Re: [OFFICIAL] Some FT background stuff (guidelines for writers)

> The problem I have with that is that this sort of campaign by
definition
> requires FTL travel and I never really liked the idea (even back when
I
> played 1st edition traveller) that a culture could somehow develop FTL
> travel without developing FTL comms. It's like having invented a
teleporter
> but yet not invented a Fax machine or radio.

But traveller did have FTL comms. If it only took you a week to jump 
a courier (and I suppose there is no good reason why you can't 
automate a courier except that if something goes wrong, AI would tend 
to lack the flexibility to deal with it that a human would have) up 
to six map hexes (a heck of a long distance as I recall, probably 20 
LY), then you are FTL. It just turned out in that setting that you 
could pop a ship into jump space using a particular sequence of 
energy pulsed through a grid of some fantastic metal in the hull, and 
you would then pop out a week later at your destination. They didn't 
violate the 'you can't accelerate past the speed of light' law of 
physics, they just stepped out of our universe (a la Starwars 
hyperspace) in a neat way. Hence they had FTL comms, but it pretty 
much still boiled down to a pony express delivery system.