We're at the crossroads between realism and fun, here. Realistically, one of the following would be true:

1) It's impossible to turn a ship into a near-c impactor for some scientific or technological reason.

2) it's possible, but there are effective and widely deployed countermeasures.

3) It's happened many times over the course of the three Imperia.

Since we don't hear about (3) in canon, that narrows it down to (1) or (2), unless you accept Kurt's suggestion that every single incident has been effectively covered up. ("Mora? No sir, no such planet. No, sir, I don't care if you were born there, not in our data bank. Do you maybe mean X-338, the interdicted molten slag heap which I must emphasize has always been just like that?")

If you emphasize fun over "realism" (e.g., continuity with canon and agreement in broad terms with what we know about people and technology), then sure, have the players invent the trick and have the target planet be utterly surprised by it.

Of course, on the third hand, the US was "surprised" by the use of jetliners as cruise missiles on 9/11, despite two preceding well-known fictional portrayals of the specific building-as-target idea that I can think of offhand,.not to mention the use of kamikaze aircraft against our fleet in WWII.

On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 1:13 PM, William Ewing (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:

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Maybe in the capital system. Maybe. We don't have cameras on every street corner with pattern recognition that will detect concealed carry, because those advocating for gun control have not convinced the rest of us we need such an extreme reaction.
Doing that to Traveller makes it no fun. It's impossible to get away with anything, whether it's something the PCs might have wanted to do or not. It reminds me of D&D games where teleporting to a new continent can't escape the magical APB for slaying the villain.

From: Craig Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
Sent: Friday, July 24, 2015 9:11 PM
Subject: Re: [TML] Captain, the USS AMANA is in radar range

And, of course, the other side of this is that everyone in the universe will know about all the threats from standard technology, as their cultures have been living with it for thousands of years. What countermeasures (technical and tactical) have evolved over that period?

Just for example, a run-up to a significant fraction of c is going to take much more than a week. So if you dot the Oort cloud with sensors looking for suspicious objects accelerating into the inner system, and give each that's more than a light-week out a jump-capable message torpedo, you can get word to the main world within a week, and a week later have a fleet arrive via in-system jump at a position where they can intercept the intruder at its predicted position two weeks after detection, and destroy it before it's within 50 AU of its target. Heck, jump a few 12G missiles with good homing systems out there, that will do the job just fine.

Obviously, that takes a lot of money and hardware. But the Imperium and its worlds have a lot of money, hardware, and time. Don't you think there's a defense shell like this around the major hi-population worlds?
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Craig Berry (http://google.com/+CraigBerry)
"Eternity is in love with the productions of time." - William Blake