Since that is what I've been trying to argue, I'm gratified to see you state that. But it's not the opinion I'm used to hear from TPTB (you are one of TPTB at Mongoose, right? Or am I mixing you up with someone else?)
HG did tie in with one assumption of the basic game, namely that when worlds have been settled for most of a millenium, some of them will reach population sizes in the hundreds and thousands of millions. The problem was that this assumption is incompatible with another assumption of the basic game, namely that populations in the thousands of millions can't afford more than a few tens of thousands tons of warships.
The problem could have been solved by reducing planetary populations drastically or increasing fleet tonnages drastically. HG went with the latter. The biggest problem with HG is IMO that it grandfathered Book 2 designs instead of making a clean break.
And a lot of the discrepancies that plague the Official Traveller Universe to this day is that this has not been accepted and accounted for.
And I ain't tipexing my copy of FFW just to reconsile canon changes
And who would ask you to? But if FFW is ever reissued, maybe Regina's TL could be changed to 12. Unless the game is so perfectly balanced that such a change would utterly ruin it, of course.
(Actually, the change that really would affect the balance of the game profoundly would be to adjust the planetary defense forces to reflect the population multiplier. As it is, one world can have the same defenses as one with nine times fewer people while another one with 11% more people can have ten times the defenses. How's that for verisimilitude?)
Hans
