Recent content by phavoc

That must be Jim Adler, the 453rd Texas Hammer

I think we are mostly saying the same thing. When renting a car you have to have liability insurance on, which won't fix a car you own but will / can be used for damage done BY you to other cars. And many policies carry over your insurance to the car you rent (or even borrow from a friend)...

Well, it sounds like you had a single cargo bay, and within that cargo bay you had a cargo container (think of it like a nesting doll, one inside the other). Ships hulls are notoriously tough in Traveller. A container, unless it's specifically an armored one or designed to be hauled...

Well, when I rent a car, or have rented a U-haul, they always ASK me if I want insurance, but my normal car insurance covers liability while I'm operating it. In this case my liability is the equivalent of collision insurance for the owner of the car/truck I'm renting. However my goods in the...

Typically insurance is an after-market cost for cargo, but would normally be included in the mortgage costs if you don't own the ship. That would be the same as a person with a car has to carry collision insurance (in the US) so long as a bank owns the title. Freight is insured separately, and...

Yeah, the OHP was a generalized type meant more for convoy escort rather than keeping up with carrier battlegroups. CV groups often had dedicated and specialized ships - Tico class cruisers are an example. Spruance was an excellent sub hunter (one of the best, not to mention nice looking)...

Huh, did not know about the transmission issue. Did 2300AD explore the idea of synchronizing the stutterwarp drives of multiple ships so that their phasing periods were the same? I don't recall all the granularity of stutterwarp and its timing, but something like that would work. One could...

Sure, space isn't the same as surface/subsurface and air environments - but that's not really been the issue. While each of those environments requires different forms of sensors, spacecraft in Traveller have IR, radar, Lidar, gravitica and other forms of sensors to detect things. It's an...

Robot brains would put a lot of pilots, navigators and captains out of business! The idea of the crew being in the same location (especially the command crew) would appeal more to the operators than to the designers. One has to take the human component into account, or else you'd just have...

I never played the star cruiser portion of 2300AD, so my knowledge of it is vague at best. For any sort of combat missiles excel when swarming and overwhelm the enemies defenses unless you are counting on your missiles penetration accuracy to get past their defenses. Offensive changes have...

Some of that would be for the particular mission that ship is on. If it's milk-run courier route, sure, you could have a single pilot on board. If you were sending that ship in to chart a new system - I'd expect like 4 crew, minimum, for all the tasks that would be needed. Once you get above...

ha! The latest MGT kickstarter for AI consciousness and all that stuff... wasn't there a movie called Darkstar or something where the crew was trying to convince a warhead with AI to detonate itself? It was a bit of a dark comedy, but I could see having truly intelligent weapons deciding that...

Kennedy was the only one I could remember. I know it was an American ship, and I don't remember any of the other nations ships names. :) Without any sort of significant boost from a launcher, missile launchers can launch and engage targets at any angle. Projectile or energy weapons would be...

This is where the USAF CCA's are starting to fill in, at least theoretically. Designers are asking the same question - does it make more sense to have disposable wingmen? Obviously if you can bring your non-expendable assets back is great for lots of reasons.

That's a fair comparison. Hyper-level of details are not always needed or wanted, and sometimes provide too much restrictions. When I got The Traveller book I liked that the Regina sub-sector had details on the worlds - or at least some description of every system. When you are creating...