Perhaps. I think I understand why the LBBs were LBBs. Not a knock, just an observation. I really had fun with Traveller, but was perplexed by a distinct lack of astrophysics other than starship refueling and other operational or player minutiae.
Perhaps. I think I understand why the LBBs were LBBs. Not a knock, just an observation. I really had fun with Traveller, but was perplexed by a distinct lack of astrophysics other than starship refueling and other operational or player minutiae.
I guess I had this notion where a captain could order his vessel to chop it up into rubble or maybe "car" sized or moving box sized chunks. Such that as the mass approached a planet, it would literally fall apart, and just wind up as a spectacular sky show instead of the bringer of extinction that it might have posed.
What do you think?
I like him and Brian Greene. He's got lots of good lay person explanations on things. I have one of his books from the early 90s on Hyperspace. Very interesting stuff. I'm not qualified, but I think it would be interesting if he collaborated with someone on a Traveller supplement; "Traveller; Astrophysics", complete with solar coronal events, gamma ray bursts, extinction meteors, or the "refueling your ship by shoveling snow topic" I started either last year or the year before lastHi !
I've noticed Dr. Kaku's shows are very popular, so popular, he goes to sf conventions and answers questions about possible things like faster than light travel from people dressed as D&D warriors and ST troopers.
Evidently some don't take him seriously because of those conventions, but he is one of the top experimental physicists.
I guess I had it in my mind that if it was sliced up, then the piece closer to the planet would be drawn away from the main mass, and you'd get a kind of "splayed out" rock strewn in thousands or millions of pieces instead of a giant "lump sum", so to speak. You would get a cascade of meteorlettes instead of a giant meteor. Not a good idea? :CoW:The problem is all the mass is still there. It really doesn't matter if it's one chunk or a billion. Having the that mass hit the atmosphere (and ground) will still cause an extinction level event. The form of the extinction may be a little different, but will be just as bad in either case.
Those "digestible chunks" are going to bake the surface, according to NASA predictions. You're still dumping the same amount of KE over the same 2 days, but now you are heating the air directly, rather than dumping in into the crust. Less nuclear winter, more "glowing red-hot sky kills everything underneath it"... and more metal oxide fallout.Interesting clarification on Apophis. When I think of slicing it up, I guess I had this image of slicing it up into digestible chunks that the planet's atmosphere could incinerate, and not so much into "smaller" yet still dangerous space rocks. I figured that as the body approached, after a starship's laser barbette hacked it up, the thing would approach as an aggregate instead of a single solid mass.
I guess I had this notion where a captain could order his vessel to chop it up into rubble or maybe "car" sized or moving box sized chunks. Such that as the mass approached a planet, it would literally fall apart, and just wind up as a spectacular sky show instead of the bringer of extinction that it might have posed.
What do you think?
When I was converting the near star coordinates to get a 3D map of local space, I had to use proper motions work out the nearest star's movement over the millennia up to the Third Imperium, which was a nuisance. For farther ones it doesn't really matter.I was somewhat curious about this, how often did the IISS need to update the star charts. I found this paper describing how fast, in general, stars in the local space were moving relative to each other. According to the paper stars have an average radial velocity of 13.1 ± 11.1 km/sec. Radial velocity means either toward or away from the Sol system. Smaller (M, G, K) stars are moving faster than larger (F, A) stars.
I wonder how it would manifest, if true.Those "digestible chunks" are going to bake the surface, according to NASA predictions. You're still dumping the same amount of KE over the same 2 days, but now you are heating the air directly, rather than dumping in into the crust. Less nuclear winter, more "glowing red-hot sky kills everything underneath it"... and more metal oxide fallout.
I wonder how it would manifest, if true.
The ramifications of failure you've outlined, and it's a scary picture. I'm not ashamed to admit that I had a bit of a chill when I came across that Youtube video (it wasn't a doc, by the way, just another one of those top ten list thing, which made me go to NASA's website to confirm). I mean, if that's something that our TL6-7-8 civ can't deal with, but had fore-knoweldge, and perhaps even a crack at addressing, then there's got to be a playable scenario for a TL higher.
Space-dwelling monsters are too much into fantasy for the majority of people playing Traveller. If you want that, there's Star Wars, Star Trek, or Dragonstar...
Hell, they make more sense in Dragonstar than anywhere else.
Traveller has come to mean a specific kind of humanocentric hard Space Opera...
I wanted to respond to this properly; I think a new thread is needed, and I'll probably create one in due course regarding "fantasy" Traveller verse "improbable" or "unlikely" Traveller.
One of the things that's bugged me about hard science based sci-fi is how much handwave to inject into the OTU. I bring it up in this thread because MTs PC game; "MT 2; Quest for the Ancients" had Pink Slime threatening a well known Marches world.
So, to relate it to the thread, assuming you fail in your task to save that planet, do you update the map by saying Rhylanor is covered in Pink Slime, or what?
I'll start a new thread later on.
Why not? The pink slime comes from an Ancient facility. The facility fulfils the basic purpose of Ancient sites: Industrial strength handwaving to get a plot going. It's a terraforming device. The slime will (unless stopped by the PCs) cover the entire surface of Rhylanor and lie there for a time, terraforming its metaphorical heart out according to the ineffable purpose of a 300,000 year absent Ancient.One of the things that's bugged me about hard science based sci-fi is how much handwave to inject into the OTU. I bring it up in this thread because MTs PC game; "MT 2; Quest for the Ancients" had Pink Slime threatening a well known Marches world.
I don't know about updating the map. Rhylanor will still be there. You'd need to update the UWP, though.So, to relate it to the thread, assuming you fail in your task to save that planet, do you update the map by saying Rhylanor is covered in Pink Slime, or what?