Thrust plates might have made sense as alternative tech in FF&S as well.
Or maybe we did do that.
I just remember that just about the first thing Frank ever said to me
about the next edition of Traveller after MT was, "there aren't going to
be any reactionless drives." And he repeated that often.
We actually did discuss a lot of alternative anti-grav, including
something he liked from some SF book he'd read where starships take off
over water, because their "grav footprint," so to speak is projected
downwards onto the surface below, and water would absorb it nicely and not
have it crush buildings, asphalt, children. I don't remember where that
was from.
> I didn't think the blanket prohibition made much sense and like the idea
of tplates being TL F or G
> ---
> from my T989
> wrote:
>> I agree with your reasoning.
>>
>> So, what you're saying is that reactionless drives snuck into TNE despite
>> Frank's prohibition? :-) That's kind of ironic, but also kind of
>> inescapable, as we had already established repulsors in earlier editions,
>> and tractors were just a higher-tech extension of that. I don't recall if
>> anyone ever realized that or not.
>>
>> Frank used to try to insist that any game we put out should "only violate
>> one law of physics per game." That sounded good, but in practice, that was
>> impossible in an SF game that attempted to cover SO MUCH of the
existing SF
>> literature as Traveller did.
>>
>> Dave
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