Wrong, Hans - it means that every amendment is a separate universe. So dead wrong it makes discussion of canon with you practically pointless...
Your view that different versions of Traveller describe separate universes makes discussion of canon pointless. The only value canon has is preventing, as best possible, the fragmentation of our common frame of reference and the preservation of as much self-consistency as can be achieved when scores and hundreds of people works on a shared universe. It's all very well to argue that there must be an explanation for the existence of battleships even though the combat system makes them, credit for credit, profoundly inferior to heavy cruisers. But if you can't come up with an explanation that works, its pointless to insist that there MUST be one.
For purposes of understanding CT canon - HG defines how ships behave. Your rejection of rules is a form of blindness. This is because most of the CT setting is defined as rules, not as prose description.
I'm not trying to understand CT canon
per se. I'm trying to promote a comprehensive and self-consistent game universe where I'm on the same page with other fans who are trying for the same thing. That does involve understanding CT canon as far as it can be understood, but it's only a means to an end, not an end in itself.
I don't reject rules blindly. I only reject them when they mess up a self-consistent setting. Even then, I'm perfectly fine with most rules, as long as they are taken for what they are, a game artifact for the purpose of making it possible to run a game in a setting much too complex to emulate with any rules simple enough to be playable.
Most of the official game universe is defined by the setting material, and the setting material describes a universe every bit as complex as the real one we live in. The rules only describe a tiny fraction of the setting -- a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction. It's perfectly ludicrous to claim that the rules define the setting. At best they describe it (a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of it), at worst they contradict certain aspects of it for the sake of playability.
Even when the rules reflect the setting accurately they still don't
define it, they describe it.
Imagine a rule to emulate throwing a coin: "When a character tosses a coin, roll a die. On a 1-3 the result is heads, on a 4-6 the result is tails." This rule reflects the tossing of a coin pretty adequately. If you ignore the possibility that the coin tosser has the skill to affect the normal fifty-fifty odds of the outcome, the rule will emulate the result of a coin toss perfectly. It couldn't be any more true to the setting. But it doesn't define the nature of tossing a coin, it describes it.
The Rules and setting are interlinked.
Of course they are. The rules are supposed to emulate selected aspects of the setting in a way that is simple enough to run a game where those aspects are important.
By NOT using the rules, you have created for yourself a parallel universe - one which isn't the OTU of CT, because things don't work as they do in CT.
There is no such thing as the OTU of CT. There used to be, but that was a long time ago. And the rules I use are irrelevant to the current OTU. Any setting can be emulated using multiple different rules sets.
I've met 12 year olds who get that changing the rules means running in a different universe; I don't have a clue why you're blind to this.
Because you and the 12 year olds are wrong about that. And I can't fathom how you can possibly believe in a setting where starship combat is fought in 20 minute intervals, weapon accuracies improve or worsen drastically as a ship moves a meter from one range band to another, people die in neat fractions of the total crew complement, 30 fighters attacking in concert either all hit or all miss, etc. etc.. Such a belief is completely incomprehensible to me.
Hans
