[TML] Effect of metal on Tech level

[Richard Aiken]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Jerry W Barrington
<jerry.barrington at gmail.com> wrote:
> "They found a planet no one desired and upon it created an unsupervised
> gravity well for unwanted human debris: political activists, terrorists, the
> criminally insane, and the insanely criminal.  It was a dump in the middle
> of a lethal desert with no support facilities, authority, control, or law.
> They named the planet after the deepest of Hell's hells: Tartaros.  This is
> the story of a man and murderer, Bando Nicos, who was condemned to Tartaros
> and became the planet's first police officer. "
>
> But if you dump political activists and terrorists with no guards, what's to
> keep their buddies from coming to get them.  In OTU it wouldn't work without
> a guard ship to keep rescuers out, because tramp ships are so common.

True.  Although you could probably get away with a brace of automated
interdiction satellites.  Any criminals with pull - those with buddies
who have enough money or connections to hire a ship to go and get them
- wouldn't get sent here.  And there's nothing to say Tartarus doesn't
have guard ships or satellites.  The entire book is written solely
from the POV of Nicos, who wouldn't know anything about any such
system, anyway.

BTW, calling Nicos "the planet's first police officer" is a trifle
misleading.  Unless you happen to be the sort of person who considers
Judge Dredd to be merely a policeman . . .

But if I'm understanding the originally-postulated situation
correctly, a big war has happened a couple or three generations back
in the poster's campaign.  A war that basically caused the
civilization concerned to collapse.  So it isn't the OTU.  Unless it's
TNE or maybe 1200.  In which case randomly-arriving free traders are
hardly a concern.

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein