To me, if Traveller allows for high-G ship's to reach a high speed and also allows for opponents to jump into system at almost any location (outside the 100D limit) then why not allow a player to try and jump in at a semi-far distance from your target, form up (without having to worry about your enemy interfering due to the distance between where you jumped in and where he likely is, due to the position of the key areas he would likely be protecting, etc) and then maybe playing around with either making high-speed runs onto your target or sending groups in from different directions and/or making feints, or end sweeps etc.
The problem is you have conflicting world views going on.
One, is you have the "reality" of the situation as manifested in the rule sets, notably the tactical game but also the other aspects like ship construction, economics, etc.
Then you have the other, potentially conflicting, "reality" of canon and "how it's done".
Many discussions center around "well here's what we know based on rules, but here's what we know based on canon. There may not be a specific rule for XYZ, but we see it here in canon, so it must/must not be so, regardless of what the rules say." The threads on Drop Tanks are legion in this regard, as well as the ones on Jump Drives.
Finally, you also have events like FFW and TCS which represent not just rule sets in play, but national doctrine and "the way it should be" as envisioned by the game designers and authors.
The ever popular "Battle Rider" debates about whether they're really any good or not is another fine example of this clash.
The point mentioned in the BL article about "Open Ended" is that they weren't going to pre-suppose doctrine or even tactics. They said "Here's a ship, here's how lasers and guns work, here's acceleration, here's sensors, and off you go." From this you can develop your own tactics.
If it was played enough we'd learn gaps in imbalances in the rules (referring to Starfire, Starfire v3 is pretty well known to favor missiles heavily, as an example). We'd find the sweet spots of bang/buck (the infamous 19999 ton HG ships).
But we don't have enough rules or clarity to work out the operational problem from a tactics level, things like jump behavior to tell us whether we should jump in system far from a target or not. Deeper problems tied to economics, politics and crew performance that influence over arching doctrine is pretty much completely absent. The Soviet Union fights differently than the NATO allies for a reason, even though they both use hardened, tracked vehicles with guns.
We will likely never get enough depth in a ruleset to see organic doctrines emerge between, say, Imperial, Zho, and Aslan fleets. Any real doctrine differences would likely be "hard coded" into the ruleset. The "Assault" series of games from GDW did this, since they were actually games of Command and Control, with guns and tanks being secondary. But if it was just guns and tanks, the Soviets would fight much like the Americans.
But all this comes back down to early on in T5, I made a plea that the Powers that Be decided and document the combat system first thing, and then from there work on the ship building system, because these two factors manifest in their most pure form, the physical rules to the universe. You can't go top down on this, you can't force tactics or doctrine from above and manifest it in to a combat system.
You can influence the combat system to taste, for example the differences between the Klingon and Federation ships in Star Fleet Battles. They fight very differently based on their weapon systems and ship design. Those were conscious choices by the game designers to give the races a particular feel and technique of play. But SFB has nothing to do with physics, so they could make stuff up as they wish to suit the racial views. Traveller can't really do that, as physics tends to be a harsh mistress to tie your future too.
So, it would be nice to see the higher level concepts that affect operations, the more strategic operations (jump, refueling, fleet maintenance, cargo transfers, etc.) be nailed down, and then operational rules (at least at a system invasion level, not a planetary invasion level) will basically write themselves. Then we'll see how viable deep system assembly and fast sweeps and flybys, among other things, really are as a technique.
