Neil's Miscellaneous Ramblings

Traveller Vignette 053 He didn't look like much when we finally caught up with him, not for a man we'd spent half our lives hunting. A tired old man in a cheap apartment, the money he'd fled with long spent trying to throw us off his trail. There were six of us left by then, though dozens more sent money to fund us when they could, or passed on leads and rumours. Jahns sat on his couch, blood on his mouth from a knocked-out tooth; he'd had an old gun under the cushions, and Dobry had smashed him in the face with his pistol when he'd gone for it. He was sitting very still despite the pain from the tooth, because the hook that replaced Carter's right hand was about an inch from his left eyeball. Carter lost the hand to a cut gone gangrenous in the camps, and he'd never been able to afford a replacement, or even a good augmetic. He probably could have, if he'd given up the hunt and settled down to a steady job, but that hadn't been an option fo...

  British Museum "Hieroglyphics" exhibition, January 2022 We've visited most of the recent BM exhibitions, and mostly they have been good. Unfortunately, this one didn't really meet the same standard. Partly, it was a problem of subject - most of the recent exhibitions such as "The World of Stonehenge" have been built around striking artefacts, which this simply didn't have - while many of the items on show were intellectually important, they were basically lengths of faded linen, and lacked visual appeal. There was also a certain split personality element, as it couldn't decided whether it wanted to be the story of the decipherment of hieroglyphics, or about what hieroglyphics can tell us about ancient Egypt. There was also a problem of exhibit design - while most of the recent exhibitions have put text on the walls where it could be read by multiple people, a large part of this had artefacts and text in a long row of low cabinets, where one or...

Traveller Vignette 052 LSP's subsector Chief Executive was a hard-driving son-of-a-bitch called Wallace. He announced when he took the post that he'd fire the lowest performing 10% of his regional and divisional managers every year, because “there's no place at LSP for underperformance” and he'd kept his promise. The strategy had delivered short term gains, as his subordinates doubled their efforts to stay out of the bottom of the pack, and Wallace apparently got an enormous ego trip from displaying his power through the high-profile firings. Living in constant anxiety was bad for morale, however, and his division was having real problems recruiting the best up-and-coming talent. It didn't do much to develop corporate loyalty, either, which is why I was able to buy complete schematics of the installation for a surprisingly reasonable price from one of the execs he'd fired the previous year (Author's note - This can be a useful plot idea, explaini...

Traveller Vignette 051 Four clusterbombs dropped free of my fighter, scattering anti-personnel submunitions, and the Saruthi field hospital disappeared in a crackling wave of explosions behind me. It'd been clearly marked with red crosses, showing how little the Saruthi understood what was coming. We'd all seen the pictures of Saruthi executing whole hospitals of our wounded during the invasion, to clear space for their own casualties. Besides, given that we planned to kill every Saruthi soldier on the planet, waiting for wounded ones to heal before executing them seemed both inefficient and hypocritical. I saw the flash of multiple SAM launches, as Saruthi launch controllers let their anger get the better of their judgement, and my threat warning receivers all went off together. I pointed the interface fighter straight up, hit the afterburners, and it climbed for altitude like a homesick angel. I couldn't outrun the missiles, but I didn't have to. The sky fli...

Traveller Vignette 050 Count Thuring sat at a grav-desk, an inch-thick slab of black glass floating on suspensors. It was typical of the man, I thought – an ostentatious off-world product bought more for show than for efficiency. He put his hand flat on the glass surface, and the desk beeped once as it recognised his palmprint and unlocked. A touch sensitive keyboard appeared on the surface, and he used quick strokes of his index finger to open documents. “Take a look at this” he said. The entire opposite wall became a monitor screen, and I didn't like what it was showing.... (Author's note - This is intended as colour text, while Count Thuring could work as a patron or briefing officer for all sorts of missions)

  Tracklink Article -  SP-70 Self Propelled Gun This was originally published in Issue 113 (Autumn 2022) of Tracklink, the magazine of the Tank Museum.  However, the photos which accompanied it are owned by the tank Museum, so I have replaced them with another photo from the public domain The SP-70 155mm Self Propelled Gun The SP-70 (also known as the PanzerHaubitz 155-1 and the Semovente 155mm) began in the late 1960s as an Anglo-German project to replace their existing US-made M109 SP Guns with a more advanced gun with higher rate of fire and better range. Italy then joined the project, and it may say something about the large multinational defence projects common in the 1970s that project managers estimated that a third country joining would push the in-service date back six months and increase costs by 11.7%, mostly from extra project management and an additional set of technical evaluations. As common with such international projects, work was parcelled out between...

Vignette 049 The Daggertooth had been a mature male, big and fierce. Yahless'ayu bowed once to its still-warm corpse, then spread his hands to his sides, palms upward in a gesture of peace. “Mother of grazers, I am Yahless'ayu of the Elkh'uurt pride. I give you the life of this predator, and the lives of the grazers it would have hunted, in payment for the lives of your children that my pride will take in the coming year, lives saved for lives taken” The first part of the ritual complete, he glanced quickly at the hovering pict-drone to ensure it was transmitting. “I am Yahless'ayu of the Elkh'uurt pride. I have taken this daggertooth in the traditional way, without bow or firearm, and with no more than a claw of companions. I claim my place as a hunter of the pride, and as an adult”. He stepped back as E'kwaaay'r and the others came forward in turn for their own oaths of adulthood... (Author's note - The canon sources don't talk much ab...

Vignette 048 “ When my brother and I visited Duchaine, we went to the same planet, but very different worlds. His naval lieutenant's uniform got him admission into the polite society and wealth of the thousand families who owned and ran the planet, and he moved through a world of elegant receptions, excellent food, and ubiquitous servants catering to every whim. My work as a journalist took me into the underside of Duchaine's arcologies, where millions thrown out of work by the automation of its industries tried to survive on inadequate or non-existent welfare. Law enforcement was brutal when it was present, but mostly it wasn't, since the thousand families just wanted the slum-dwellers kept out of sight and out of mind, and didn't much care what they did to each other. A job as a servant upside was a dream come true for most slummies, even if it only paid three meals a day and a bunk in a dormitory, and they'd do almost anything to get one. A recruiter came...

Game Review - Forgotten Waters I'm interested in the evolution of games, and particularly the rise of cooperative rather than competitive games. This year's Christmas game is a good example of that, with the players as the crew of the same pirate ship, and also the first game to actually integrate a phone app as part of the game, rather than a rules reference or a bolt-on source for additional premium content. The game itself has a number of heavy cardboard trackers for various types of resource - supplies, crew, hull points and the number and power of any cannon the ship may acquire. These resources will be gained and used up as the game progresses. If hill points or crew reach zero, the players ship sinks and the game is over; supplies can reach zero, but causes other problems rather than instant death. Neatly, the crew tracker also has a second counter tracking crew discontent. This starts at the opposite end of the track from the crew counter, and moves in the opposit...

Vignette 047 The city of Aralais is surrounded by an archaic city wall, known as the “Hunger Wall” and decorated with elaborate carvings, bas-reliefs and mosaics. It was built solely to provide employment for out-of-work and hungry citizens during the terrible economic depression of the 530s, and funded by the Marquis of Aralais, then the wealthiest noble on the planet. He continued to pour money into its construction until the end of the depression, and on being told the cost had almost bankrupted him, simply observed “Then I am thankful that my fortune lasted long enough to preserve my people”. The Marquis' memorial can be seen in the city cemetery. It was built entirely by craftsmen who learned their trade building his wall, and carries the inscription “Walls can defend a people against more than enemies” (Author's note - This is intended to give a world a little more flavour, as since the "Hunger Wall" serves no architectural purpose it can be added to a ...

Vignette 046 “ The first thing you notice on pre-fusion worlds is the smell. Whether it's the dung from riding and draft animals, the coal and wood smoke from steam-powered worlds or the sharper tang of burned petrochemicals from internal combustion systems, they all stink, and it takes a while to get used to it”. (Author's note - This is just a handy piece of colour text the referee can drop in anywhere. We'd be horrified by how bad Victorian London smelled - even natives often were - and fusion-era natives would be horrified by the car-related pollution in modern LA)

  Game Review - Rhino Hero Buying a new game for christmas is a family tradition - we play it with my parents on christmas day, then ourselves on new year's eve. This year's choice was "Rhino Hero", a simple and cheap game that's still a lot of fun. It's effectively a cross between Uno and reverse Jenga - all players start with a number of floor cards in their hands, and the aim is to be the first to get rid of them all by building an ever taller tower of cards. When a player lays a floor card, it will have one or two "walls" drawn on it. These walls are simply folded cards, and the next player places the walls then balances a new floor card on them, before the turn passes on for the third player to do the same. The first player to get rid of all their cards wins, which is only likely to happen if all the players have pretty steady hands. If the tower collapses while a player is adding that card, then that player loses and the winner is whic...

Traveller Vignette 045 “ One of the new recruits was a guy called Connors, from the Matriarchy of Dulcene. His family had too many sons, and the family mothers decided three of them should seek their fortunes off-world. To be fair, they'd tried to find suitable jobs for them, and the guy was generally a pretty good fit. He'd apparently been working as a driver / mechanic in his family's vehicle pool since he left school at 14, and he was way ahead of most recruits on mechanical skills. He could also iron and sew like a professional, and got good points for turnout. On the other hand, he'd only been taught the most basic maths, and he'd clearly never handled money beyond the “pocket money” level – the top sergeant had to step in several times in the early days to stop him getting ripped off. Everybody made fun of the fact he'd taken “fashion” as a school subject, until we discovered he knew what'd look good on you better than you did, and could pro...

  Traveller Vignette 044 “ Technology and economics can interact in some very unexpected ways. The ubiquitous LSP OP-500 office printer is a good example – it's a pretty decent office printer, and Ling sell millions each year at Cr 500 a time, making a good margin on each. But not everybody wants to spend that much on a full-spec printer, so LSP wanted a cheaper printer for the home market, and set out to design one to sell for around Cr 250 each. Thing is, it turned out that making a completely new design with a new production line would actually cost more per unit than simply running off extra OP-500s on the existing production line. LSP would still make a small profit on each OP-500 it sold at that price, but it'd obviously crash sales of the same printer in the office market at a higher price – nobody would pay Cr 500 if they knew people were getting the same thing for Cr 250. So they thought a bit, added a memory buffer to the cheap version, which did nothing but...

Traveller Vignette 043 “ The years after the war were hard. So much had been destroyed in the invasion, or by orbital bombardment after the Saruthi realised they couldn't win and wrecked everything as they pulled out. My earliest memories are childhood meals in the orphanage dining hall – there was just enough food for everybody, and you learned not to take too much. After dinner, we sewed by lamplight while a house-mother read stories from an old book. One of the house mothers cried when we finally got the power grid up and the electric lights came back on; she remembered them from before the war. I went to work in the shipyards when I was fourteen; it was hard, heavy work, and I came back to the dormitory exhausted most nights, but I cheered myself hoarse with the rest when our first ship lifted. It wasn't much of a ship – not even jump capable – but it let us start training crews, and we built more and better ships over the years that followed. It cost us a lot...

FN P90 PDW T he latest delve into the random toybox of guns last week produced an FN P-90, an odd little device firing a bottleneck 5.7x28mm round from a 50rd magazine running flat along the reciever top. It's odd-locking, but fully ambidextrous and surprisingly ergonomic once you get used to it. The barrel is notably longer than it looks, since it's a bullpup design, and the higher velocity gives it a flatter trajectory than 9x19mm, so it'll easily outshoot most conventional SMGs. However, the tendency towards 5.56mm carbines mean it hasn't exactly leapt into mass use, which may be a pity. The P-90 with an HK53 for comparison - note that the HK53 is an SMG-length version of the HK33 5.56mm assault rifle, and rather chunkier than the 9mm MP5. It's probably a better comparator to the P90 in terms of performance, however, though the example above obviously has its stock collapsed

Traveller Vignette 042 “ The Aslan was old, grey-maned and dressed in shabby, threadbare coveralls. It didn't fit with the neat stack of bank notes, several thousand credits at least. He handed it to me, bowed and rumbled “T'enk yoo”, obviously sounds carefully learned by rote. The female next to him was nearly as old, and spoke careful anglic. “My brother was interned after the revolution on Kashan, and was prisoner in the camps there.” I felt sick. The revolutionary government hadn't even been able to feed their own troops properly in the last years of the war, let alone prisoners. We'd sent what we could, but it hadn't been nearly enough. “ He says relief parcels from your organisation were the difference between hunger and starvation. He thanks you for his life, for which he cannot repay. He gives this for his oath to repay one hundred-fold the cost of each parcel he received, and for his two packmates who died in the camps and cannot redeem their own ...

  Traveller Vignette 041 Marla looked at me, then at the part-empty bottle, as if gauging how much alcohol was in each. It was a local vintage, poor stuff, but I'd found that if I drank enough of it, I didn’t mind how bad it was. “You shouldn't drink alone” she told me, disapprovingly “ I never drink alone” I told her “It's just that everyone who keeps me company while I drink died in the war. I'd still rather spend time with them than most people I meet these days”. She rolled her eyes. “Do you actually practice the whole burned-out warhorse routine for effect, or are you seriously that full of bullshit? No, don't tell me, I don't care. Just take a sobriety pill and get ready. We've got a job”. She started to leave, then paused “And try to shave, for the Emperor's sake, so I don't have to apologise for the way you look” (Author's note - This is just a piece of colour, I'm afraid. I wrote it as a little character piece, but ...

Traveller 2300 - Tools for Colonial Living GDW's Traveller was by far the best-known of the science fiction roleplaying games. However, it was set far into the future, leaving a potential opening for a "near future" SF RPG and GDW launched "Traveller 2300" in 1986 to try to fill this gap. The result was confusing. Despite using "Traveller" as part of the name to cash in on brand recognition, there was no relationship between the games. Traveller 2300 used a new rule set, and a background derived by extending the chronology created for GDW's Twilight 2000 game into the future, after humanity had recovered from WWIII and explored a small section of the universe - roughly a subsector, in classic traveller terms. The games' universe had some excellent features (the Kafers in particular were some of my favourite aliens) but it also had some notably bad ones (including an extremely abrupt left turn to bring in lots of cyberpunk elements in the l...

Traveller Vignette 040 “ The liner Jenny Haniver emerged from jump without warning, on a prohibited vector that intersected the orbit of the system's main inhabited world. Orbital control tried to raise her onboard flight computers, then the backup flight computers and finally the human crew, without any success. She'd exited jump with significant velocity – another serious navigation infraction – so control wanted her boarded before she hit atmosphere and burned up. The tyranny of orbital mechanics meant we were about the only ship with the right location and thrust potential to intercept, and the fact we were nothing but an intra-system shuttle without a full crew aboard be damned. Anything from planetside or close orbit would have to burn to meet her, then reverse thrust and burn in the opposite direction to match velocities, which wasn't going to happen.” (Author's note - This is obviously a scenario set up; if the PCs have a ship, then it happens to...

Traveller Vignette 039 “ Hunting psions is part of the Bureau's job, but frankly not a major one – despite the urban legends about secret megacorp research projects and elite covert operatives, actual psions are very uncommon, and most aren't actually that powerful. The last psion hunt I remember was back in 1105; we'd picked up his trail when Naval Intelligence broke an undercover psion ring which might – or might not – have had Zho backing. The ring had been testing a new drug which supposedly helped unlock dormant powers, and asked planetary authorities to do a routine follow-up on anyone who might have been a test subject. Anyway, this guy ran a speeder dealership, and a very successful one. He didn't show any of the standard powers, but he was supernaturally persuasive. I mean, he couldn't make you believe your mother was a Vargr or something, but everything he said just seemed so...reasonable. The first agent I sent to interview him came back wit...

Traveller Vignette 038 “ Brother James met me in the mission's carefully tended vegetable garden. He looked thin, overworked and oddly content. The Iskandrian church had been working on this low-tech backwater world for three generations now, running clinics and schools, and their work was slowly paying off – literacy and life expectancy were up by a measurable amount, and child mortality was down. From what I understood, there was actually a waiting list of people back on Iskander willing to spend two years training then another five years here, working for nothing but their keep and the belief that they'd be rewarded in some future life. They didn't particularly try to proselytize, because their church taught that the best argument was a good example, but they got converts anyway and I'd not met anybody on world who had anything but praise for the brothers. “ The mission seems to be doing well, Brother” I said. “ Pretty good” he said modestly “But you know...

  Traveller Small Arms - Part 1, Handguns Traveller has a gone for "generic" weapons - an autopistol, rather than a "10mm Muller-Riviera Mk 19" - which is fine, but the weapons in the basic book - and especially the handguns - seem a rather sparse assortment. It would be nice to have a little more choice, and for a TL9 pistol not to be identical its TL5 equivalent. On the other hand, I like the simplicity of the existing rules, and didn't want to come up with a huge book of new weapons. The best option was therefore to add a couple of simple options which modified the existing weapons, and add some colour to show how a weapon changes through tech levels, while still using the same combat table. The first thing is to add a "light pistol", which uses the same combat tables as the body pistol, but made of conventional materials rather than the high tech detection-proof materials as the body pistol and weighing 350g. Cost, availability and lega...