Traveller General--Pass the Medic check edition

Has anyone found a way to have a more traditional career system in TNE? I love the house system, but the character creation is really jarring to me.

Let me plug CE and Solo too. I've really enjoyed SOLO and not just for solitaire play either.

I've used the scout campaign tables in Solo to create survey targets and other events for my players in our normal campaign.

Use the edition's process you DO like, but scale the skill rolls to match the TNE career numbers. Several editions do allow serial careers, though TNE was the first.

Was liking Mongoose Traveller 2nd ed until I got to vehicle and space combat.

You can't target systems? They only get affected if it's a critical hit? That's a load of shit, especially in space combat

Also Spaceships don't have directional armour? It's just a value?

This is really disappointing, I was expecting the space combat to be interesting but it seems so basic.

Does the High Guard book improve on this or is it still the same?

>You can't target systems? They only get affected if it's a critical hit? That's a load of shit, especially in space combat

Space combat normally takes place at ranges measured in light-seconds, yet you want to believe you can aim at specific systems across that distance?

Maybe I'm thinking about i in the wrong way then, Star Trek style space combat.

Yeah, Traveller combat is a "little" bit more realistic than Star Trek. Still, I have trouble thinking that even in Trek you could target systems at hundreds of thousands of KM range.

Anyway, no version of Traveller has targeted starship combat if I recall.

There is limited targeting in the homebrew Intercept combat system, under Mongoose 1e/Third Party/Intercept Space Combat System.
On a good hit, you can adjust the hit location roll up or down by one, and on a very good hit you can just pick on the table what to hit.

I guess you could set missiles and other self-guided weapons to target certain systems, but they'd probably need sophisticated sensors to work out where exactly those subsystems are. Either that or have a database of common ship designs and where to target.

Also raises a question. Meson weapons are fired such that the two beams meet inside the target right? Wouldn't that make them much harder to hit with than, say, a particle beam? Both need to have the beam meet the target, but mesons have the added complication of needing the target to be *exactly* where you thought it would be.

Am I supposed to have my players roll a duration die every single time they make a skill check? I don't really see a point of this, but a lot of the rules make it seem like this is intended...

No. It's not necessary.

The telescope resolution/laser resolution equations are basically the same.

So yes, at multiple lightseconds vs a vehicle maneuvering at multiple g's, it's not very practical; but if both ships are orbiting the same planet, they should be able to pick the exact square centimeter they want to hit.

But surely you could aim in certain parts of the ship, say shooting the back to get the engines?

I say it's very much akin to trying to headshot people in urban combat when you're assaulting a room.

You're making it more likely to miss for a marginally better reward.

Aren't Traveller ships quite sturdy though?

Generally, yes, unless the weapon is large and out-rates the target (see the original CT High Guard and MT). The meta reason is that fleet combats are between high powered entities that want to kill each other, while small ship combat should enable piracy and discourage TPKs.

The only problem is that it's in the nature of players to fight anyone who cuts into their profits (ie pirates) to the death.
Well at least in most cases. Mine are decent enough to obsessively serve their revenge cold if needs be

Right. Little ships are hard to kill outright with other little ships. Chasing down a pirate and continuing to pump shots into it is one thing. Being vaporized with one shot another entirely.

>Meson weapons are fired such that the two beams meet inside the target right?

Wrong. Mesons (whatever they are meant to be in-game) are particles which don't interact with "normal" matter. When they decay however, they do so violently causing a nice explosion.

A meson gun produces mesons somehow and then accelerates them to an extremely specific fraction of light-speed. The time dilation created by that fraction of 'c' delays the mesons' decay by a known amount of time so the mesons decay at a specific time. It's akin to firing an explosive shell with a timed fused. Depending on how you set the fuse, the shell will explode at specific time after leaving the gun.

There's fluff dating back to Classic and an illo in TTA "suggestiing" that mesons a PRODUCED by the interaction of two beams, so the intersection you're understandably worried about would occur INSIDE the meson gun.

As someone who has been involved in the nuclear industry and radiological controls for decades, I have a LOT of trouble with the description of how mesons "work", especially the decay angle. Half-lives mean the most of the particles aren't going to decay at the selected time.

My problem with meson guns doesn't mean I don't use them. After all, I also use jump drive, gravitics, psionics, and all the rest.

Ah, fair play. My physics is pretty terrible. Non-baryonic matter didn't feature heavily enough in my schooling for me to understand it. I was under the impression it was a beam of Mesons and Anti-Mesons that met and annihilated within the target, but a cursory reading confirms that's dumb

General consensus when this has come up before is that the described particles would form a standard distribution double cone shaped explosion instead of a sphere, OR it is all weird science invented by Bob Meson and works exactly as described.

>Right. Little ships are hard to kill outright with other little ships. Chasing down a pirate and continuing to pump shots into it is one thing. Being vaporized with one shot another entirely.

Exactly. There are scale issues a work here. At the PC level you don't want ships vaporized in one shot and at the megabattle level you do want one shot-one kill so battles don't take days to play out.

Classic has 3 basic choice for ship combat; Book 2, HG2, and Mayday. (The systems in TTB and Starter are versions of Book 2.) In each, small ships tend to "peck" each other to death rather then land KO punches.

In Book 3/TTB/Starter, you've a 1/36 chance of rolling a critical followed by a 1/6 of rolling an explosion for a KO punch. That's 0.0046 or ~5 chances in a 1000.

In HG2. oddly enough, small ships are the most "protected" against each other. Critical hits there depend on weapon sizes and, because small ships don't carry weapons big enough, critical hits and their one shot KOs don't happen. In HG2, small ships "kill" each other through accumulated by fuel hits.

Mayday is the odd man out. 1st, it's a wargame and thus had a different design goal. 2nd, it was part of GDW's Series 120 collection meaning it would have less than 120 counters and take less than 120 minutes to play. That time limit especially means small ships can in kill each other quickly. While Mayday has a simplified damage table and no critical hits, it also uses the concept of cumulative hits. A certain number of hits in 1 turn and/or in consecutive turns destroys a ship killing everyone aboard even if the hit(s) didn't cause any specific damage.

If I'm running a small-ship universe, how would space combat play out?
I'm honestly thinking like High Guard in terms of weapons, but with the super deadly stuff restricted to the Government. And of course people who don't give a fuck about the Government and don't care about things like "supply lines" and "spare parts"

Small ship as in using High Guard to model the size range from Book 2 (ie. up to 5000 dtons)? The weapons that can auto-crit will remain rare.

>but a cursory reading confirms that's dumb

Not dumb. Merely understandable. Trav's meson gun as described is PFM; pure fucking magic.

>described particles would form a standard distribution double cone shaped explosion instead of a sphere

My issue has to do with how the half-life concept actually works. If an isotope, particle, or element has a half-life of one minute, that doesn't mean that half it decays PRECISELY at the one minute mark. Instead, decay events begin immediately and increase in number until half of the isotope/element/particles have decayed be one minute.

Imagine a bell curve. The x-axis is time, the y is #s of decays, and the peak of the bell curve occurs at one minute. Following the curve you'll see that decays happen all the time between 0 seconds and 1 minute, the # of decays only peaks at one minute, many decays occur BEFORE one minute, and HALF the decays occur after one minute. Given the relativistic speeds mesons are supposedly accelerated to, a huge percentage of the mesons won't decay inside or even near the target at all. No matter how "narrow" you make the bell curve, most of the mesons will not be decaying when - and thus where - you want them to do so.

Of course, all of this are just sperglord concerns on my part. The game is fictional so the weapons are (mostly) fictional too.

I mean using Classic's dTonnage/Drive/Reactor tables with High Guard-esque weapons.
Which seems to be kosher if expensive RAW. The only thing I was thinking of changing was spinals, to make them feasible in the 5000 dTon maximum range

>If I'm running a small-ship universe, how would space combat play out?
>I'm honestly thinking like High Guard in terms of weapons, but with the super deadly stuff restricted to the Government.

High Guard for Classic? (I'll answer assuming that.) Using High Guard will keep your players safer while also giving them little to do.

HG2 produces critical hits based on weapon size in 2 ways. 1st, the weapon's size code is compared to the target ship's size code. If the weapon is 'larger", critical hits occur. 2nd, weapons with a a size

I was planning to use MgT2's ship design-ish with the Classic Drive Tables, would that help things?
As it stands in My Traveller Universe is about TL 11-12, with Jump-3 a closely guarded military secret

>I was planning to use MgT2's ship design-ish with the Classic Drive Tables, would that help things?

Sorry, I haven't used MgT's various ship combat systems (plus all the bells & whistle options available) enough to form an opinion. I do know that MgT on the whole wanted a more "cinematic" style of play & combat, one that was more exciting for the current crop of RPG players.

>As it stands in My Traveller Universe is about TL 11-12, with Jump-3 a closely guarded military secret.

I like that idea. You should have a lot of fun with it.

I'm going a bit contrarian because I autistically prefer system-to-system rather than world-to-world.

Essentially the standard "M-Drive" is made up of two parts:
1. A 2300ad-esque Stutterwarp that's too weak for interstellar space, but doesn't work near gravity wells.
2. The Traveller Gravity Drive (or whatever the shitty 100 diameter m-drive equivalent is).

Essentially the Stutterwarp is used to get between planetary systems, while the gravatic drive is used to correct momentum so the ship doesn't shoot off into interplanetary space when the stutterwarp is switched off.

Is this unworkably retarded? Or just practically retarded?
I know it's soft as diarrhoea shits, but I'm trying to combine Traveller's and 2300's big lies

It is high mobility in both circumstances, opens up all those rogue worldlets out there between suns, and very workable, but may easily produce a very different setting than the default.

>It is high mobility in both circumstances, opens up all those rogue worldlets out there between suns, and very workable, but may easily produce a very different setting than the default.

I'm gonna say that to come out of tau-space near a rogue planet is quite difficult. Not only is the gravity well smaller, but also rogue planets give off less emissions than stars, so they are harder to actually find.

In terms of setting, I like the idea of each system having at least one major belter hab, even if there's no habitable worlds in the system. Also I like having multiple habitable (terraformed) worlds in one system.
Also the fact that acceleration isn't a factor in intra-system travel makes belter-bandits more feasible, seeing as they don't need to accelerate to match their targets. You can always travel out-of-plane, but the increased travel time eats into your profits. Also would-be-pirates can still try and intercept you if they're feeling ballsy

>Is this unworkably retarded? Or just practically retarded?

If it works for you, that's all that matters.

I don't quite understand how these two bits work:
>Stutterwarp that's too weak for interstellar space
>Stutterwarp is used to get between planetary systems

If it's too weak for interstellar travel, how is it used to get between systems?

>I'm gonna say that to come out of tau-space near a rogue planet is quite difficult. Not only is the gravity well smaller, but also rogue planets give off less emissions than stars, so they are harder to actually find.
Get enough ships out there and they'll start tripping over them precisely because of the drive differences, especially if the stutter horizon is farther out than the usual Traveller 100 diameters.

While stutterwarp is very fast, it can't go faster than light, that's what the J-Drive is for.
When I say "Planetary systems" I mean the Jovian system or the Saturnine System.
You use the J-Drive to get into far orbit of a star, then use the stutterwarp to get close to a planet orbiting said star, while using the g-drive to change your relative velocity into an orbit around said planet

How many rogue planets are there in local space?
Are there enough for this to be a common phenomenon given how j-drive work?

They aren't so common that they are easy to spot, or get in the way of jumps *very often*. Space is BIG, after all.
But if your Jump drive only gets you to 10,000 diameters before knocking you into normal space, those lost rocks are going to get in the way more often.

Honestly, it's probably going to have to not be diameter-based.
Maybe jumps work based on some property of a heliosphere?

That said, pathways of rogue planets do sound like they could make a pretty cool setting

>When I say "Planetary systems" I mean the Jovian system or the Saturnine System.

Ahhh, got it. My bad. Thanks!

It's unworkably retarded because of how stutterwarp combat works. You'd essentially have tons of 'strafers' in the outsystem blasting away at comparatively stationary conventional drive ships within the diameters.

Just make your setting a low-grav setting where hyper-efficient fusion rocket M-Drives dominate, basically small Epstein Drives everywhere.

If you're gonna go stutterwarp, go full stutterwarp.

Honestly the quick combat and sensor contacts section of Naval Patrol, as well as the entire Survey Scouts section, are awesome tools for a regular campaign.

Plus even the basic commentary like using Tell Me D6 or the like? Quality stuff.

>Honestly the quick combat and sensor contacts section of Naval Patrol, as well as the entire Survey Scouts section, are awesome tools for a regular campaign.

Very much so. While I've ran both the naval and scout Solo campaigns a few times as a way of learning the systems, I've already used large portions of the socout/survey section in a regular campaign.

The players and their ship were chartered by a private survey firm which had been subcontracted by the IISS. They did a quick survery of a gas giant and its moons and will be returning to further investigate the many interesting bits that turned up. I haven't really decided on many of the details yet, but they will be stumbling across a long abandoned patrol base whose current "owners" don't want to be found at all.

I'll get to use the quick combat rules from the naval campaign section then!

Any suggestions as to which system to use for a new GM who doesn't want to use the existing 3rd Imperium setting?

Cepheus Engine. It's the OSR/OGL version and as such is deliberately designed NOT to support the 3I. Several 3rd party settings have already been released for it too.

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That being said, MgT 2e has much better integrated vehicle and ship rules as well as a chapter in High Guard 2e devoted to non-3I sci-fi equipment that is more commonly found in other franchises.

>You can't target systems?
Aside from the Intercept homebrew, it's baked into the system. Presumably you're *always* attempting to fire on specific systems, but the penalty at greater distances deters accuracy. More to the point, given how much Hull most ships have, if you're using light enough weaponry that could presumably be used to target specific bits rather than just vaporize a ship with a spinal laser, you're going to be poking the enemy ship full of critical hits long before it becomes un-flyable.

>don't have directional armour?
With ships it's a bit of a moot point. Small craft can dogfight (in 2e), and larger craft have so much hull that the armor's usually secondary on anything less than dedicated military cruisers. A good number of destroyers and frigate-esque ships in 1e and 2e have no armor at all.

Vehicles can have directional armor (both 1e and 2e).

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