth by the nation of Alepfa that
occupied one half of Easter, and the other firms were doing the same for
Zuma, the other half of the planet. The two nations existed on opposite sides
of the thick atmosphere barrier at the planet's equator, and each had its own
starport at its own pole, above the atmosphere in vacuum. There had been
peace for uneasy centuries, but the situation over the lucrative Imperial
contract and the commercial openings it would encourage was raising tensions
to the boiling point. 

Grant solved the problem in spectacular fashion, exposing a plot by 
WhiteStar/Concord to bribe the Zuman government to start a war over the port. 
He was aided in this by a mysterious stranger named M. Iscin Delano Jaeger,
a man who seemed part George Lucas, part Donald Trump. Jaeger, it turned
out, was the first human in history to be officially admitted to the Hiver
Manipulators' Club. His Manipulation, fully documented and on file on Guaran, 
was the war currently in progress on Okefenokee, which he'd started several
years earlier for the filming opportunities it would lend him. Jaeger was
an ex-supervisor at Makhidkarun, a topnotch diplomat, and an expert at
propaganda films and popular culture control, who viewed the chaos in the
Rim as the ultimate laboratory for sheer mayhem. He chose Grant's new ship
as his favored means of getting away from his projects as they exploded.

The team purchased a bizarre ship impounded from a group of pirates who'd 
been captured or killed while shoreside. The Serendipity, as they named her, 
had any number of bad associations with various people around the Rim, and
Grant's company was hounded across the sector by them, until the Serendipity
was impounded by the authorities as stolen goods on the feudal-technocratic
world of Upirzanu, where it had originally been built by Langmuir, personal 
shipwright of Lord Cendryk, the strongest ArcoLord of the world. Along the way,
the Serendipity's crew discovered a floating hulk in space with more than
its share of secrets, stopped a religious war on Vega, and bounced their
ship off a mountain on Ymir (as documented in the first couple of stories).

Their new ship contract was for the Torch, a ship designed as a prototype
for the spoiled oldest son of Lord Corris, Cendryk's greatest rival. The 
Torch was an innocent-looking merchant ship with INCREDIBLE Jump legs; it
could jump the Great Rift unaided, with minimal preparation. (Can you say 
"three Jump-5s without refueling"? Knew you could.) While the Torch gave 
Grant a big edge in the small-package trade, it brought a serious new problem
with it: its payment schedule was backbreaking. Between that and the few
loose ends left from the Serendipity's record, Grant was desperate for the
spare cash he'd need for overhauls. 

One of the most interesting loose ends of the Serendipity's run was Hector, 
the ship's computer. Technically he was just a Model/7 (just?!), but in fact 
he was much, MUCH more than that-- he was a living being. Not a sentient
computer or a synaptic robot-- a living being. As the crew discovered, the
initial discovery of sentient silicon life on the planet Cymbeline was being
exploited in secret by a private firm developing a new generation of 
computers for the Navy. The firm, CymBiotica, was now desperately trying to 
hide all evidence of its research from the occupying Solomani-- including the
third generation of CymBiots, the "grandchildren" of the now-famous sentient
chip 10987 (see Adventure 13, "Signal GK") that resembled their grnadfather 
about as much as a Cray resembled an abacus. Needless to say, Hector was a
big boon to anyone who had him as an employee-- and EVERYONE wanted him.
The only other chip of that type on the loose, nicknamed Marilyn, was being 
transported by a courier who didn't know what he was carrying and who hitched 
a ride on the Torch to evade his pursuers. Although Marilyn went insane and
had to be destroyed, the courier ended up joining the crew. He had several
different identities, and switched from one to the next effortlessly; most of 
the time, he preferred to be known as Dr. Christoph Fell, architectural 
expert and ex-IISS bureaucrat. His other alter egos included the slimy 
tabloid reporter Clovis Cruikshank and Terran private detective Tibor Trench,
not to mention a dozen others....

Driven by encroaching Solomani fleets to seek shelter in the Vegan Autonomous
District, Grant and his tired, careworn crew were approached by a man calling
himself J.J.Cameron, an executive for Ling-Standard Products. Cameron had a
fascinating proposition for Grant: he had learned of a new formulation of 
Dag, a material used in electronics design, that had been developed on Terra
and was now being hidden from the Solomani there. Grant and his team would be 
surgically altered and personality-overlaid into a completely new group of
people, and sent to Terra to recover the formula, or better yet, a sample of
the new Dag. If they succeeded, Cameron promised, he would pay off the lien
on the Torch.

Grant agreed. The process of transformation took months, but when it was 
done, the Torch was hidden in deep space, and a battered old Far Trader,
the IMSS Inexplicable, was doing the smuggler's route along the Rim. Its
captain, James Hudson, had no memory of his previous life, only a personal
secretary-bot that seemed awfully smart for just junk. Accompanied by his
ragtag crew of smugglers, Hudson headed for Terra and a quick buck. Behind
him in the Suleiman cluster, a company he didn't know or care about was
dying in the throes of a tradewar, its CEO nearly killed in a terrorist 
bombing and its VP scrambling for her life....

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

PART 5

Terra, in the Solomani Rim: 1119

	"There it is again."
	Tsogukh stopped and looked at the poster, now beginning to peel
off the wall. He frowned and scratched his head, squinting at the faces
before him, reading the caption for the dozenth time.

			HAVE YOU SEEN THESE MEN?

	Hortense, Luttner and Grant, LIC, will pay a reward of ten
	thousand Imperial Credits to the locator of the crew of the
	IMSS Torch, lost 102-1119 in the Vegan Autonomous District....

	Hudson looked past the huge Vargr's shoulder at the picture
of the man called Khagariilian Grant. Edison just stood there and blinked.
Tchorgin picked at a tooth delicately, trying to hide his boredom. Nyborg
scowled and began scratching the back of his hand again; he claimed it
still itched after the accident on Muan Gwi, oh, months ago. Newton stroked
his beard thoughtfully, his eyes troubled.
	After a long pause, Hudson turned to the others, anger fighting with 
fear on his face. "What IS it about this damn thing...?"

	"Have a seat, Mister Hudson."
	Hudson staggered across the room, propelled roughly by a shove from
the guard, and flopped into the chair. He summoned up the strength for a 
scowl at the pudgy, moon-faced man across the desk from him, and rasped, "What 
the hell gives you the right to do this to us? We're clean! We aren't...."
	"Save it, Captain. I'm not interested." The man's smile flickered for 
a moment, and he cocked an eyebrow at the door. The guard quietly withdrew,
taking the hint. The door shut with a click. 
	Hudson surveyed the room. It was obviously bugproofed and 
soundproofed; the man facing him was obese, his chins bulging out over the 
collar of the expensive business suit, grey and black except for a spot of 
color at the lapel. Hudson tried to focus on it, but his eyes weren't 
cooperating....
	"Cigarette?" A neatly-slit packet was waved before Hudson. He frowned 
at it, suddenly unsure. I don't smoke, he thought. Do I?
	"I...don't smoke."
	"You used to smoke like a chimney, old friend," was the startling 
reply. "Sure you won't change your mind?"
	Hudson shrugged and took a cigarette from the pack. The man across 
the desk lit it for him; he took a deep lungful of the smoke, held it, 
exhaled. Suddenly he saw the cold pig-black eyes regarding him carefully, 
and forced himself to cough, gasp for breath. "Foul habit," he managed.
	"Give it up, John. You're not fooling anyone."
	Hudson tried to poke a hole in the dark stare with his own eyes.
	John?
	"John?"
	"John." The oily voice held satisfaction. "Shall I spell it out for 
you, or would you like to do that yourself and save me the trouble?"
	"I have no idea what you're talking about," Hudson managed, the
cigarette forgotten between his fingers and scorching the arm of the chair.
"My name's Jim, not John. James Hudson. I'm a chartered merchant on a run
from Ys to--"
	"To Hell, John. Straight to Hell." Meaty hands slapped the desktop
as the mountain of flesh scrambled upright. "'Down, down to Hell; and say
I sent thee thither.' Shakespeare." A horrible smile creased the fat face.
"I don't know why you picked here and now to show up again, and how you chose 
that gang of freaks you call an ops team, but I am NOT going to let an 
opportunity like this pass me by." 
	"What opportunity? What are you talking about---Sonderberg?" Hudson's
mouth closed with a snap. Who?
	"Ah, so you DO remember me," the fat man nodded. "Excellent. It'll 
make killing you so much more pleasurable. It's ALREADY practical beyond 
belief, but now at least I can enjoy it."
	"Look, I DON'T remember you! I have NO IDEA who you are! That name
just, well, I don't know, just kind of popped into my head!" Hudson felt the
sweat trickle down his temple and across the stubble on his cheek. Something 
was very, VERY wrong....
	"Of course it did," Sonderberg soothed. "Of COURSE it did. Your 
overlay was a pretty shoddy one, John-- just like the others'. You must have 
really scraped the bottom of the barrel when you did your recruiting! It's
sort of a pity you're all going to have to vanish together-- it would be
interesting to see what sorts of songs Chandra and Shevek could sing. But
where, where, WHERE did you dig up RICE, for God's sake? Or that Corris
brat? And the VARGR-- you couldn't even get one with his BRAIN INTACT?!"
	Hudson's mind was whirling. Shevek? Rice? Who was-- what was--
what was that about the brain? Intact? But he was OFF drugs, Tsogukh never
DID drugs-- WHO was off drugs? And Corris--where'd he hear THAT before--
Corris, the Lord, the Keeper of the Flame--of the Flame--of the....
	Torch?
	Hudson's mouth worked like a fish's, but no sound came out. His eyes 
began to glaze over.
	Sonderberg scowled. "Hmm, the overlay must be stubborn. Normally when 
they crack, they peel right up. Okay, fine," he sighed, walking around the 
desk and facing Hudson, who shrank back in his chair at the big man's 
approach. "Let me help you along, then." He poked a surprisingly strong 
finger into Hudson's chest. "Your real name is John Becker. JOHN BECKER!"
That last was a cry of triumph. "And you are about to suffer a fatal 
accident, trying to escape from me-- and my job, YOUR JOB, will be as 
permanent as anything ever gets in this floating world we live in...."
	Hudson wasn't hearing him any more. His terrified gaze was locked
on the huge man's lapel pin, a blood-red circle-and-cross-
	JOHN BECKER. SOLOMANI SECURITY. IDENT CODE ASB8-93OJ-HGN4...4....
	My God, Grant thought in a panic. HOW MANY OF ME *ARE* THERE?!
	He fainted dead away.

TO BE CONTINUED


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

Archive-Message-Number: 2744
Date:     Fri, 9 Aug 91 9:02:57 EDT
From: "Robert S. Dean" <rsdean@crdec8.apgea.army.mil>
Subject:  Re:  (2742) MT Starship Combat rules...

In your letter dated Thu, 8 Aug 91 17:16:36 -0700, you wrote:
> 
> 	This is probably whistling in the dark, but I have some questions for
> anyone who has actually used the MT starship combat rules, or someone
> with a recent printing of them (if the bugs were fixed).
> 
> 	I've applied the erratta changes to combat tables, but have a few
> questions about the Explanation of Damage Results.
> 	One: do the 'crew sections' rules work, and if so, why? 8-) (they don't
> make any sense to me, esp. in terms of damage)

Well, I'll admit that they don't make much sense to me either--you realize that
your ship basically gets one crew hit point for each thousand tons of hull
displacement.  The actual number of crewmen per thousand tons of hull is
irrelevant.  This is a little more intuitive to me than the old High Guard
'exponential' crew factor, where each crew hit wiped out 90% of the remaining
crew.  Ships dead of crew radiation overdose were not uncommon in High Guard
combat.

> 	Two: For damage to Power Plant, the rules say 'reduce UCP factor',
> obviously a direct copy from High Guard.  Unfortunately, the craft design
> rules no longer _use_ the UCP for powerplant rating or design.  How do you
> handle PP damage?

You don't have both sets of official errata?  In the second one (I think) is
the part that says that you lose 10% of the 'disabled' damage point value
of the power plant for each hit, with a minimum of two points...so a plant
with a value of 4/8 would be disabled by 2 hits and destroyed by 4 more, but
a plant with a value of 600/1200 would be disabled by ten hits, and destroyed
by twenty more.

Personally, for both of these I would like to see things replaced by absolute
rather than relative damages.  (i.e. Crew-1 kills 10 people, if you've got lots
you're OK, and Power-1 does 4 points of damage, so the first example ship above
is scrod if hit.)  For that matter, I'd change things as they are now to say
that a Weapons-1 hit destroys a turret rather than a battery...with dynamically
reconfigurable controls, how can one hit wipe out ten turrets on a large ship,
or just knock out one weapon in a triple beam,sand and missile turret on a
small ship?

I can tell by your questions that you haven't looked at critical hits yet?
What is a bridge hit in the new game, and how do I designate the fact that
my ship has an auxiliary bridge?  Why should a computer system in triplicate
for redundant safety have all installations co-located so that a single
computer critical hit wipes out _all_ computer installations?  I think there
are a couple more of these, but I haven't got my rules with me today.

Rob


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

Archive-Message-Number: 2745
From: d9bertil@dtek.chalmers.se
Subject: Re:  (2742) MT Starship Combat rules...
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 91 15:41:54 MET DST

>   = Robert S. Dean
> > = George William Herbert

> > 	I've applied the erratta changes to combat tables, but have a few
> > questions about the Explanation of Damage Results.
> > 	One: do the 'crew sections' rules work, and if so, why? 8-) (they don't
> > make any sense to me, esp. in terms of damage)

  I suspect that they are a way of representing the 'density' of the crew.
A ship with a high density of crew will loose more crew from each hit simply
because more crew is 'in harms way'.

  As for the effects of lost crew, the first effect IMHO should be large 
penalties for damage control (wich don't really appear in MegaT so how could
it be penalized:(. This also highlights a related problem with the way MegaT
handles crew and similar things.
  MegaT seems to assume that all members of the crew has their own little 
console with a cozy acceleration couch somewhere in the ship. I believe that we
should factor in watches (each person works only 8 hours per day) and damage
control crew (those 'off duty') in this. Only about one third of the crew has
a 'real' crew station and the rest are usually idle, except when at battle-
stations when they serve as the damage control crew.

  In combat, this should mean that the ship could operate without penalty until
it was below 1/3rd crew, but that damage control and repairs would begin to
suffer immediately.
  (This is also my resoning behind that I count each robot as three crew: robots
are active around the clock. But without the other 2/3rds of the normal crew as
damage control crew, you better hope nothing breaks!)

> > 	Two: For damage to Power Plant, the rules say 'reduce UCP factor',
> > obviously a direct copy from High Guard.  Unfortunately, the craft design
> > rules no longer _use_ the UCP for powerplant rating or design.  How do you
> > handle PP damage?
> 
> You don't have both sets of official errata?  In the second one (I think) is
> the part that says that you lose 10% of the 'disabled' damage point value
> of the power plant for each hit, with a minimum of two points...so a plant
> with a value of 4/8 would be disabled by 2 hits and destroyed by 4 more, but
> a plant with a value of 600/1200 would be disabled by ten hits, and destroyed
> by twenty more.

  The net result is that all plants over a certain size will take the same 
number of hits to destroy, regardless of how large the battery hitting and how
large the drive hit:(

> Personally, for both of these I would like to see things replaced by absolute
> rather than relative damages.  (i.e. Crew-1 kills 10 people, if you've got lots
> you're OK, and Power-1 does 4 points of damage, so the first example ship above
> is scrod if hit.)

  I agree with this. I am thinking along similar lines with drive damage in
Rebel Guard, shortly it is:
  A minor critical hit on the manuever drive resulting from a hit by a battery 
that did 1000 damage points will do the minimum of full inoperable damage for
the drive and 1000 damage points.
  The performance of the drive is degraded with full performance on zero damage
and zero performance at inoperable damage (ie a 100/200 5G manuever drive will
loose one G for every 20 points of damage).

  I'm in two minds on wether using full inoperable or half inoperable as 
maximum, or maybe base it on the ships displacement.

> Rob

- - -bertil-
- - -- 
"Med ett sjyst ja"rnro"r sla^r man va"rlden med ha"pnad!"

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

Archive-Message-Number: 2746
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1991 13:16 CDT
From: KELLOGG@ducvax.auburn.edu
Subject: Auxillury bridges

The subject came up how does one build an auxillury bridge
in MegaTrav.

In my Azhanti High Lightning design I had 2 bridges.  To do this I
doubled the number of control panels, and noted that there was an
aux bridge.  It went something like this:

LrgHoloDisplay=10*2, HoloHUD=45*2, HoloLink=90*2, Aux Bridge installed.
I don't think we have to double the number of computers, as you didn't
have to in high guard.
That is how I would (did, and will) build the aux bridge.

Scott Kellogg
Beware...  The Horde is coming....

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

Archive-Message-Number: 2747
Date:     Fri, 9 Aug 91 14:36:29 EDT
From: "Robert S. Dean" <rsdean@crdec8.apgea.army.mil>
Subject:  Re:  (2742) MT Starship Combat rules...

Scott Kellogg writes:
> Auxiliary Bridges:
> On my Azhanti High Lightning conversion design, there are two bridges.
> 
> To accomplish this I doubled the number of HUDs, HoloLink panels,
> and Large Holo displays.
> It went something like this:
> LrgHoloDisp=10*2, HoloHUD=20*2, HoloLink=200*2, AuxBridge installed
> 
> I don't think we need double the number of computers, because in
> High Guard we didn't have to for the aux bridge.
> That's how I would (did, and will) do it in future.

You can if you like, but it seems to me that you are making the peculiar
assumption here that every control panel on the ship is concentrated on
the bridge.  No controls on the engines, or near the gun mounts?  If you've
got SOM (which you've quoted) it looks like dynamic reconfiguration ought
to let you get by without a physical bridge, which would certainly make a
'bridge hit' that didn't involve knocking out the entire distributed 
computer network a bit problematic.

Personally, my inclination at the moment is toward rewriting the critical
hits table and replacing Bridge Destroyed with something like "Crew-1, 
One Computer Destroyed, One of Each Comm and Sensor System Destroyed".

Rob Dean



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

Archive-Message-Number: 2748
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1991 15:51:53 -0600
From: cmaddox@imsa.edu
Subject: Proposed article about TML

[Or...  TML visits the trade rags.  This is a collaborative effort
between Chuck Maddox and myself, but we are sincerely interested in what
others on the TML have to contribute.  Please respond to *both* of us,
or the TML at large, if you have input on this project.  At the outset,
let me thank at least Rob Dean for helping for planting a tiny seed
which is now growing into a bigger seed :-) -- James]

Being a new addition to the TML it had occured to me that more people
should know about TML and how to subscribe.  I have been on internet for
about a year and did not know that a Traveller Mailing list existed until
recently.  I sent a message to James proposing to write an article for
Challenge or MegaTraveller Journal.  James responded saying that he would
be interested in co-authoring such an article.  

What we decided would be best would be an article that would inform people
of the basics and lead them to where they can find more information.  What
we are shooting for is a short focused article.  What follows is an outline
proposed by James:

>
>		Traveller Electronic Mailing List
>
>			      by
>			 Charles Maddox
>			James T. Perkins
>
>	Where can forty-five Traveller fans play in the same
>	game, share free Traveller software, tap hundreds of
>	vehicle designs from garbage trucks to Meson Cruisers,
>	and make new friends, all at the same time? No where
>	else but the USENET Traveller Electronic Mailing List
>	(TML).
>
>	What the basic premise is
>	
>	A little history...
>		how it started
>
>	A few stats... (what it is now)
>		how many members
>		level of member involvement (what source materials they have)
>
>	What special interest groups exist...
>		PBEM
>		CAT
>		TDR
>		Historians
>		Vehicles
>
>	Archives
>		What there is
>		How to get it
>			FTP (sunbane only for now)
>				sidebar: How to use ftp
>			diskette (metolius)
>			email (metolius)
>
>	How to subscribe
>
>	Basic ground rules
>		politeness, etc.
>		be prepared for loud volume :-)
>

We would like your comments and suggestions.  I will be at Gencon Saturday
August the 10th and hope to be able to talk to staffers of both magazines.

Thanks,

Chuck

Chuck Maddox    	       	       	       	       	cmaddox@imsa.edu
Computer Technician     	       	       	       	(708)-801-6015    	
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy

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