[Spaceships] Actually GMing a world with Pseudovelocity drives?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

That was the way it worked in the original Phillip Knowlan novel too but the rockets weren't guided.

You see the same sort of split in Doc's Spacehounds of IPC but the humanoids of the Galilean moons used rockets for stealth reasons.

Not only was their no radar but their were no IR sensors either. Their enemies the Jovians used lots of beams though. No FTL in Spacehounds either of course.

Interestingly, in Spacehounds Smith deliberately went against one of his own tropes. The hero and heroine were discussing exobiology, and the hero dismissed the idea of humans on other worlds. He notes that the Venusians and Martians, both distant relatives of Man, are radically different than Tellurians or each other because of different environments, and points out that the chances of finding humans on other worlds naturally are effectively nil. He even notes that intelligences from other star systems would be even more alien than Venusians and Martians, since they would not be akin to Tellurians at all.

(He doesn't explain how the life on Venus, Earth, and Mars is akin.)

In his other stories, Smith tends to populate the stars with what are for all practical purposes humans.