> On 6 Jul 2016, at 05:23, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 5:11 PM, C. Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
> As for the radiation environment, Traveller ships are implicitly assumed to have excellent rad shielding;
>
> Yes.
>
> But that shielding is apparently an active rather than a passive system and also one which can suffer catastrophic breakdown, most likely due to poor maintenance. Otherwise, there would not be that incident involving the deaths of the entire complement of one of the refinery stations in close orbit around Bowman that's mentioned in Beltstrike, which incident resulted in wages to work there afterward being relatively high (since nobody really believed management's assurances that the problem had been taken care of and would not recur).

(Memory failing… Beltsrike not to hand…) Isn’t Beltsrike about mining for CT (Contra-Terrene, or Anti-matter?) In which case I don’t think passive systems would be much good at keeping the nasty anti-protons away from your normal matter ship. It’d need to be an active system to divert them away from any kind of contact.

Regards, Andy
--
Andrew Long
Andrew dot Long at Mac dot com