> What do you think, or what do you think other Traveller players in 1993
> think we should have done instead?
Really, I think you were screwed. I completely agree that MT irretrievably
eliminated the Imperium. Hard Times basically meant it could never have
a true successor state.
I also believe that the Hard Times fans were missing one huge point:
without the Virus (or something like it) there was no change for any
Imperial recovery. Why? Because the neighbors would have picked the bones
clean. Without something that leveled *everyone*, then the Aslan, Solomani,
K'kree, and Vargr would have just moved in and cleaned up. There would
never have been the chance for a Fourth Imperium because the tiny and
weak successor states would have been crushed and eliminated by their
powerful neighbors. The only successor state that had any chance to live
was the Domain of Deneb because their big opponent (the Zhodani) had
no interest in taking them over, and the Vargr had better targets.
So, you had to flatten *everyone* and start over. Really, I don't believe
you had a choice. (In fact, I thought that the Empress Wave was solely
there to flatten the Zhodani, since the Virus couldn't get to them. So
even the one major power that escaped Virus unscathed still got hammered.)
My biggest complaint was that the way chosen to flattened everyone
eliminated the history. Sure, you had to flatten everyone, but the
way I saw it done meant that the whole history of what went before
was completely swept away, meaning that everything was starting over
completely fresh. (That was one of the things I really liked about
how Martin recast everything for 1248. He made sure that the pre-
collapse history was still in the background and still fully leveraged
in the setting.) I freely admit that I could have misunderstood that
point.
Mike West