Yep, and changing that one variable completely breaks the background. The whole reason for Traveller's feudal Imperia is that there's no way to exercise direct authority across more than a few parsecs, because your information and orders become hopelessly out of date at greater distances -- for example, I seem to recall that one of the Frontier Wars was over before Capital got the news that it had started. That forces a functional government to entrust enormous authority in governors operating on the Emperor's behalf, at several levels, until finally at the planetary level other sorts of government are feasible. With FTL communications, a central government can operate directly across arbitrarily large distances. You'd still need people out there who you trust to gather good data and carry out orders, but there would be nothing like the degree of autonomy enjoyed by Traveller nobles.

On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 12:38 PM, Caleuche <xxxxxx@sudnadja.com> wrote:
I think the more important thing is consistency rather than realism in many cases. Realism becomes useful because game rules can't account for everything and barring a specific rule players are likely to presume that objects would act as they do in reality. If you make it clear that faster than light communication is possible in your universe, and that rule applies to everyone equally, then it's fine.

The thing is that Traveller explicitly excludes faster than light communication by any means other than jump drive, and if you can detect something (like "tachyons") faster than light you can communicate faster than light, so if you do something like that, make it clear that your Traveller Universe is different than the official one in that regard. 




-------- Original Message --------
On February 6, 2018 9:32 AM, Catherine Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

If Robert Heinlein can get away with having a nuclear explosion cause time travel, you can get away with having one cause tachyons. :)

On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 12:54 AM, Tim <xxxxxx@little-possums.net> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 01:03:19AM -0500, Kurt Feltenberger (via tml list) wrote:
> The second bit of help is more physics related:  When a nuclear
> weapon detonates (or thousands of them...), is there any
> particle/wave/theoretical "thing" that would travel faster than
> light and would alert someone with a sensor for that "thing"?

Not in any known physics, but don't let that stop you making up
something involving tachyons or jumpspace stuff.


- Tim
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