klingsor said:
I think that is exactly the point, they are not hard SF. Hard SF items will probably be accepted by the Traveller Taliban whereas items tending towards science fantasy (phasers, frisbee guns) will not be and tend to dial them up to 4.
Flechette guns they are not, flechettes are more like nails - long and thin to give high mass for their frontal area and thus good sectional density.
What would be worth a new topic is what weapons would be plausible (and thus acceptable to the Traveller Taliban) and fun such as the flying crowbars from Footfall.
LOL on "Travler Taliban". Actually, any campaign I run will be set in the Third Imperium, I'll either do the Year 1105 setting from Classic CT (like the idea of having the 5th Frontier War looming over the horizon) or since I do have T20's "Gateway to Destiny" do some conversions of T20 aliens/Minor Humans to MGT and use the Year 1000 setting from it. So, the Magrail gun as it stands either won't be used, or will be a K'Kree invention with the limitations I stated above (half effective vrs armor, gets innaccurate pretty fast at range, but again the K'Kree don't care, they are using them to hack apart them primitive carnivores...). Use outside of the 2000 Worlds and their colonies, if I do put some Magrails in there will be very uncommon and probably just reversed engineered prototypes, again if I put them into MTU version of a 3rd Imperium campaign.
Having said that, I'm not upset at all that such were included. I knew from the start that anything not 3rd Imperium/OTU specific with MGT will try to be a bit more of a generic game. People forget the CT started as a generic Sci-Fi game until Suppliment 3 came out detailing the Spinward Marches, if I have my "Traveller History" correct. Why can't MGT do the same thing, be a generic Sci-Fi game with one of many settings inculding the "OTU 3rd Imperium"?
Or to put it another way, their might be a "most supported" setting with D&D right now (if there is, I pretty much stopped with D&D early 3E, don't own a single 4E or even 3.5e book), but that's obviously not the only setting. As much as I do like the 3rd Imperium setting (and ones that are in it's history), not like I will scream "THOU MUST PLAY THE OTU!! HERETIC!!" if someone wants to play "Mongoose Traveller: Babylon 5" or whatever.
As an aside...with regards to my possible MTU idea, the K'Kree using Magrail guns, and slapping the 1/2 armor penetration/inaccurate at long range limitations on it...who's to say that might not be a Hiver maniplulation...convince those silly K'Kree some gun shooting metal frisbees is the ultimate in Carnivore extermination...all the while they are lugging around weapons with much more bulky ammo and less accuracy then a nice simple gauss rifle...yep, it could be...