Long before Traveller 4 and it Year Zero Mileau was published. I decided to define how the Third Imperium worked in my game. Based on the few canonical hints I came up with the Articles of the Incorporation of the Third Imperium.
You can download them here.
Years later when I read through the Mileau Zero stuff I was pleased at how close I hit the mark. The big difference is that I was influenced by H Beam Piper vision of Empire and had the clause that all Nuclear Weapons are to be surrendered to the Imperium.
Unless I'm badly mistaken, I thought the Imperial Rules of War did ban the use of all weapons of mass destruction by Imperial member worlds.
ReplyDeleteThe difference between "banned" and "surrendered" is an important one.
ReplyDeleteHaving just checked the appropriate sources, the Imperial Rules of War reserve the use of nuclear weapons (not weapons of mass destruction generally -- my error there) to the Imperium alone.
ReplyDeleteThe Rules of War library data explicitly says they are an unwritten tradition. Although it is vague enough that one of the tenets could have been in the Articles of Incorporation.
ReplyDeleteThe prohibition of nukes is also a product of what we were going through in the cold war. Now we know things like near-c rocks, bio-engineered plagues, nano machine grey goo can be just as desvasating.