Nothing stopping a free trader in CT from going to some TL5 or 6
world and retrofitting their kkm launchers with primitive nukes
in exchange for some widgets a few TL higher... To say nothing of
some of the despots winked at by the 3I.
Or simply using their ship as a wmd. 9/11 style hijacking of a
ship or three plowing into a downport could be tricky without a
CAP with very heavy coverage of the mainworld.
---
from my T989
Hyphen_DJW wrote:
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?