Recent content by IanW

Just a point on Slow Drug. As written, Slow Drug is the best way to move biofreight around - dose them on slow drug, then they can go four to a bunkroom. From the passengers point of view, under Slow Drug, an otherwise probably boring trip is subjectively not that long. I solve the damage this...

A classic is "skip tracing". Our Heroes are in a Type S scout - the jeep of the Imperium, capable of jump-2 and carrying some crew and a small amount of cargo. The Imperium buys em by the thousand, and rather than scrap them as they get to the end of their useful life, the IISS floods frontier...

Absolutely nothing. Selling goods on consignment ("A share of the final sale price") also has a very long history ... so for example, Our Heroes could be gunrunning to somewhere or other, and Colonel-General Stok could have provided them with a containerload of lost-in-the-paperwork weaponary...

I'd argue no and no. I mean, most people just dont need to know that, and the 'Solomani Hypothesis' has got baggage on it ... its known, but not everyone will know it :)

Then put a sidebar explaining that it's a tax, and the circumstances under which you can evade it.

0.01 tons a month is 10 kilos a month is 300 grams a day - IMO you're off by a factor of 3. A liter of water, a kilo of food and a kilo of LOx and other supplies per day - assume decent but not perfect water and air recycling and you're good. 0.1 dtons per person per month. Outside Imperial...

Well, the Ziru Sirkaa did fine with jump-2 - if you replace most of the cargo hold with fuel tankage, a jump-2 far trader can do deep-space jumps, crosssing a jump-6 void in three easy legs. The other thing to think about is smuggling. Stargates are the obvious tariff points, right ? So a...

Hopeless, Stuff to think about includes ... Stargates and the outsystem OK, so you've got a stargate system. Were jump drives used for travel to and from the Outsystem ? If they were, then you'd have faster recovery, as the short-legged Outsystem puddle-jumpers get refitted with extra fuel...

At the scale of those ships, each of those "massive particle guns" is about 0.5% of ship volume. Relatively speaking, they are a single laser turret on a 200 dton ship. The big investment in the E-gun is what does the damage, and thats how it should be.

So its a tax. Be explicit about that, and make it clear that it doesnt apply outside the Imperial Frontier, or to smugglers or belters or other marginal types.

Im going to rant about this. This is one of the stupid, brain dead, broken rules that exist because Marc Miller is crap at economics. Its up there with 'Cr1000 per jump' freight costs. This rule either (a) destroys belter colonies as viable entities, or (b) theres some magic feature about...

Why is it a bad thing that tertiary batteries arent doing anything to highly armoured battlewagons ?

If I was your GM, I wouldnt allow that - otherwise we'll build a robot grav sled, with its own set of skills, with a robot gun turret on it, that has its own set of skills, and a robot sensor unit on that, with its own set of skills.

Hans, Briefly, much of the meta plot is what you said would happen, happening. The jumped-up State that the safe trade route went thru got stroppy, tried to tax the trade too hard and got bombed rather than annexed. This caused the chain of safespots to be disrupted etc etc. Your opinion will...

Egil, When Im building a warship, the questions go like this order. 1. What size a ship am I building ? 2. What jump do I need for the role ? 3. How big a Spinal Weapon can I jam in ? 4. Given 1-3, what number of g's is vaguely reasonable ? 5. How thick a Meson and Damper Screens can I...