Fuzion+

[anders lager]

T4 introduces the concept of cold fusion (fusion+) on Sylea. Presumably, a fusion reactor can now be so small, to even fit in a battledress! This tech contradicts all previous versions of Traveller. And it was invented a thousand years before "Golden Era" Traveller!

How do you go about explaining this phenomenon in your games? Can it be integrated in later "canon" in a good way?

/doc.

 

[Zparkz]

Cold Fusion was first mentioned in FF&S v1
I think it never was a part of the Traveller canon. At least so I interpret the text in FF&S

 

[robject]

T4 introduces the concept of cold fusion (fusion+) on Sylea. Presumably, a fusion reactor can now be so small, to even fit in a battledress! This tech contradicts all previous versions of Traveller. And it was invented a thousand years before "Golden Era" Traveller!

How do you go about explaining this phenomenon in your games? Can it be integrated in later "canon" in a good way?

/doc.

Creative retcon?

 

[anders lager]

OK, I'll check FF&S1 when I come home... Thanks!

/a.

PS.

What does "retcom" mean?

DS.

 

[Zparkz]

I think it is labeled Piezo...something in the power chapter. I don't have FF&S in front of me now, but there is almost a page dedicated to the stuff.

 

[redwalker]

What does "retcom" mean?

DS.

Retroactive continuity.

In other words, the writers can't reconcile the contradictions, so they just keep telling stories.

This is often seen in comic books.

 

[rancke]

T4 introduces the concept of cold fusion (fusion+) on Sylea. Presumably, a fusion reactor can now be so small, to even fit in a battledress! This tech contradicts all previous versions of Traveller. And it was invented a thousand years before "Golden Era" Traveller!

How do you go about explaining this phenomenon in your games? Can it be integrated in later "canon" in a good way?

I must have missed the contradiction completely. I've always believed that Fusion+ allowed fusion plants of the size we saw in other Traveller editions and that the non-Fusion+ fusion plants of T4 were bigger and more expensive.

I know MT had a fusion plant the size of a trashcan, which is pretty small, I believe. Battlesuit-sized plants I've never heard of. Are there any mentioned in any T4 book?



Hans

 

[anders lager]

Yup, check out "Emperors Arsenal", where the augmented battledress from TL 12 is equipped with a small fusion+ energy source. Also the PCMP-14 and up is fusion+ -powered.

And "Central Supply Catalog", about battle dress armor...

/doc.

 

[Renaissance Man]

Ahh, poor, poor T4. There were some pretty nice supplements and some great background stuff for it. A lot of babies were thrown out with that bathwater when the Traveller community rejected the product line.

 

[aramis]

Fusion+ was never well explained in the core book, other than passing references to it building the Imperium. Likewise, the core mechanics of T4, while a workable system, did not work as advertised. It felt nothing like CT to me, and even less like MT... and the editing quality would have gotten a huge pile of failing grades in any of my freshman college courses.

It was, in a nutshell, a passable system with a few gems and some real stinkers, and didn't play at all like anything else Traveller labelled. It was, for the first time in my life, sufficient to make me wonder what color the sky was in Marc's world, cause it sure didn't seem to be any shade of blue...

I was hopeful, the blind hop of the media blitzed, when T4 came out. (Tho' I was disappointed at the time that SJ (of SJG) didn't get his bid to do MT2E....) We played it. We didn't like the stat-bloat. We tried the This Is Hard rule. It didn't help. Due to stat bloat, it also made PC's ubermenschen in combat. (Skill 3 was sufficient for all but sniping. The skill 6 sniper with Dex F, however, had trouble hitting at range...)

Further, the method of dealing with armor felt like a step backwards after MT or TNE...

And it lacked the promised simplicity. If it had not been hyped the way it had, it might have fared a lot better. But between the hype, and the high quality of the other editions, it had a huge bar to meet, and failed by a long shot.

Lots of good ideas, lost to poor editing, lack of adequate in-depth playtesting, and excessive hype.

 

[Renaissance Man]

I looked it over and never played it, largely for the reasons you described. But I really liked the Milieu 0 stuff. The equipment catalogues and sourcebooks had some great ideas. It turned what had formerly been a very misty period of TU history and made it come alive. Fusion+ was part of that, the technology that gave the Emperor that crucial edge he needed to pull the core systems out of the Long Night. I also liked how chemical slug throwers were still the main weapons of the day, giving the milieu a strangely gritty, retro flavour when compared to the glitzy explosive plasma and fusion weapons of later TLs.

Of course, I had never played CT and so didn't have the issue of authenticity to deal with. I had played MT, but I was a zygote.

Yeah, the system was a serious downer for anyone looking for a definitive new Trav edition. Pretty much unplayable by all accounts. But I'm definitely mining the material for my own TU.

 

[epicenter00]

I admit I sort of used a kind of "reverse handwavium" to dismiss Fusion+. It was pretty egregious, sadly, like a lot of other things in T4.

I've always despised the Traveller tenet of "cheap, plentiful fusion power" as I cannot stop thinking of the implications of it (along with gravity control) that entirely breaks my suspension of disbelief in the incongruously primitive nature of the rest of the Traveller world - given those two tenets, there are tons of implications I haven't considered - suffice it to say, there's no way that the Traveller universe would be like the way it is, starting with the beloved tramp freighter.

Fusion+ was the straw that broke the camel's back - now you could literally have fusion reactors in cars and tanks. Next, we'd see them in our iPods and hand calculators. I simply couldn't handle Fusion+. It felt like something you'd see in Doctor Who or Ghostbusters, not a sci-fi game whose players claim is "hard" sci-fi.