On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 05:22:48PM -0400, Kurt Feltenberger wrote: >How do you figure this? Looking at the causes for terrorism today, and >in the Traveller universe, it isn't always about resources; it's about >belief, oppression - or the perception of oppression, unwanted >occupation, and a host of other issues. So long as there is organized >government or social groups there will be terrorism of one sort or another.
It's an effort vs reward thing. Once you've got control of a spacecraft powered by a nuclear reactor, you can rain radioactive death over really quite a large area. It's not hard at all, in a universe where you have asteroid miners with reactionless-drive ships, to get hold of one of those ships and set its autopilot to take a rock on a multi-year course that ends in a planet. Any merchant spacecraft, any little asteroid miner, is potentially as damaging as a nuclear weapon - or even more so. And yet these things are sold openly to civilians. That tells me that people simply don't _want_ to commit terrorist acts. Whether that's because of mind control, insanely intrusive law enforcement, or everybody simply sitting down and deciding to be peaceful and happy... is not germane to the argument. Reactionless or nuclear-powered ships coupled with a society recognisably like our own simply break my suspension of disbelief (and I say this even though I've run games in which they exist). R _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
