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I'm looking forward to Pioneer, but have some fear it will draw upon the deeply flawed 2k3 Aerospace Engineers Handbook. If the authors go back and "do it right," it'll be a grand product.

Phasers are particle beams with an exotic, fictional particle (nadions). Blasters are also a particle beam weapon firing a slow bolt with a significant amount of particles, i.e. a plasma weapon. The particles are accelerated "blaster gas."

Pulsed lasers are typically far more destructive at realistic energies. Continuous wave ("beam") lasers heat and melt hulls, whereas short pulses shatter the hull, thus: (from this post at the Children of a Dead Earth designers notes)

Ah yes, marginal success (rolling exactly the target no.) was 50% armour penetration, and success by 2 was double damage, 4 quad and 8 was 8x damage. Conversion to wounding was if the penetration value was 2x more than the armour, full damage was inflicted, between 1x and 2x was 50% damage and...

I'll point out that GDW rebalanced the Traveller task system to make 7+ on 2d6 the target in place of 8+. This was first published in Challenge 29, and incorporated into Megatraveller. DPG/GDW Task System Roll 2d6 plus bonuses. Targets are: Simple: 3+ Routine: 7+ Difficult: 11+ Formidable: 15+...

Tirane was the first planet discovered that could support Human life. It is, however, perhaps not a good planet as described. The habitable band(s) of the planet move on a 79 year cycle (by the E/CS writeup), and so the population is itinerant, staying in place for 20 years before largely...

Scout is a career in GDW 2300AD, described thus: "Initial survey of a system is done by scouts. These scouts use their ships and ships' sensors to detect the large scale characteristics of systems and worlds. Mapping and starcharting are their specialities, breaking new ground for exploratory...

Earth by the article "Earth:2300" has a population of 5.38 billion and there are 120 nations. However, the Earth/Cybertech sourcebook's nations sum to more than this. In some cases, an extra zero was added to the population (Manchuria and Central Asia). With those two corrections, the...

Is this the 2nd Mongoose edition? Certainly, the population numbers were wrong in the 1st Mongoose edition, and they were in 2320AD. The 2012 Mongoose edition was a reskin of 2320AD, and the populations for 2320 were projected back. Remember, in the 1st Mongoose edition, the population of...

As part of an ongoing project to examine changes in 2300AD over time, I realised that how stutterwarp discharge was handled in the 1987 and 1988 editions is radically different. (link to blog post) Essentially, before the 1988 revision, stutterwarps discharged spontaneously when insystem, and...

Earth has a density of 5.51 g/cm3. Iron is 7.8 g/cm3. A pure iron planet has a density of 1.42 of Earth. A 5,000 km world (size-3) of pure iron can just about retain O2, but not N2, in the life zone.

Both are, effectively, vacuum worlds. Io has an atmospheric pressure ca. 1/1,000,000,000th (a billionth) of Earth, and is mainly SO2. Europa has 1/100,000,000,000th (a hundred-billionth) of Earth, being released water and a little O2. They're composed of recently released gases that they lack...

A size 3 planet needs a density >1.4 of Earth to retain oxygen, and higher to retain N2, in the life zone. Now, if the planet is further out than the life zone, it is colder, and will retain lower MW gases. The flip side is that it is cold.

From the game perspective, having world size and density is useful, since the number of burns in MgT to lift off from a world would be the world size * density. In 2300AD we have a horribly broken world, King. According to the GDW 2300AD world creation system (and physical reality), it is a gas...

If I adjust the G values to straighten the density curve: Size Diameter G 1 1600 0.07 2 3200 0.15 3 4800 0.25 4 6400 0.35 5 8000 0.5 6 9600 0.65 7 11200 0.8 8 12800 1 9 14400 1.2 10 16000 1.4

The system seems to assume density increases with size:

To get a size-5 world down to 0.45 G, density must be 0.7 of Earth. It would have an atmospheric pressure of 0.49 atm, and a MMWR of 25; so it is close to not being able to retain O2 (MW = 32) and N2 (MW = 28). Pretty close to not capable of having a breathable atmosphere. A size-4 world of...

Humans can survive about 1.5 G and start adapting. This is fine, because rocky worlds with greater than ca. 1.35 G will become gas giants unless very close to the star, in which case they're BBQ. Similarly, worlds with less than about 0.5 G don't have enough gravity to retain oxygen in the...

French Arm Adventures has essentially no additional material, apart from a little canon-breaking Pentapod stuff, than the original GDW books, which are far better formatted. I recommend getting the whole of GDW's 2k3 corpus in one shot from MWM directly...

Bayern would work well in a TL-11 Terran Confederation, possible better than 2k3. It was always an oddity in 2k3, because it required some universe changing tech changes to work. The Pleiades are ca. 150 parsecs rimward from Terra, and thus away from the Vilani Imperium. For the "rift," instead...