Pak Protecters in GURPS

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Kzinti STL flight was the gravity polarizer,

I'm reasonably certain that the Kzinti must have had some other form of STL propulsion besides the gravity polarizer. Niven never exactly made it super-clear how it worked, but its description in Protector implied that it was only useful when it was going "downhill" - i.e., towards a gravity source. I'd assume it works by somehow negating the effect of all other sources of gravity on your ship besides the one taking you in the direction you wanted to go. That works fine if you're in the outer solar system and want to get inwards fast, but for getting back out, it's a lot worse - you'd have to turn off the local star's gravity and rely on other sources to pull you back out, but that would be slow in almost all circumstances - the pull of gravity from Alpha Centauri, say, when you're at Sol, is so slight that even if you discount all other sources, it would still probably take years, if not decades or centuries, to get to anywhere you'd want to engage your hyperdrive.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Kzinti must have had other propulsion devices besides the gravity polarizer on their ships. Those could have been reactionless as well, of course. But I think that the Kzinti don't necessarily need to not have reaction drives at all in order to learn the Kzinti Lesson. I think simple ignorance and hidebound-ness is probably sufficient - they had never used reaction drives that way, and so never thought of their potential. And their survey of human space wouldn't have tipped them off, because humans didn't use reaction drives that way either, at that point, and didn't think of them as weapons. It's just, humans were much better at adapting and innovating once we needed to study war once more.

Originally Posted by Bruno

As much as the Kzinti are poster children for hidebound and impulsive, they aren't totally stupid. Possibly a little stupid though.

Yeah, I'd peg pre-Man-Kzin Wars Kzinti at something like a racial IQ of 9, and both Impulsive and Bad Temper with fairly low self-control numbers: 9, if not 6. Whereas by Louis Wu and Chmee's time, the self-controls on both were probably up to 12 or 15, with many individuals buying one or both disadvantages off entirely, and the racial IQ might have bumped up to 10.