I would _really_ like to see some plant articles.

It's an area where I'm skimpy, and I'd really like to know more.

Please, Timothy?

And , thank you - there were no responses on my post, I was worrying
it hadn't sent (grin)

On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 5:28 PM, Timothy Collinson
<xxxxxx@port.ac.uk> wrote:
> I was going to try and respond to Jeff and say, yes, it is hard to come up
> with a memorable *new* animal.  Partly because nature has such an incredible
> way of coming up with weird and wonderful without my help and partly because
> I'm not that great a biologist (or botanist) to know much about what would
> work/not work, what's plausible, not plausible etc.  I feel my efforts thus
> far have been a tad derivative.  And I have tried - both because, like you,
> I feel it's a bit neglected and because I want to come up with interesting
> things!  One snag is that the Keith brothers set such a high bar for both
> design and illustration - it's a bit disheartening.
>
> And don't get me started on plants - here we have an SF game, wonderful
> opportunities for world design, planet after planet and across 10 editions
> of Traveller next to *nothing* bar a paragraph or two on plants or
> vegetation.  One of the reasons I populated a space station in the second
> game I ran at TravCon with "the hidden gardens" and more plants you could
> shake a stick at.  (I think I've probably mentioned here or in the pages of
> Freelance Traveller that one player took a look at my 4 page 'Selected Guide
> to the Flora of Anther' and reckoned I'd just supplied his Traveller
> vegetation needs for the rest of his life.)  A supplement would be nice, but
> even just a short section in a world building book or an article from
> someone who knows something about the possibilities of alien flora would be
> wonderful.  As it happens I've currently borrowed my Mum's encyclopedia of
> plants while she's on holiday, but it's a bit 'garden flower' orientated so
> its not helping as much as I'd hoped.
>
> Then just to cap it all Jeffrey comes along with the above... and, well, I
> might as well just fold.  My hat's off to you sir.  Brilliant.
>
> tc
>
>
> On 19 July 2016 at 15:39, Jeffrey Schwartz <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> The old Scout leaned back in big overstuffed chair, enjoying the rich
>> leather and the comfort almost as much as he was enjoying the fine
>> brandy in the elegant glass in his hand. The "Danger Club" had offered
>> him a cr50 honorarium - and free drinks! - to come chat with the
>> members about some of the creatures he'd seen over the years.
>>
>> "The magni-pie is very dangerous, albeit accidentally. Ran into them
>> during the Fourth Frontier War...."
>> "They're kinda like a beaker with wings, capable of gliding more than
>> flying. Call it a flying-squirell-monkey. They have a magnetic sense
>> that lets them navigate, but that sense is also used in evaluating the
>> gifts a male offers a female during courtship. The purer the magnetic
>> signature, the more attractive the gift."
>> "Since the colonization of _______ , the little buggers have a habit
>> of stealing any small bits of metal - nuts, bolts, nails - that
>> aren't...uh.. nailed down. So to speak."
>> He paused and took a sip of the brandy,"During the war, the bastards
>> would swarm over battle fields, picking up the empty shell cases,
>> magazines, all the expendable stuff used up in a modern battle. An in
>> the course of this, they discovered that the ring from a grenade pin
>> was just the right size to go around the foot and rest on the leg of a
>> female, like a pretty bracelet."
>> "The females discovered jewelry."
>> "Nature being what it is, the males of course locked on to the best
>> gift to gain a mate... which was ok as long as they contented
>> themselves to sweeping through after a battle and picking up the
>> dropped grenade pins."
>> "When they began sneaking in on bivouac sights and stealing them, it
>> got dangerous."
>> The Scout leaned forward a bit, his voice drawing the listeners in,
>> "It's 0200. You're trying to run a silent camp as part of an
>> infiltration mission. There's the normal animal sounds, a little
>> rattle of the tree branches above the camp. Nothing out of the
>> ordinary, and the sentries are on watch with thermal and lowlight...
>> One of the little critters you've been seeing all day runs down a tree
>> trunk, but who cares? You lose it in the underbrush and camo around
>> your sleeping teammates... a few moments later it scampers back up
>> another tree trunk. "
>> The Scout held his breath for a dramatic pause,"Then ... Boom!"
>> It wasn't a yelled "Boom!" - it was a sad, maudlin way of saying it.
>> "Dave, the same Dave that you've been marching with for a month,
>> explodes. Yeah, I know, the restraining loop over the spoon on the
>> grenade... but from the times a soldier woke up before the magni-pie
>> stole the pin, they snip through the strap with their beak so they can
>> get to the pin easier. "
>>
>> The Scout took another sip, savoring the brandy. "Dangerous, but they
>> don't intend to be, and if you're not carrying grenades then the
>> problem isn't there. I think the real topic on the table is creatures
>> that are intentionally dangerous"
>>
>> "On _________, in the highland mountains, the natives hunt the
>> Trellkatan. Picture a sort of arboreal mountain goat... like goat with
>> the hands and feet of an ape. About 1.5 meters tall when they stand on
>> their hind legs, about 60cm running on all fours. The backs of the
>> hands are covered with ... like turtle shell, or super thick
>> sharkskin, so when they fold the fingers into the palm the hand works
>> like a hoof."
>>
>> "The natives hunt them for the pelts - they grow long, thick coats
>> that are chemically really similar to spider silk or kevlar. There's a
>> couple companies that pay nicely for them and make really elegant
>> Cloth armor from the stuff."
>>
>> "The problem is the fur gets twisted, tangled and matted, like a
>> sheep's... and three to four centimeter thick tangled mats tend to
>> stop a lot of incoming fire. It's hard to cut, it's hard to stab
>> through it, bullets tend to hit strand after strand and slow down.
>> Gauss needles work, and energy weapons. But hitting them with energy
>> weapons ruins the pelt, which is the whole point of the hunt."
>>
>> "The locals use a kind of a long spear, with a thin stiletto head to
>> it. About a third of a meter of needle, with a crossbar like a boar
>> spear, and then about another meter and a half of metal rod."
>>
>> "The Trellkatan have a very powerful grip, and if they get a hand on
>> you they'll crush your throat. Or the bones in your arm. Or pull the
>> arm out of it's socket. Their main weapon, though, are the curved
>> horns, like a goat's, except the outside and inside of the curve of
>> the horn is razor thin and very sharp. It won't cut deep, but the
>> creatures are very big on hitting in the face and neck with the horns.
>> When they hunt , they hold their prey down and slit its throat with
>> the horn-edge."
>>
>> "That's the other difference between them and goats - or apes. They're
>> extremely territorial, irrationally so. No other animal can live
>> within about 1500 meters of their lair. They'll hunt and kill
>> everything the find there. Another 5 km or so is hunting range, where
>> they'll let things live but go through hunting for food. "
>>
>> "They are like goats in that they're a herd animal or a pack animal,
>> depending on how you look at it. The hunting parties are between 4 and
>> 24 of them, usually all males. Maybe a couple young near-adult
>> females"
>>
>> "The Lairs are mountain caves, or cave complexes, where dozens of them
>> live. The females have a nursing organ that is like a tap that
>> branches off where the stomach and the intestines join. A tube from
>> the tummy that the young nurse semi-digested food from. They have
>> litters of 2 to 5 kids every spring, and all the males hunt like crazy
>> to feed them. They mate in the fall, and gestate all winter, deep in
>> the cave where the temperature is the same year round.  They gorge all
>> summer, and the females are sort of hibernating while gestating."
>>
>> "Trying to hunt them in the lair is... dangerous. They climb up into
>> the tops of the cave, find niches.  They hear really well, and will
>> tap their hoof-hands on the rock to make a clicking sound that they
>> range-find on in the dark. Not as good as a bat's sonar, but good
>> enough they can find their way around even in the deep-dark. And that
>> hearing lets them know you're coming, so they can get to the side, or
>> above, the opening between one part of the cave and another. As the
>> hunter crawls through, they just snatch him and slash."
>>
>> "Some people will gas the cave - smoke grenades work, or riot gas -
>> but the twists, niches, and occasional water filled tunnel stop that.
>> Mostly they throw the smoke in so that more Trellkatan come out  -
>> although that isn't usually a problem. Get within 500 meters or so of
>> the cave, and every adult male will mob you since you're in their
>> exclusion zone."
>>
>> The Scout noticed his brandy snifter was empty - and the noticing was
>> because of the well groomed and dressed waiter who had held off
>> filling it until there was a pause in the story telling. The tall man
>> poured another helping, the amber liquid making the cut crystal
>> sparkle in the light of the elegant fireplace behind and to the left
>> of the old man's chair.
>>
>> "The Trellkatan... they're dangerous, but we hunt them. By we I mean
>> sophonts, humanati. We make the choice to go up in the mountains and
>> hunt them. It could be worse. "
>>
>> "I was doing a survey on... well. It's a Red Zone, and I'm not going
>> to name it. It's Red Zoned for a reason."
>>
>> "We landed in badlands - not desert, not mountain, not a nearly-dry
>> riverbed canyon, but some kind of hellish mix of the worst qualities
>> of all three. Strange regoliths worn by wind and rain and, once upon a
>> time when the river was more than a trickle of a stream, by rushing
>> waters. "
>>
>> "Binary system, a pair of .... no, I think mentioning spectral types
>> would be bad. Let's just leave it at a pair of dim stars, so there was
>> never really night, and never really day. Fast rotational period, less
>> than 14 hours, which contributed to the winds that whistled through
>> the rocks, and made ever shifting patterns of light and shadow that
>> tricked your eye and made you see things that weren't there. Or,
>> worse, made you ignore things that were there."
>>
>> "Radiation was fairly high, both from the stars and from radioactive
>> cobalt dust in the atmosphere. Yeah. Not naturally occurring, and from
>> the half-life about 50 years back, the civilization nuked itself. Long
>> Night colony that everybody forgot about.  We found some wreckage,
>> bits and pieces of documents."
>>
>> "They'd broken with their parent world because of a dispute over
>> genetic engineering ethics. The parent world subscribed to views
>> similar to the enlightened, sensible, dare I say SANE! kind of
>> thoughts that are common in the Imperium as a whole. Praise the
>> Emperor and all his predecessors for wisdom. "
>>
>> With that toast, the Old Scout raised his glass and took a sip, and
>> the listeners echoed the sentiment.
>>
>> "The ... freethinkers... no, that is too weak a word. "Fanatical
>> whackjobs" is closer, but lacks the dispassionate social
>> professionalism so prized by the Scout Service, so I'll avoid that
>> term. Let's just go with 'people'."
>>
>> "The people who colonized wanted to make ... well... Von Neuman
>> machines. But they wanted biological Von Neuman Terraforming Servitor
>> Creatures. At first, this was just peachy. There was enough land they
>> could all spread out, grow some landscaping slave-critters, and have
>> their own little gardens of eden. "
>>
>> "Until there got to be too many people. And then they started to argue
>> over the choicest bits of land. And arguing turned to duels, but that
>> wasn't enough, so there were skirmishes and then custom-built fighting
>> critters in arena combats. Then there were the sore losers who decided
>> not to go along with the arena trial by combat's result, and there
>> were battles between estates. And then estates banded together, and
>> ....and someone decided that they were going escalate, and 'win', and
>> they dusted off the old physics books and made nukes."
>>
>> "Which shattered the infrastructure enough that the people were no
>> longer in their manicured estates, and the fighting critters were
>> loose across the world."
>>
>> "The really big ones weren't so bad. About 15 metric tons mass, three
>> to four meters at the shoulder. Scales? Plates? I don't know what to
>> call them. Size of a dinner plate, thick as your thumb and overlapping
>> like a shark's teeth. Ablative to energy weapon fire, and HEAP would
>> just blow that one plate off. Trunk like an elephant, tail like a
>> scorpion - with a stinger!, and six big legs like an alligator that
>> let it move while keeping the soft belly near the ground. Claws that
>> let it climb the soft limestone rock of the badlands. Eight tentacles
>> off a mound in the middle of the back, each ending in a stinger like
>> the one on the tail. "
>>
>> "Those weren't so bad, because at least you could see them coming.
>> Well, no, you could hear them coming as they crunched up the terrain.
>> In the shifting shadows and twisty regoliths, they could actually
>> sneak up on you, because your eyes would sometimes think they were
>> just a big, weird shaped rock. They'd stalk in nice and slow, crawling
>> just a little at a time, until they were close enough. "
>>
>> "The Big Ones would dig down into the mud in the stream bed, and just
>> let all the water run through their mouths - filter feeding like
>> whales. They could sit still, waiting like that, until they noticed
>> something to kill. The shape of their mouths was such they couldn't
>> even eat animals they killed - they'd toss the bodies in the stream,
>> and filter up bits that came off or the little minnow-sized fish that
>> came to eat the carrion."
>>
>> "Worse were the bunnies. Little fluffy bunny rabbit things, with soft
>> fur and cute bunny bodies. "
>>
>> The Scout shuddered, looking off into space, and took a swig of his
>> drink. Then steadied himself, whispered a couple words, and said more
>> clearly, "Absent friends" and raised his drink in a toast, before
>> sipping again. A few other people echoed the toast.
>>
>> "The bunnies would roll in the dust, their fur picking it up and
>> camouflaging them near perfectly. They were small - shoe box sized -
>> and fast as all hell when they sprinted. Inside 100 meters, they'd be
>> on you in a heartbeat."
>>
>> "Two long, sharp incisors. Two long, sharp claws per paw... and the
>> belly has a thing like the Hunter's organ in an electric eel, with
>> specialized conductors to the incisors and paws. If it could get
>> through the HazMat suits we were wearing because of the cobalt, it
>> could zap hard enough to stun you. "   [Roll vs END]
>>
>> "When nothing was there to hunt, they moved like a herd of herbivores,
>> eating the lichen and bits of plant that grew between the rocks, or
>> digging out insects. Like watching a flock of chickens sweeping the
>> area, nibbling here and there, while the ones on the edge of the flock
>> keep watch. They'd go slow, stay stealthy and quiet, and feed....
>> until the ones on the edge caught sight of real prey."
>>
>> "Then the whole flock would go into stalk mode, and when they got
>> close enough sprint and pounce. Thirty or forty of them hitting almost
>> at once, like land piranha. Stop one, and another is ducking around to
>> stab at your heel, the back of your calf.... and once those little
>> needles get through, down you go. The bastard would shock and shock
>> and shock and make sure you couldn't get up to push its friends off."
>>
>> The Old Scout paused a bit, staring down into his glass,and then
>> gulped the brandy down in one swallow before asking,"How about a
>> little break? Maybe some cards?"
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