Recent content by Bryn the 2300AD guy

@WHULorigan beat me to pointing out how nukes actually work, but let me add that the fusion reaction does not produce explosive effects, but rather causes addition fission reactions (in the 238U stage) which do. Hence a thermonuclear device is fission-fusion-fission. The (typically) 239Pu is...

That's the print run, but graph it by year: Traveller was no longer the best selling rulesset. Twilight: 2000 overtook Traveller in 1985-6. Remember, this is all materials, including supplements etc.

Nonsense, GDW lasted a decade after this, and the new, non-Traveller products were a large part of the lifeblood of the company. This is especially true of Twilight:2000 which was a huge seller. What killed GDW was essentially that they stopped publishing products for 2300AD, Space:1889, Dark...

GDW wrote what became 2300AD, which was originally called "Overlord" with the intent to use the most advanced mechanics available (task system etc.) in a very realistic setting. This led to some pretty deadly combat. This combat was criticised by some for being too deadly, but was still much...

Allow me to quote MWM from Challenge 27: Traveller: 2300 is GDW's new science fiction role-playing game, but the conceptualization, design, and development of the game has taken more than a year. During that time, the GDW staff working on the project has thought and rethought just about every...

Traveller fusion is explicitly protium fusion, which prettymuch rules out a plasma confinement reactor. I would suggest the gravity fields are probably compressing a tiny fraction of a gram, possibly inside an electrode a la cold fusion. As for the amount of real energy, whilst a value has been...

I was wondering, given that other games using Hanrahan's Traveller engine have their own fora here, like Dark Conspiracy, should 2300AD be separated from the Traveller forum?

Speaking of GDW's work only: The prototype ESA stutterwarp is produced 2136 and fitted to the probe Prometheus. This flew to Alpha Centauri and returned in 2137. Note that the idea of needing multiple drives to go 7.7 ly at this point (see the Tirane write-up in the CA and the AR-I article in...

About 22 years back, I wrote a brief set of conversion notes from the 2300AD Naval Architects Manual to Traveller dTons for Colin Dunn. These were the basis, I believe, of the pre-AEH ship design system. When I got the AEH it was obvious there were a lot of problems with it, and I started...

I am unsure of the legal status, and it depends on whether MWM inserted a clause for ownership (or compulsary purchase?) of all licenced products. He'd sent much time trying to acquire ownership of the Judge's Guild stuff etc., and I know he never owned the Digest material. For 2300AD, Colin...

For near future Traveller there is always the interstellar war era and the Terran Confederation. I am surprised Mongoose hasn't done that as a setting.

Libertines, or anything like them, explicitly don't exist in the universe as written. They are Colin's invention and he keeps changing the rest of the universe to try and justify them. It still makes no sense though, and it got strange (see my piece here on them)

Go ahead

They are just awful. It was fascinating to watch peoples reactions go from "looks good" to "that's odd" to "this is unusable nonsense"as they actually tried to use it. I can drive wagons through the holes in it all day, but the conversion to real power is wrong, 1 power = 25 kW (also for...

On the original authorship of 2300AD... GDW wrote the contributions to 2300AD in the front covers. The main design team for the 1st edition was MW Miller, Frank Chadwick and Tim Brown. Lester W. Smith became the line manager sometime in 1987. In an interview with him, he said that he got the...