But what Mike MEANT to say was, "the Aslan are cool if you like them,
they're just not my cup of tea." See? Peace and harmony. :-)
So that's what I said in RSB? I remember thinking about some "wheels
within wheels" to revisit later, but I can't remember right now, without
the book in front of me.
But what you're getting at is the angst of a designer, when you have to
dig into what's been published, and realize, "man, some of what we've
published just isn't true," because you're the guy that's going to have to
fix it. Having had to re-read EVERYTHING put out about the Spinward Marches
from CT onwards to update it, I remember writing somewhere, "I know more
about the internal inconsistencies of Traveller than anyone alive, and I
know where all the bodies are buried, and I ain't telling." Some of them
were easy, like when Frank published two different names for the Empress of
Solee, and I turned one into an honorific atop her given name. But some,
especially in the Spinward Marches, were not as easy, especially since they
were so old and established. But my compass was always not to say, "oops,
this is wrong, use this information instead," unless it was absolutely
necessary. Instead, find a way of seeing them as things that were each true
in their own right, and doing something with the tension between two
different interpretations.
Heck, one of the big secrets was that there were multiple editions of the
LBBs (and LBB compilations and Traveller Book that followed) that had some
pretty major changes that were never called attention to. You just had to
trip over them.
One example of a big wholesale change was fixing the mess of all of the
bad stars from the DGP computer run, complete with all of the
record-stuck-