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Showing posts from October, 2013

Care and Feeding of Zombies

With Halloween just ahead I stopped my Traveller designs to work on something more spooky: a classification system for zombies! Smarts  1) Bugs are smarter. Zombies react solely by instinct. Will walk off cliffs or into fire.  2) Animal cunning. Very dumb animals.  3) Feral human. Will throw rocks, particularly to break lights.  4) Semi-intelligent. Will throw rocks, use clubs and can learn rudiments of machinery. Could fire a rifle but not load it. Can open doors. Limited learning.  5) Near human. Often retains habits and knowledge of past life. Can learn by observing how to operate simple machinery. Quickness  1) Can plod slowly along. Forever.  2) Can stumble or shamble along at normal walking speed.  3) Can break into a shambling jog.  4) Can run but may fall.  5) Can run as fast as a human. Muscle  1) Half human strength  2) Below average human strength  3) Average human strength  4) Athletic human strength  5) Twice as strong as an average human Toughness  1)

M-Drives and Rocket Jocks

The major player in my next Traveller Campaign is the 'Polity.' I think FFE has copyrighted 'Imperium.' The Polity is made up of humans descended from Terrans who were abducted/saved at the end of the last Ice Age by aliens we'll call the Ascended. The Ascended ... ascended eventually. They evolved to the point where they no longer really had any cultural references with us lowly meatbags anymore. The humans left behind had access to their technology and managed to back engineer some of it with different degrees of success. Like the Terrans who arrive on the Up Port the Polity is about TL 9. They have gravitic drives and laser rifles and carbines. Their troops wear ablative (think chrome storm troopers who can hit what they aim for sometimes.) The Newcomers will probably assume they are much more advanced. The problem is a) the Polity is a stagnant culture (these humans are not as technologically inclined as the humans left behind on Terra) and b) having grav driv

Up Port Alpha

Up Port Alpha is built more or less to Traveller TL 9. The major difference between CT's tech level progression and my ATU's technology is that reaction drives are still used, at least by Terrans. Several sublight expeditions have been launched to Saturn and the outer worlds as well as the Oort cloud (they're very good reaction drives.) The port was built as a joint effort by the UN and the Lunar Republic. The Republic feels very strongly about weaponizing space and further antagonizing the Asteroid Coalition. Earth is determined to defend itself and its lukewarm ally. Alpha is 2000 displacement tons. 1500 tons is in a ring 20 meters in radius rotating at four revs per minute. This spin gravity takes some getting used to. The ring is 6 meters thick and 35 meters wide. It contains most of the space port systems. The ring is mounted on a central shaft that doesn't rotate and contains two shuttle (95 ton) hangars and two 50 ton berths for the two cutters. A smaller 15 to