Recent content by simonh

It’s very easy to misunderstand just how huge space is and just how tiny even the biggest ships are. For an example, the Apollo missions left 1 square meter reflectors on the moon so we could bounce lasers off them to measure the distance to the moon. The laser is beamed through a telescope to...

You don't need to limit armour on smaller craft, if you say that larger weapons inflict a certain minimum amount of damage irrespective of the armour on the target. That should 'discriminate' against smaller craft in the way that we want while also causing an attrition effect on larger ships so...

IMHO the idea that standard civilian starship hulls are even comparable to tank armour is daft, given how small starship turrets are. If TL tank armour is 40 point on a MT scale I'd expect starship hulls to start at something like 10 points or so with starship weaponry scaled to match. When it...

What is the reason for the hydrogen cost to using the wormhole?

There's no real problem with this. Wormhole and stargate style systems are well established in SF, the only real wrinkle is the 5 day warmup time. In practice this means the optimum approach is for settled systems to have space stations maintaining wormholes continuously to common destinations...

A holographic effect should radiate exactly as much light as you would expect from an equivalent non-holographic image, plus some residual heat. But this ship is dumping hundreds of units of power directly into the surface of it's hull, after all that energy has to go somewhere. It's going to...

For what it's worth I agree if you are buying a commercial product sold as final, but I have no problem with publishers releasing material early in the development and editing process as long as they are up front and clear that this is what they are doing. As long as the customer is making an...

The warp drive time traveling slingshot effect is pure Star Trek technobabble. Outside of Star Trek it has no theoretical basis whatsoever beyond any FTL travel system being equivalent to time travel anyway. The IXS is intended to use the Alcubierre warp drive. If that's the case, the inside of...

You can point out mitigating factors and argue the severity of the issue, but 'completely invalidated' is going way too far. The experience with board games that you cite is a whole different kettle of fish. Board games come with the dice you need to play the game. The Star Wars game with the...

Exactly right, familiarity with something people already like is unbelievably valuable. It's OSR style D&D in space and that sells because people who already know they like OSR/D&D already know they will like at least half of what it is. The fact that it has the most creakingly ancient...

Most people don't seem to care. If your contention was true, Traveller 2300 with it's far more up to date star maps would be more popular than OTU Traveller. It isn't and never has been. Several alternate Traveller settings with more realistic astrography also exist and are niche products. More...

You're addressing my incidental examples, not my actual points. I'll try to be clearer. 1. What criteria do you propose to distinguish between 'better' and 'worse' mechanics, setting, dice, etc for Traveller? You talk a lot about 'best' but don't ever really say what you mean by that. How do...

The technicalities are all very well, but I'm not seeing anyone give any reasons why a change like this would be desirable. What is broken about the current system that this fixes? The standard J-Drive has the following consequences for settings: * Ships are confined to chains of worlds within...

Best according to what metrics though? It's meaningless without providing a way to distinguish bad, good, better, best. But what constitutes better will vary depending on your objectives. What are the priorities? Familiarity, backwards compatibility, dice availability? Those priorities will...

It means you're not always comparing your roll to zero, so there's often a final subtraction form target number which is what you're trying to avoid. It seems to me live a very small win. Yes in many cases there's one less add or subtract in the task resolution out of, what, maybe 4 or 5...