water vapor condenses onto particles in the air (like dust for instance) to form rain drops - the increased particle count due to the dirt and debris blown into the air would lead to increased rain fall - i.e. more water vapor than normal would condense out of the sky thus leading to increased rain fall
and with temperatures dropping due to the amount of sun that would be blocked by the same dust and debris you get increased snowfall - thus the chances of a winter without snow after the level of nuclear and conventional attacks seen in the Twilight War would be essentially zero
if anything, if you want to damage crop yields, you could just fall back on the reduced growing times that would be causes by a lengthened winter due to the dust and debris in the air - i.e. not the nuclear winter where it never shines but a winter that starts in October and wont let go fully till May - that alone would reduce food production, especially in places where agriculture was geared to a longer growing season (i.e. southern CA and FL for instance)
also keep in mind that too much rain can be very bad as well - think about heavy rains hitting before the harvest and what kind of damage that can cause
but a drought like that described in HW and Kidnapped - not possible after that kind of widespread nuclear exchange - it would take years to clear that level of dust and debris from the skies - i.e. most likely you would have shorter summers and longer winters till around 2004 or longer
plus as I have said before - HW and Kidnapped are US killers plain and simple
if you want HW and Kidnapped - then its time to scrap the AD2300 timeline at least as far as the US is concerned - just going by what it says, at best, the US is reduced to 1/8th of its pre-war population - but that assumes no disease, no plague, no typhus outbreak from 3/8 of the prewar US population dying in a few months as starvation leaves only enough food for a quarter of the survivors
add that in as well, plus all the fighting to get at the remaining food, plus destruction of food stocks from that fighting - and you get a US that would be lucky to have 5 percent of its population left by early 2002
no way do you go from there to faster than light starships per the 2300AD timeline
and you dont need an uber drought and plague to "further adventures in the US" - its screwed up enough all on its own long before Kidnapped and HW
again - the game is about recovery as much as it is about survival - otherwise why the Soviet scientists, why Reset, why have an adventure to recover gold in NY or recapture the Ozarks from New America or secure a working oil platform in Texas
HW and Kidnapped throws all that out the window to a drought that is completely implausible - so instead for me and many others they are better ignored -
but again canon is what the GM makes of it after July 18,2000 - after that date everyone is free to do what they wish as to what is in and what is not in their campaign after all (heck I have heard of campaigns that threw Omega out the door and had the US stay in Europe where no one ever went anywhere but Europe and fun was had by all)
again just my two cents
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