Personally, I think MM should eat his words, unresolve Virus to being the OTU, make it the ATU, and have a post-rebellion 4I arise from the civil war... hard times made the 3I a shattered memory, but did it respectfully.
Virus just wipes the setting, does nothing for verisimilitude of the computer literate, and makes little sense in both its scope and power... It crossed the line from Sci-Fi to Sci-Fan. Not a good thing.
a 4I, say in the mid to late 1300's, would be a far better setting if it didn't have the legacies of Dave to contend with. (Dave was even disrespectful of CT and MT on line at times. He openly hated the 3I setting, and when he got the chance, destroyed it and made fun of it.)
Also, TNE's mechanics, not being an evolution of CT, drastically changed the feel. PC's were WAY too tough, and the setting was intentionally (according to Dave, on the TML in the mid 90's) more violent and less moralistic.
I've run CT era with all official rulesets out except GT. Each ruleset has a different feel. TNE had a less traveller feeling than Traveller: 2300... I even playtested T20.
TNE doesn't need the OTU; it just needs virus and ANY empire bigger than the pocket one is playing out of.
Likewise, I think that the Virus effectively KILLS the setting; moving forward with virus in tact forces any further development to acknowledge the Sci-Fan elements and deal with them. This is BAD for setting, and the good name of traveller.
Not that TNE is all that bad a ruleset, but it created a very non-traveller feel. It made no efforts to support non-official universes, since the Virus-infested encounter tables were the ONLY ones released for TNE.
Virus just wipes the setting, does nothing for verisimilitude of the computer literate, and makes little sense in both its scope and power... It crossed the line from Sci-Fi to Sci-Fan. Not a good thing.
a 4I, say in the mid to late 1300's, would be a far better setting if it didn't have the legacies of Dave to contend with. (Dave was even disrespectful of CT and MT on line at times. He openly hated the 3I setting, and when he got the chance, destroyed it and made fun of it.)
Also, TNE's mechanics, not being an evolution of CT, drastically changed the feel. PC's were WAY too tough, and the setting was intentionally (according to Dave, on the TML in the mid 90's) more violent and less moralistic.
I've run CT era with all official rulesets out except GT. Each ruleset has a different feel. TNE had a less traveller feeling than Traveller: 2300... I even playtested T20.
TNE doesn't need the OTU; it just needs virus and ANY empire bigger than the pocket one is playing out of.
Likewise, I think that the Virus effectively KILLS the setting; moving forward with virus in tact forces any further development to acknowledge the Sci-Fan elements and deal with them. This is BAD for setting, and the good name of traveller.
Not that TNE is all that bad a ruleset, but it created a very non-traveller feel. It made no efforts to support non-official universes, since the Virus-infested encounter tables were the ONLY ones released for TNE.