Traveller Vignette 054 We like to imagine Library Data is always reliable, but the need to propagate information across vast interstellar distances means sometimes it is less accurate than we might wish. Some things are simple mistakes, as when translation/transliteration from Terran Spanish to Vilani then back to Galanglic meant that for over a century, Library Data in the Spinward sectors listed Don Quixote's companion as "Sancho Panzer" or when the Vilani AAB listed "Paper Jam" as a traditional Terran foodstuff. A more famous example occurred during the initial expansion out of Sylea after the Long Night, when an error during optical scanning of old, faded hardcopy logs misread the population digit for a world as "8" (tens of millions) rather than "3" (thousands). A speculative trader arrived shortly after re-contact with a hold full of commemorative mugs celebrating the accession of Cleon II, assuming that the locals would want to s...
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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...