Recent content by walkir

Yeah, of course politics. But even structure and radiation shielding-wise that should have been a lot different. Well, I don't have the books as my FLGS did not have them in stock yesterday. Perhaps the station is written as anything but a few-million-dTon block.

A bit OT, but I did not want to resurrect the old bab5 thread: The German SciFi Channel is re-airing Babylon 5 by now and I'm starting to be interested after not liking the show in the 90s. The day before yesterday they aired "severed dreams", the episode in which four Minbari vessels help the...

Well, is - or rather, should - this really (be) a scientific question? Isn't "how technology does not change humanity" a central plot element of Traveller? (At least that's how I understood it) How going to space or even be transplanted to other worlds does not change us?

What about something like uplift's civilization of the 5 galaxies? An ancient (group of) race(s) that lived in charted space for a few million years before moving on to another spiral arm, coming back to it every few hundred million years or so? "They moved on because the planets...

Well, that's early first Imperium... Even if you want the Vilani and/or Terran Confederation not to have invented underwater weaponry (short of lasers), the engineers can draw from a big list of things usable for this. I don't think magnetodynamics is to high tech for TL 9.

So I miscounted. Thanks for the correction. ;)

Just look at the modern world - rich nations can easily afford TL 7, while regions like most of africa, rural china, indian slums etc, which house at least one billion people, practically do not reach TL 5. And even in those regions, people do not die off faster than new people are born. One...

The problem with that one is that is basically an "interstellar wars 2.0" setting...

As I first heard of Traveller via GURPS (which means I don't really care for canon anyway - if I had time to play it, it would be the alternate GUPRS universe), what aliens where "copied" from spacemaster or other systems? And how usable are the texts of the official races (at least the major...

You did notice "underwater performance" on starships p.24, stating that any starship with vectored thrust reactionless thrusters (= standard M-Drives) with at least 2G, very good or better streamlining and total compartmentalization are assumed to have the equivalent of a submersible hull...

Wow. Those carrer tables need way more space... And why include Advanced EDU if it only includes "N/A"s?

I have a question to make sure I read the rules right. Is there a way to get a scout ship, no strings attached? Page 35 says "the first receipt provides use of the ship, but the ship is still the property of the scout service[...]" So the second time you roll this it's a free starship, isn't...

Well, I was using the hydrogen breathers of the uplift universe as example. No one (no oxygen breathing alien, as strange as they may be) understands them, as they don't understands oxygen breathers. The only thing they understand about each other is a need to not be in the same spiral arm. That...

Not necessarily. They need enough communication for a verbal "get out off my lawn!", as simply destroying every ship that comes near a certain line might look like animal intelligence, yes. But they need no understanding of the same concepts.

You're talking TL 7.5, I'm talking TL12. The air might smell or have other not life-threatening problems after a year without refreshing, no problem with that. But a ship that needs venting every other week for pure survival? Seriously? I would call that a very bad Idea in hard SF, and we're...