Thread: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: Armor XXI--> Planetary Environments part 2

Continued from previous...

And one of the things about Traveller was that it had this fetish for
quantifying everything imaginable with a Universal
Planetary/World/

Not that anyone asked me, but: I always thought this emphasis on randomly generating large amounts of data was a major weakness of the original Traveller universe. I can understand fans wanting to see all 11,000 world and I'm really not trying to take a dig at anybody, but you ended up with too much stuff that just didn't make sense. Besides the physical improbabilities of garden worlds around dim stars and the question of why a billion people were living under domes on a vacuum snowball when there was an empty Eden planet J2 away, it lead to some wacky and weird governmental stuff too. Supposedly Imperial citizens have freedom of travel between the various worlds, so why is there a heavily populated soul-crushing dictatorship J1 away from Happy Fun Freedom Planet? In real life, there's a reason the East Germans built the Berlin Wall, and it wasn't just to stun the world with their taste in architecture.

-JTD

"It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over an area you have just bombed."
- U.S. Air Force on public relations

I'm glad you said that and not me, although I rather implied it.

Yes, I didn't even get into the social part of the UPP. IIRC, the system
changed subtly in the various editions of the original LBBs, where at first
the pop number was completely independent of Diameter, Atmo, Hyd, and in
later editions there were some pluses if you had a good ecosystem. And if I
do recall correctly, I naturally have to wonder which version of the
generation rules were used by the DGP script.

I remember spending a lot of time thinking, "Why, why, why, WHY did anyone
think it was a good idea to generate ALL of that? And why did they have to
let anyone know they did?" But like I said, the Traveller way of life is
that was what people did, and a player who wants to run a campaign in the
Whozit Subsector wants to use data that didn't get overwritten by some
published book later.

But then why publish the world generation rules if all we're going to do
is publish all the real stats anyway? No one will ever randomly generate an
Imperial world, because they're looking for the real numbers. So the only
people who use the world generation rules are the people who don't use the
setting, so why do we publish the setting and the generation rules in the
same books at all? Well, because we always had, and if we stopped doing so,
people would be upset that we had taken stuff out, and the new version of
the game didn't have everything in it.

In some ways, we were hostages to a game system that was bigger than us.

By the way, I admire your analysis at the end there, especially that fine
turn of phrase on the Berlin Wall. Nicely done.

Dave

On Thu, 14 Jun 2012 22:42:36 -0400, Jeff Dougherty
<> wrote:
> Not that anyone asked me, but: I always thought this emphasis on
> randomly generating large amounts of data was a major weakness of the
> original Traveller universe. I can understand fans wanting to see all
> 11,000 world and I'm really not trying to take a dig at anybody, but you
> ended up with too much stuff that just didn't make sense. Besides the
> physical improbabilities of garden worlds around dim stars and the
> question of why a billion people were living under domes on a vacuum
> snowball when there was an empty Eden planet J2 away, it lead to some
> wacky and weird governmental stuff too. Supposedly Imperial citizens
have
> freedom of travel between the various worlds, so why is there a heavily
> populated soul-crushing dictatorship J1 away from Happy Fun Freedom
> Planet? In real life, there's a reason the East Germans built the Berlin
> Wall, and it wasn't just to stun the world with their taste in
> architecture.
> -JTD
>
> "It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over an area you have
> just bombed." - U.S. Air Force on public relations
>
>
>

>And this leads me to one of the major changes to existing data that I made
>in TNE, the wholesale stellar change. <SNIP>

>1. Just out of curiosity, what did the folks on this list think of that? I
>don't think I had any choice.

Anything that enhances the reality of the setting without drastically increasing complexity
 is fine by me, or, as my thoughts at the time were: "Cool!"
 
>Lastly, this dovetails full circle into "collapsing worlds" with Virus.
>This was something Frank was really adamant about, getting rid of all of
>the marginal worlds where you had to come up with all kinds of complicated
>rationalizations for how people were living there at all, much less by the
>billions. And I think his reason for this was really largely aesthetic,
>that it didn't make sense when you looked at it at the gross level. With
>jump drives, where we'd already established that starships run around with
>holds full of low-cost junk from world-to-world, we have Cheap Travel. So
>why do so many people stay on deadly worlds? Didn't make no sense. But it
>also had the effect of pruning out of TNE the need to run adventures on so
>many worlds where you had to spend so much time explaining how people could
>even live there to begin with.
 
I think a lot of worlds could be rationalised as perhaps hold-overs from older days, settlements
that once made sense, but now do not. Traveller though did have too many inhospitable inhabited
worlds in relation to the truly hadbitable worlds that had minimal habitation.
 
That said, I always allow inhabited inhospitable worlds which had too low a tech to be affected by Virus
to have a good chance of surviving in some manner the direct effects of the Collapse - whether they survive
into the New Era is another thing. Same holds for worlds which have a Hard Times tech that is less or not
susceptable to Virus.
 
Eamon

> I always allow inhabited inhospitable worlds which had too
> low a tech to be affected by Virus
> to have a good chance of surviving in some manner the direct effects of
> the Collapse - whether they survive
> into the New Era is another thing. Same holds for worlds which have a
> Hard Times tech that is less or not
> susceptable to Virus.

You reminded me that we had to have TWO systems to collapse worlds. One
that collapsed them from their intermediate Hard Times values, and one for
worlds that never got HT mods that were collapse all the way from their 3d
Imp values.

And in practice, we rolled in the stellar fix to that same process.

On Fri, 15 Jun 2012 04:03:31 +0100 (BST), Eamon Watters
<> wrote:
>>And this leads me to one of the major changes to existing data that I
> made
> >in TNE, the wholesale stellar change.
>
> >1. Just out of curiosity, what did the folks on this list think of
> that? I
> >don't think I had any choice.
>
> Anything that enhances the reality of the setting without drastically
> increasing complexity
>  is fine by me, or, as my thoughts at the time were: "Cool!"
>  
> >Lastly, this dovetails full circle into "collapsing worlds" with
> Virus.
> >This was something Frank was really adamant about, getting rid of all
> of
> >the marginal worlds where you had to come up with all kinds of
> complicated
> >rationalizations for how people were living there at all, much less by
> the
> >billions. And I think his reason for this was really largely
> aesthetic,
> >that it didn't make sense when you looked at it at the gross level.
> With
> >jump drives, where we'd already established that starships run around
> with
> >holds full of low-cost junk from world-to-world, we have Cheap Travel.
> So
> >why do so many people stay on deadly worlds? Didn't make no sense. But
> it
> >also had the effect of pruning out of TNE the need to run adventures
> on so
> >many worlds where you had to spend so much time explaining how people
> could
> >even live there to begin with.
>  
> I think a lot of worlds could be rationalised as perhaps hold-overs
> from older days, settlements
> that once made sense, but now do not. Traveller though did have too
> many inhospitable inhabited
> worlds in relation to the truly hadbitable worlds that had minimal
> habitation.
>  
> That said, I always allow inhabited inhospitable worlds which had too
> low a tech to be affected by Virus
> to have a good chance of surviving in some manner the direct effects of
> the Collapse - whether they survive
> into the New Era is another thing. Same holds for worlds which have a
> Hard Times tech that is less or not
> susceptable to Virus.
>  
> Eamon
>
>

That also reminded me of the other reason that we had to do the stellar
fix, because it was confusing Population I with Population II stars.
Population I are younger stars in the spiral arms like the Sun, with
higher metal content. Pop II are older, low-metal stars in the galactic
halo or globular clusters, and these would be less likely to have planets.
So randomly mixing them together in the same area is missing the point of
stellar classifications entirely. Again, kind of a Traveller-ism to want
to collect one of every astronomical concept ever heard of.

>> I always allow inhabited inhospitable worlds which had too
>> low a tech to be affected by Virus
>> to have a good chance of surviving in some manner the direct effects of
>> the Collapse - whether they survive
>> into the New Era is another thing. Same holds for worlds which have a
>> Hard Times tech that is less or not
>> susceptable to Virus.
>
> You reminded me that we had to have TWO systems to collapse worlds. One
> that collapsed them from their intermediate Hard Times values, and one for
> worlds that never got HT mods that were collapse all the way from their 3d
> Imp values.
>
> And in practice, we rolled in the stellar fix to that same process.
>
>
> On Fri, 15 Jun 2012 04:03:31 +0100 (BST), Eamon Watters
> <> wrote:
>>>And this leads me to one of the major changes to existing data that I
>> made
>> >in TNE, the wholesale stellar change.
>>
>> >1. Just out of curiosity, what did the folks on this list think of
>> that? I
>> >don't think I had any choice.
>>
>> Anything that enhances the reality of the setting without drastically
>> increasing complexity
>>  is fine by me, or, as my thoughts at the time were: "Cool!"
>>  
>> >Lastly, this dovetails full circle into "collapsing worlds" with
>> Virus.
>> >This was something Frank was really adamant about, getting rid of all
>> of
>> >the marginal worlds where you had to come up with all kinds of
>> complicated
>> >rationalizations for how people were living there at all, much less by
>> the
>> >billions. And I think his reason for this was really largely
>> aesthetic,
>> >that it didn't make sense when you looked at it at the gross level.
>> With
>> >jump drives, where we'd already established that starships run around
>> with
>> >holds full of low-cost junk from world-to-world, we have Cheap Travel.
>> So
>> >why do so many people stay on deadly worlds? Didn't make no sense. But
>> it
>> >also had the effect of pruning out of TNE the need to run adventures
>> on so
>> >many worlds where you had to spend so much time explaining how people
>> could
>> >even live there to begin with.
>>  
>> I think a lot of worlds could be rationalised as perhaps hold-overs
>> from older days, settlements
>> that once made sense, but now do not. Traveller though did have too
>> many inhospitable inhabited
>> worlds in relation to the truly hadbitable worlds that had minimal
>> habitation.
>>  
>> That said, I always allow inhabited inhospitable worlds which had too
>> low a tech to be affected by Virus
>> to have a good chance of surviving in some manner the direct effects of
>> the Collapse - whether they survive
>> into the New Era is another thing. Same holds for worlds which have a
>> Hard Times tech that is less or not
>> susceptable to Virus.
>>  
>> Eamon
>>
>>

I thought that that was something that should have been available, though it would have needed access to Hard Times to do it properly. IIRC the Rulebooks only allowed collapse from Imperial Tech.
 
Thinking about it, it would provide an interesting Virus Topgraphy: Faction safes would have had much further to fall (though possibly the expertese to combat the worst effects if warned fast enough), areas hit hard by the Rebellion would have less of an impact - but may not have had the expertese and resources to pull themselves back up again. Throw the evolution of the Virus into the mix and things could be interesting: a few core worlds with a good chance of recovery - but most worlds blasted or very low tech, and a periphery with a similar chance of recovery, but with more mid-tech worlds to advance once a polity gets on its feet.
 
That brings to mind a question: How did the Black Curtain Civilization maintain its tech? An early verison of a Viral Countermeasure? A more advanced Viral entity being avalable to combat the Suiciders? And how did they enslave the k'Kree?
 
Eamon

From: "" <>
To:
Sent: Friday, 15 June 2012, 12:14
Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: Armor XXI--> Planetary Environments part 2

 
> I always allow inhabited inhospitable worlds which had too
> low a tech to be affected by Virus
> to have a good chance of surviving in some manner the direct effects of
> the Collapse - whether they survive
> into the New Era is another thing. Same holds for worlds which have a
> Hard Times tech that is less or not
> susceptable to Virus.

You reminded me that we had to have TWO systems to collapse worlds. One
that collapsed them from their intermediate Hard Times values, and one for
worlds that never got HT mods that were collapse all the way from their 3d
Imp values.

And in practice, we rolled in the stellar fix to that same process.

On Fri, 15 Jun 2012 04:03:31 +0100 (BST), Eamon Watters
<eamonwatter

I think what you suggest is a valid model. However, for whatever variety
of reasons, we didn't go into that much detail, leaving that to the GMs'
creativity.

> How did the Black Curtain Civilization
> maintain its tech? An early verison of a Viral Countermeasure? A more
> advanced Viral entity being avalable to combat the Suiciders?

The latter. Since Lucan's space was where it was first released, the more
advanced strains would evolve there first, and the ability of vampire
systems to take over other systems and rewrite each other's software and
hardware would be more advanced there. And as the virus systems started
flowing back to Lucan's space to destroy the creator, they would be taken
over and overwritten, and so on, so that the density of advanced strains
increased until all of Lucan's space was governed by an advanced strain
that could assimilate anything that came in, hence the black hole
metaphor.

> And how did they enslave the k'Kree?

Probably something said to them, "You will be assimilated. Put on this
armor. It won't hurt...much. The only joy is the joy of duty. Work...
work... work..."

Dave

> I thought that that was something that should have been available, though
> it would have needed access to Hard Times to do it properly. IIRC the
> Rulebooks only allowed collapse from Imperial Tech.
>  
> Thinking about it, it would provide an interesting Virus Topgraphy:
> Faction safes would have had much further to fall (though possibly the
> expertese to combat the worst effects if warned fast enough), areas hit
> hard by the Rebellion would have less of an impact - but may not have had
> the expertese and resources to pull themselves back up again. Throw the
> evolution of the Virus into the mix and things could be interesting: a few
> core worlds with a good chance of recovery - but most worlds blasted or
> very low tech, and a periphery with a similar chance of recovery, but
> with more mid-tech worlds to advance once a polity gets on its feet.
>  
> That brings to mind a question: How did the Black Curtain Civilization
> maintain its tech? An early verison of a Viral Countermeasure? A more
> advanced Viral entity being avalable to combat the Suiciders? And how did
> they enslave the k'Kree?
>  
> Eamon
>
> From: "" <>
> To:
> Sent: Friday, 15 June 2012, 12:14
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: Armor XXI--> Planetary Environments part
> 2
>
>
>  
>> I always allow inhabited inhospitable worlds which had too
>> low a tech to be affected by Virus
>> to have a good chance of surviving in some manner the direct effects of
>> the Collapse - whether they survive
>> into the New Era is another thing. Same holds for worlds which have a
>> Hard Times tech that is less or not
>> susceptable to Virus.
>
> You reminded me that we had to have TWO systems to collapse worlds. One
> that collapsed them from their intermediate Hard Times values, and one for
> worlds that never got HT mods that were collapse all the way from their 3d
> Imp values.
>
> And in practice, we rolled in the stellar fix to that same process.
>
> On Fri, 15 Jun 2012 04:03:31 +0100 (BST), Eamon Watters
> <eamonwatter

All I can do is give you my perspective ...

> 1. Just out of curiosity, what did the folks on this list think of that? I
> don't think I had any choice.

You didn't go nearly far enough. Quite frankly, even with the changes, there
were a huge number of worlds with impossible stellar data. The biggest issue
was just the vast number of "dwarf" stars. Really, a "dwarf" star has no
spectral class (which all of the ones listed did have) and the presence of
a white dwarf would eliminate the possibility of a habitable world in the
system, even if it was the "other" star of a binary or trinary system.

Don't get me wrong. It was a huge improvement. But it was only an incremental
step. It didn't actually fix the problem.

> 2. Did subsequent editions of Traveller hang onto the star changes, or
> stick with the DGP computer run?

In the only setting set after TNE, which was TNE 1248, we definitely did
use the updated star information. For 1248 Spinward States, I used the
updated stars as my basis, then updated them *again* to improve the
situation. For the most part, all I really did was change any "D" star
to a "V" star (without changing the spectral class), unless the main
world was a vacuum or near vacuum world. In that case, I eliminated the
spectral class (which is meaningless for a white dwarf) and kept it a
white dwarf. I think there ended up being less than 10 white dwarf
stars in all of the Domain of Deneb. (Which is actually a reasonable
count.)

I believe the Freedom League sourcebook did also. (The Freedom League
was what the Reformation Coalition evolved into in the 1248 setting.)

There was one exception to the limited changes: Pashus. In the RSB it
was a naval depot and a research station that delved into temporal
mechanics. I had them have a really, really, really bad accident that
artificially aged the star (along with everything else in the system).

I do have one question for you on that, if you can remember. For the most
part, when you updated the star information, you did it retroactively. So,
even though you listed both 1117 and 1202 data for every world, you only
listed the new, updated stellar data. Except for *one* world. That world
you listed both the old and the new stellar data, and the stars weren't
anywhere close. I always assumed that was a typo. Was there an implied
story there?

Mike West

Mike--

Well, poop. I think I tried to be as minimal as possible with the changes,
so as to avoid upsetting people (Traveller abhors change, as I think TNE
provides an object example), but you're saying it was too minimal. I know
that I hated all of the dwarfs as well, but the main reason to not excise
them is that red dwarfs are the most common type of star (according to
astronomical theory circa 1991-95). So the intent was to not violently
change the observed percentage distribution. (In reality, we did of
necessity change the percentage distribution, I just wanted to do so as
little as possible.) I have always taken as my assumption that the map of
"Charted Space" showed EVERY STAR, not just every inhabited stellar
system. I ran a Trav campaign for a while where my map showed ALL stars,
and there was one in almost every hex, and it totally took the
cartographic feel out of the game. Now if we left any WHITE dwarfs in that
was either by accident, because they would be post-supernova, and all
their planets would be burned off, or by design, i.e., we knew it was a
post-supernova system where these were cinders populated by research
stations or whatever. It sounds like you're saying that we left a lot more
white dwarfs than I thought. I had thought that almost all of the Ds left
were Ks and Ms. And it also sounds like you're saying that we left a lot
of D Dwarfs, not just main sequence K and M small-d dwarfs. Without the
books in front of me, maybe some of my notes or guidance to "Geo," or the
astronomy texts I was working from, I can't say much more right now.

On my list of "things I always really wanted to do" was like a six-page
article for Challenge where I would just explain astronomy and the H-R
diagram and the main sequence so players could understand that stellar
types were not just a list of collectibles, but mass families and dynamic
stages in stellar evolution, and the difference between Pop I and II
stars, and WHY it means something if a star is this type or that type, so
that they could see why we made the stellar changes.

And as for the star you cite, I'm sure it was a typo. I don't recall
having any Droyne gating any stars around, and if I had, I would have
referenced it in the text, "on XXX-11XX Regency scientists noticed a
stunning development..." What world was it?

By the way, Mike, I tremendously enjoy your messages, as you pay the kind
of demented attention to this stuff that I did.

Dave

> All I can do is give you my perspective ...
>
>> 1. Just out of curiosity, what did the folks on this list think of that?
>> I
>> don't think I had any choice.
>
> You didn't go nearly far enough. Quite frankly, even with the changes,
> there
> were a huge number of worlds with impossible stellar data. The biggest
> issue
> was just the vast number of "dwarf" stars. Really, a "dwarf" star has no
> spectral class (which all of the ones listed did have) and the presence of
> a white dwarf would eliminate the possibility of a habitable world in the
> system, even if it was the "other" star of a binary or trinary system.
>
> Don't get me wrong. It was a huge improvement. But it was only an
> incremental
> step. It didn't actually fix the problem.
>
>> 2. Did subsequent editions of Traveller hang onto the star changes, or
>> stick with the DGP computer run?
>
> In the only setting set after TNE, which was TNE 1248, we definitely did
> use the updated star information. For 1248 Spinward States, I used the
> updated stars as my basis, then updated them *again* to improve the
> situation. For the most part, all I really did was change any "D" star
> to a "V" star (without changing the spectral class), unless the main
> world was a vacuum or near vacuum world. In that case, I eliminated the
> spectral class (which is meaningless for a white dwarf) and kept it a
> white dwarf. I think there ended up being less than 10 white dwarf
> stars in all of the Domain of Deneb. (Which is actually a reasonable
> count.)
>
> I believe the Freedom League sourcebook did also. (The Freedom League
> was what the Reformation Coalition evolved into in the 1248 setting.)
>
> There was one exception to the limited changes: Pashus. In the RSB it
> was a naval depot and a research station that delved into temporal
> mechanics. I had them have a really, really, really bad accident that
> artificially aged the star (along with everything else in the system).
>
> I do have one question for you on that, if you can remember. For the most
> part, when you updated the star information, you did it retroactively. So,
> even though you listed both 1117 and 1202 data for every world, you only
> listed the new, updated stellar data. Except for *one* world. That world
> you listed both the old and the new stellar data, and the stars weren't
> anywhere close. I always assumed that was a typo. Was there an implied
> story there?
>
> Mike West
>
>
>

> I know that I hated all of the dwarfs as well, but the main reason to not
> excise them is that red dwarfs are the most common type of star (according
> to astronomical theory circa 1991-95).

Ah, that was probably the problem. The only type "D" star is a white
dwarf, and that doesn't have a spectral class. A "red dwarf" is really
a type M main sequence star. (That confused the crap out of me at
first.) So, the largest "red dwarf" is actually an "M0 V", not an "M0 D".
That means that all of those "red dwarf" stars should have been a main
sequence "V", not a dwarf "D".

Because of the mistaken generation routines, there were actually no
white dwarfs in the data at all. All of the "dwarf" stars where type
"D" with a spectral class. While that was a mistake, it was a tremendous
boon to me, as that meant I could just take the mistaken spectral
class and change the type to "V". That fixed 95%+ of the problems. (Well,
not really. But it did get me close enough to ignore any remaining
problems in that 95%.) The last little bit could legitimately have
been white dwarf stars, so I just deleted the spectral class and left
the "D".

(Hey, I didn't understand all of this stuff until I needed to learn it
for Spinward States, and then I got to ask Constantine a lot of questions,
which helped, as this is his actual area of real-life expertise!)

The one fix I didn't make was to world sizes. I really wanted to
fix world sizes where the atmosphere was type 4-9 so that the minimum
planet size would be 5. (That is the minimum size required for a
planet to retain an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. Smaller than that,
and the atmosphere leaks out leaving a planet like Mars.)

> And as for the star you cite, I'm sure it was a typo. I don't recall
> having any Droyne gating any stars around, and if I had, I would have
> referenced it in the text, "on XXX-11XX Regency scientists noticed a
> stunning development..." What world was it?

Uniqua/Darrian/Spinward Marches. It lists "K9 V M2 D" for 1117 and
"K9 V M9 D" for 1202. It ended up with "K9 V M9 V". (Of course,
I think I later learned that is still wrong, as there is no "M9".
Red dwarfs stop at "M8". Oh well. One step at a time. :-) )

> By the way, Mike, I tremendously enjoy your messages, as you pay the kind
> of demented attention to this stuff that I did.

Well, the vast majority of that was focused on the RSB because of my
effort on 1248 Spinward States. Martin gave me some very broad strokes
to work with, and let me run with it. The main broad strokes were:
- The Regency collapses (splinters, really)
- The three main political entities post-Regency were the Imperial
Regency, the League of Deneb, and the League of Spinward States.
Other than that, he pretty much let me go nuts.

While I later found out that you never intended for the Regency to
splinter, the RSB perfectly sets up the possibility. Because of that,
it was very easy to set up the scenario where that happened. And many
of the UWP changes that were made just wrote their own stories.

For example, Lilad was population A and extremely high tech, but
its government went from A (popular dictator, e.g. a hereditary
king) to 7 (balkanized). Well, that just screamed out "civil war"
to me as the King's unpopular child/grandchild attempts reassert
absolute control. What does all-out war at TL F even look like?
Not pretty, I decided, and Lilad suffered greatly as a result.

Another example was the Rape of Trin. I expanded on the effect
of the flight of the Kishkii. Basically, the Kishkii virus was
extremely effective and extremely invasive. However, it was
single-minded in its focus, which meant it caused relatively
little damage on its way to Trin. The practical effect of this
was that the Regency got to refine and perfect its anti-viral
techniques and technologies as it fought against the most
advanced virus example it ever saw. While the Regency lost the
battle, as the Kishkii succeeded in devastating Trin, the
Regency actually *won* the war as the Kishkii effectively
proved and improved the Regency viral defenses with a true
trial by fire. The reason there were no more episodes like
the Rape of Trin is because the experience made the Regency
effectively immune to virus. So, while the Rape of Trin
was a tremendous loss of life and a great tragedy, their
deaths were not in vain: they helped protect the rest of
the Regency.

Anyway, the result is doing all of that, even after finishing
Spinward States four years ago, I still remember most of this
stuff off the top of my head.

Now, if you asked me about general TNE rules or FF&S or
something like that, I am toast. I got nothin'. As me about
the RSB, and I got you covered. As me about H&I or general
TNE history, and I am probably OK. The other stuff? I am
outta my league.

Mike West

First, apologies for the really delayed response - I'm now working 6, and occasional 7 days a week, that plus a 3 year-old bundle of joy can really hit the response time.

I can't recall exactly what MJD wrote on it, but Vampire Fleets, in the Migration sub-section on Page 8 referrs to pressure from the Puppeteers from coreward, who developed "somewhere near the old Imperial core in the 1140s.

Also, the entry on Khalid Kentaro in Star Vikings mentions the Unity of Promise collapsing under the first wave of Vampire Fleets in 1156 (fleets fleeing the Puppeteers?)

Eamon--

WRT to dates of when various strains arose, MJD's retrospective reporting
of dates is appropriate, but I don't recall that we (GDW/TNE) had any firm
dates in mind. Until you find something where we did. :-)

I remember something about Promise collapsing, but didn't we also have
Promise as a PE in New Era? I haven't been to my storage unit since I got
back from my trip. Too many thunderstorms this weekend; not a good
environment to go pawing through the storage unit.

WRT Peacekeepers, that sounds consistent with the Vampire family tree, but
without something hard to look at, I am at a bit of an impasse.

Dave

> First, apologies for the really delayed response - I'm now working 6,
and
> occasional 7 days a week, that plus a 3 year-old bundle of joy can
really
> hit the response time.
>
> I can't recall exactly what MJD wrote on it, but Vampire Fleets, in the
Migration sub-section on Page 8 referrs to pressure from the Puppeteers
from coreward, who developed "somewhere near the old Imperial core in
the
> 1140s.
>
> Also, the entry on Khalid Kentaro in Star Vikings mentions the Unity of
Promise collapsing under the first wave of Vampire Fleets in 1156
(fleets
> fleeing the Puppeteers?).
>
> As for the Peacekeepers, I'm not sure they're on the original Virus
Family
> Tree - and I was unable to find one in Vampire Fleets where they are
introduced.
>
> Interesting points on Virus Evolution - when my Brain is less fried I
will
> have to try and assimilate them.
>
> Eamon
>
>
>
> ________________________________
Sent: Friday, 15 June 2012, 23:29
Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: Armor XXI--> Planetary Environments
part
> 2
>
>
>  
> Thank you/you're welcome. I assume you mean 1140s, from MJD's stuff.

Promise was a major Vampire maintenance world, so a PE of sorts. You might be thinking of your excellent Covenant of Sufren?

Eamon

________________________________
Sent: Tuesday, 19 June 2012, 0:01
Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: Armor XXI--> Planetary Environments part 2


 
Eamon--

WRT to dates of when various strains arose, MJD's retrospective reporting
of dates is appropriate, but I don't recall that we (GDW/TNE) had any firm
dates in mind. Until you find something where we did. :-)

I remember something about Promise collapsing, but didn't we also have
Promise as a PE in New Era? I haven't been to my storage unit since I got
back from my trip. Too many thunderstorms this weekend; not a good
environment to go pawing through the storage unit.

WRT Peacekeepers, that sounds consistent with the Vampire family tree, but
without something hard to look at, I am at a bit of an impasse.

Dave

> First, apologies for the really delayed response - I'm now working 6,
and
> occasional 7 days a week, that plus a 3 year-old bundle of joy can
really
> hit the response time.
>
> I can't recall exactly what MJD wrote on it, but Vampire Fleets, in the
Migration sub-section on Page 8 referrs to pressure from the Puppeteers
from coreward, who developed "somewhere near the old Imperial core in
the
> 1140s.
>
> Also, the entry on Khalid Kentaro in Star Vikings mentions the Unity of
Promise collapsing under the first wave of Vampire Fleets in 1156
(fleets
> fleeing the Puppeteers?).
>
> As for the Peacekeepers, I'm not sure they're on the original Virus
Family
> Tree - and I was unable to find one in Vampire Fleets where they are
introduced.
>
> Interesting points on Virus Evolution - when my Brain is less fried I
will
> have to try and assimilate them.
>
> Eamon
>
>
>
> ________________________________
Sent: Friday, 15 June 2012, 23:29
Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: Armor XXI--> Planetary Environments
part
> 2
>
>
>  
> Thank you/you're welcome. I assume you mean 1140s, from MJD's stuff.

Eamon--

That's it, Sufren vice Promise. Thank you. Same sector, different PE.

"excellent CofS," thank you twice more. After I had published it I
realized I probably hadn't made them strong enough, but a certain amount
of legerdemain can address that. I think I heard that 1248 squished them.
If so, too bad, I liked them, but examples must be made. I didn't make
them to be red shirts, however.

By the way, when replying, try to remember to trim off all unnecessary
repeats of previous posts. We had a reminder of the goodness of doing that
a couple of days ago, and as I try to do so, I realize you might not have
gotten that far in your backlog yet.

Dave

> Promise was a major Vampire maintenance world, so a PE of sorts. You might
> be thinking of your excellent Covenant of Sufren?
>
> Eamon
>