Dear Folks -
Hi Dave! Thanks for dropping into this forum and answering so many questions.
You wrote:
>I think that probably the reason this was jarring to long-time Traveller
>players is that it is in fact the consequence of a very basic rule change
>in TNE: no reactionless drives.
Actually, I think the jarring thing was the NUKE-pumped Xray lasers. As someone put it, "what happens if a bad-tempered grizzeled o'-timer comes out of jump and decides to start blasting away at everyone?" With the "ordinary" shipboard weapons of CT, lots of civilian would get killed, and eventually the Imperial Navy, local navy, or even nearby civvie would take him out.
With nukes aboard, however, the equation changes. It wouldn't take too many thrown at civilian population centres to have a megadeath situation at hand. You don't even need to target the missiles' laser at anything, just tell it to explode over the top of a city. How do you play this one?
For me personally, the second issue I had was this: I could understand that naval vessels would have point defence fire control and thus shoot down conventional missiles aimed at them. But given the MCr prices for PD, I didn't think it would be installed on most _civilian_ ships. This makes contact missiles viable for player-character sized encounters, while allowing the _military_ to retain the nukes (which was the original premise, anyway).
(My final nit - and it's just that, a personal preferencelikes/dislikes sort of thing - was that bomb-pumped xray laser missiles said "Traveller: 2300" to me. And that's a different game, y'know? Hey, I didn't even like the idea of arqubusses in AD&D, it was too... jarring. In a bad Warhammer way. But as I said, just a personal nit. ;-) ;-)
Were these the sorts of discussions kicked around in the Workshop? And if so, what conclusions did you all come to?