A better subsidized merchant

[mike wightman]

Why so irregular? The Q drive is a third of the strength of a P drive?

because I liked the pattern, there is no formula

 

[Spinward Flow]

@spank ... I think you're in danger of "wandering off the reservation" with the direction of your postulates.
You're moving in (what feels like) the direction of "urban renewal" rather than in the direction of "fixer upper opportunity" to improve CT without fundamentally rewriting it.

If you need to "rewrite the rules of the universe" in order to make your concept/proposals "work for you" ... what are you really doing?

1. Are you trying to extend existing precedents?
2. Are you trying to improve existing precedents?
3. Are you trying to overwrite existing precedents?
4. Are you trying to create an entirely new paradigm to replace the old paradigm?

I would argue that 1 is acceptable ... 2 starts getting mighty questionable ... 3 is default unacceptable ... and 4 is "you're not playing the same game" anymore, so why are we having this conversation.

My point is that there are ... boundaries ... around what are reasonable modifications/interpolations to make.



A LOT of the issues you've identified with LBB2 starship design issues were actually "solved" by switching to the LBB5.80 design (and USP coded combat) paradigm. There are edge cases, of course (because the two design paradigms have a lot of asymmetries) ... but the simple point I'm trying to make is that if LBB2 doesn't "do" what you want it to, but LBB5 does, the answer is to use LBB5 ... rather than trying to rewrite LBB2 "to make it better" in the way that you want it to be.



Which is why my stance towards these kinds of topics is that EXTENDING is fine ... but overwriting/rewriting (wholesale) is inherently suspect.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Which is why my stance towards these kinds of topics is that EXTENDING is fine ... but overwriting/rewriting (wholesale) is inherently suspect.

Agreed, mostly -- if you're talking in terms of interpolation and extrapolation.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Agreed, mostly -- if you're talking in terms of interpolation and extrapolation.

Which I am.
When you stop "interpolating and extrapolating" and move into the realm of "wholesale rewriting" ... (to make it "BETTER") ... that's when you start moving off the reservation.

"Reading between the lines" in order to "fill in the blanks" is (mostly) fine.
Drafting entirely NEW lines to be read (and read between) is not.

 

[spank]

The 100 ton hull, and the heavier hulls are outliers, they have been made to fit the table in CT.
The 100 ton hull does not have an optimum drive size for J-1, J-3, or J-5 if you are designing a ship that goes J-1 you only option is a size A drive. same for J-3 and B, J-5 and C. So it's not a mistake in the table, the table is telling you that in a 100 ton hull the smallest drive you can install and get J-5 is a C.

The J drive in the 2000 ton hull should not give you J-1 it's too small. You should be using a drive that match the formula Perf*Hull/200 --- 1*2000/200 = 10, a size 10 drive or the 10th drive on the table. T5, CE and MGT corrected this.


The same holds true for X in a 800 ton hull.
Mathematically you want a drive that is 6*800/200 = 24, you can count out to the 24th drive, or remember that there are 24 entries on the drive table, so Z is the drive you want, or you can find the drive that is 5*24+5 tons, 125 tons. and Costs 24*10 MCr.
T5 works around the need to convert from numeric to a letter designation by assigning each drive a EP designation.

There is an error in the smaller table for the 100 Dt hull.
An A drive gives potential 2, not 1, whether you want it to or not.
A B drive gives potential 4, not 3, whether you want it to or not.

Why not use the smallest drive that gives the desired performance in the smaller table? E.g. the J drive in a 2000 Dt hull or X drive in a 800 Dt hull?

You could just add a column for "-"? Then it would give the same information as the large table.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

The 100 ton hull, and the heavier hulls are outliers, they have been made to fit the table in CT.

Sure.

The 100 ton hull does not have an optimum drive size for J-1, J-3, or J-5 if you are designing a ship that goes J-1 you only option is a size A drive. same for J-3 and B, J-5 and C. So it's not a mistake in the table, the table is telling you that in a 100 ton hull the smallest drive you can install and get J-5 is a C.

But a C drive in a 100 Dt hull is potential 6, hence J-6. There is no drive that will produce J-5 in a 100 Dt hull in LBB2. Welcome to the wonderful quirky world of LBB2!

The J drive in the 2000 ton hull should not give you J-1 it's too small.

But it does...

You should be using a drive that match the formula Perf*Hull/200 --- 1*2000/200 = 10, a size 10 drive or the 10th drive on the table.

The suggested formula covers most of the drives most of the time, not all the drives all the time.
The Drive Potential Table is the final arbiter of how LBB2 works.

T5, CE and MGT corrected this.
View attachment 6056

T5 and MgT1 (hence CE) works differently. Essentially they copy LBB5, but with lettered drives.
LBB2 is non-linear and very deliberately so.

The same holds true for X in a 800 ton hull.

Mathematically you want a drive that is 6*800/200 = 24, you can count out to the 24th drive, or remember that there are 24 entries on the drive table, so Z is the drive you want, or you can find the drive that is 5*24+5 tons, 125 tons. and Costs 24*10 MCr.
T5 works around the need to convert from numeric to a letter designation by assigning each drive a EP designation.

Quite, in T5 and MgT1, but not in LBB2.
The bigger drives are very much overpowered in LBB2.

Note that MgT1 goes to 2000 Dt hulls and T5 to 2400 Dt hulls, whereas LBB2 goes to 5000 Dt with the same number of lettered drives. LBB2 solves that by overpowering the biggest drives. And reducing their power in smaller hulls, such as the 800 Dt hull.

 

[kilemall]

Which I am.
When you stop "interpolating and extrapolating" and move into the realm of "wholesale rewriting" ... (to make it "BETTER") ... that's when you start moving off the reservation.

"Reading between the lines" in order to "fill in the blanks" is (mostly) fine.
Drafting entirely NEW lines to be read (and read between) is not.

I’ve got no problem doing that when it’s warranted. For instance I wanted to have LBB2 and LBB5 ships fight in the HG to hit format without the very bad value drop (maneuver-1 hit does 2tons damage small ships and 2000 tons large). Also, so HG uses LBB2 movement.

So I had to redo the damage tables/paradigms.

I don’t pretend that it’s anything RAW although intended to preserve most of the battle economics tradeoffs inherent in the ship build system. But you can’t resolve it readily by sticking closely to extrapolations.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Do whatever you want, change whatever you want, just call it what it is: a house rule.

We all house rule to some extent.
I use simplified Striker combat, instead of the daft system in LBB1, when playing CT...

 

[spank]

Mostly 1, and a little bit of 2.
Back to the standard Hull example,
CT has 4 discounted standard hulls, and 2 regular price standard hulls.
MGT 1E extends this by interpolating the cost for intermediate hulls,

Which is an improvement, BUT, the progression is a little wonky.

Anything above 800 is not discounted, so there is no advantage to even having a STD hull, the Custom Hull cost the same and you can size the drives however you want. The only advantage you get is a 3 week reduction in build time (for an inferior product.)


With this in mind, I think the standard hull cost can be improved, and still approximate the existing paradigm.
something where the cost per ton moves along a curve smoothly. Maybe something like this:

Or this:

@spank ... I think you're in danger of "wandering off the reservation" with the direction of your postulates.
You're moving in (what feels like) the direction of "urban renewal" rather than in the direction of "fixer upper opportunity" to improve CT without fundamentally rewriting it.

If you need to "rewrite the rules of the universe" in order to make your concept/proposals "work for you" ... what are you really doing?

1. Are you trying to extend existing precedents?
2. Are you trying to improve existing precedents?
3. Are you trying to overwrite existing precedents?
4. Are you trying to create an entirely new paradigm to replace the old paradigm?

I would argue that 1 is acceptable ... 2 starts getting mighty questionable ... 3 is default unacceptable ... and 4 is "you're not playing the same game" anymore, so why are we having this conversation.

My point is that there are ... boundaries ... around what are reasonable modifications/interpolations to make.



A LOT of the issues you've identified with LBB2 starship design issues were actually "solved" by switching to the LBB5.80 design (and USP coded combat) paradigm. There are edge cases, of course (because the two design paradigms have a lot of asymmetries) ... but the simple point I'm trying to make is that if LBB2 doesn't "do" what you want it to, but LBB5 does, the answer is to use LBB5 ... rather than trying to rewrite LBB2 "to make it better" in the way that you want it to be.



Which is why my stance towards these kinds of topics is that EXTENDING is fine ... but overwriting/rewriting (wholesale) is inherently suspect.

 

[spank]

Sure.


But a C drive in a 100 Dt hull is potential 6, hence J-6. There is no drive that will produce J-5 in a 100 Dt hull in LBB2. Welcome to the wonderful quirky world of LBB2!

But if you want to build a J-5 seeker the best available engine to put in it is a drive C, hence the table shows a drive C.

The J drive in the 2000 ton hull should not give you J-1 it's too small.

But it does...

But it's wrong, and it should be fixed.

The suggested formula covers most of the drives most of the time, not all the drives all the time.
The Drive Potential Table is the final arbiter of how LBB2 works.

The tables on LBB should be brought in line with the formula, and the formula added to the book for customs drives, maybe with a size/cost penalty for non-standard drives.

T5 and MgT1 (hence CE) works differently. Essentially they copy LBB5, but with lettered drives.
LBB2 is non-linear and very deliberately so.

T5, MGT 1E and CE are much close to LBB2 than HG. The drive costs, and sizes all mirror LBB2, not HG.

Quite, in T5 and MgT1, but not in LBB2.
The bigger drives are very much overpowered in LBB2.

Note that MgT1 goes to 2000 Dt hulls and T5 to 2400 Dt hulls, whereas LBB2 goes to 5000 Dt with the same number of lettered drives. LBB2 solves that by overpowering the biggest drives. And reducing their power in smaller hulls, such as the 800 Dt hull.

LBB2 should either ditch the bigger hulls, or add double letter drives.
All the improvement added in the later editions should be folded back into LBB2.

 

[Grav_Moped]

But it's wrong, and it should be fixed.

The way I see it is that after all of the hackery for the TL-15 drives (W-Z), a +10% fudge for the Size J in 2KTd is easily excuseable.

 

[spank]

The way I see it is that after all of the hackery for the TL-15 drives (W-Z), a +10% fudge for the Size J in 2KTd is easily excuseable.

I'd rather fix both.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

But if you want to build a J-5 seeker the best available engine to put in it is a drive C, hence the table shows a drive C.

Then I guess you are out of luck, since there is no lettered drive that produces potential 5 in a 100 Dt hull, neither in LBB2 nor in T5.
A C drive produces potential 6, no less, no more.

LBB2'81, p13:
The drive potential table lists 24 standard drive types, identified by the letters A through Z (omitting I and 0 to avoid confusion). Also listed are various tonnage levels for hulls; any tonnage which exceeds a listed level should be read at the next higher level. Correlating hull size with drive letter indicates drive potential. For maneuver drives, this potential is the Gs acceleration available. For jump drives, the potential is the jump number (Jn), or jump range in parsecs. For power plants, it is power plant rating (Pn).

Incidentally you can't fit all the fuel required in the hull either, as you would need 50 Dt jump fuel and 50 Dt power plant fuel.
With LBB2'81, if you want a 100 Dt starship, you get the Scout, and that's it. Welcome to the tyranny of the Drive Potential Table...

But it's wrong, and it should be fixed.

Sure, if you think there is an error, submit to the CT errata discussion thread:
https://www.travellerrpg.com/threads/ct-errata-compendium.20051/unread

T5, MGT 1E and CE are much close to LBB2 than HG. The drive costs, and sizes all mirror LBB2, not HG.

But they use the LBB5 paradigm of linear drive performance and TL limits on potential.

LBB2 used TL limits on drive size, not potential, and non-linear drive performance. This meant higher tech leads to bigger ships, and bigger ships are more efficient, hence higher tech ships can be more efficient. Completely different paradigm.

The tables on LBB should be brought in line with the formula, and the formula added to the book for customs drives, maybe with a size/cost penalty for non-standard drives.

LBB2 should either ditch the bigger hulls, or add double letter drives.
All the improvement added in the later editions should be folded back into LBB2.

I suspect you are going to be disappointed if you expect CT to be completely rebuilt to conform to later editions.

 

[whartung]

I think it would be interesting to see an LBB 2 version of FF&S for ACS ships. Make some standard drives, and hulls, and what not. Bunch of "imperfect but usable" low res lego blocks to drag and drop into a ship design to make one hopefully as simple and an LBB 2 ship.

 

[spank]

It's the potential table, not the performance table. It's the maximum you can potentially get from the drive, not the only possible performance you can get from the drive. LBB 2 '77 was quite clear on this. " Different hulls have different requirements for drives and power plants. A drive
of a certain size will be less efficient as the size of the hull increases. The maximum drive potential table lists the 24 possible drive and power plant types (lettered A through Z, omitting l and O) at the top and several levels of hull sizes along the left side. When drive or power plant letter is correlated with hull size, the number obtained is termed maximum potential."

Perhaps that needs to be added back in to stop such parsimonious readings of the rules.

Then I guess you are out of luck, since there is no lettered drive that produces potential 5 in a 100 Dt hull, neither in LBB2 nor in T5.
A C drive produces potential 6, no less, no more.

 

[Spinward Flow]

The J drive in the 2000 ton hull should not give you J-1 it's too small.

But it does...

We've been over this before.
It "does" because of a typo.
A very VERY VERY obvious typo.

The bigger drives are very much overpowered in LBB2.

When the presented pattern doesn't follow its own established pattern to completion ... stuff breaks.

if you are designing a ship that goes J-1 you only option is a size A drive.

Yes.
This is what we call a "non-problem" in the business.

There is no drive that will produce J-5 in a 100 Dt hull in LBB2.

I would quibble on the grounds that a Jump-C drive in a 100 ton hull is perfectly capable of J5 using LBB2.
It's also capable of J6 as well ... but that's a "feature" rather than a "bug" (per se).

So I had to redo the damage tables/paradigms.

Nature of the beast, I'm afraid, since you're looking at trying to merge two completely incongruous shapes together (the radically different paradigms of LBB2 and LBB5).

Gets back to a point I've made before (elsewhere, in other threads).
LBB2 is starship design by arithmetic.
LBB5 is starship design by algebra.

You can use algebra to "do" arithmetic, because algebra is a more "powerful" paradigm for mathematical computations.
You can't use arithmetic to "do" algebra, because algebra "does stuff" that arithmetic "doesn't really understand" (or do).

For example:

• 1+2=3
• x+y=z

The former is arithmetic and answers a SINGLE combination of values.
The latter is algebra and answers ALL of the combinations of values that be plugged into the respective variables.
I can CHOOSE values of ...

• x=1
• y=2
• z=3

... which are then functionally equivalent to the arithmetic case of 1+2=3 ... but there are OTHER combinations of variables in which x+y=z.

I'd rather fix both.

Already got you covered.

 

[Rupert]

It wouldn't let me add the intro sentence
"I wonder why there have been so few homebrew drive tables over the years?"

I expect that those who are mortally offended by the drive table just use the standard formula, and if doesn't suit they make their own formula. I think just about everyone who does more than adjust one number in the drive table will be working to a formula anyway, so a table is just the presentation of that.

Back in the day I recall basically no discussion of the drive table. Unless you were doing 'CT, LBB 1-3 only' about everyone used the formulas, especially for jump drives, where it's really simple: 1+Jn% of displacement, fuel is either 10% per Jn or 5+5jn% (i.e. five time the jump drive's displacement) depending on rules.

 

[mike wightman]

But if you want to build a J-5 seeker the best available engine to put in it is a drive C, hence the table shows a drive C.

So you put in a C drive but only enough fuel for jump 5 - sorted.

But it's wrong, and it should be fixed.

That's an opinion. The authors made this a deliberate choice, it has been discussed for getting on for 5 decades, and it has never been raised as errata.

The tables on LBB should be brought in line with the formula, and the formula added to the book for customs drives, maybe with a size/cost penalty for non-standard drives.

You are assuming that this simple formula you, me, and thousands of others have noticed over the years is how the authors did it but made a few mistakes. It isn't. The table was deliberate.

T5, MGT 1E and CE are much close to LBB2 than HG. The drive costs, and sizes all mirror LBB2, not HG.

MegaTraveller, TNE, T4 T20, GT, GT:ISW all use similar numbers to HG.

LBB2 should either ditch the bigger hulls, or add double letter drives.
All the improvement added in the later editions should be folded back into LBB2.

Then it wouldn't be LBB:2 anymore but a new design system.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

We've been over this before.

Yes, we have. After being published in several books unchanged the Drive Potential Table is firmly entrenched as RAW.
Change whatever you want, it's just your house rule.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

It's the potential table, not the performance table. It's the maximum you can potentially get from the drive, not the only possible performance you can get from the drive. LBB 2 '77 was quite clear on this. " Different hulls have different requirements for drives and power plants. A drive
of a certain size will be less efficient as the size of the hull increases. The maximum drive potential table lists the 24 possible drive and power plant types (lettered A through Z, omitting l and O) at the top and several levels of hull sizes along the left side. When drive or power plant letter is correlated with hull size, the number obtained is termed maximum potential."

I see you truncated the quote before it said:

LBB2'77, p10-11:
When drive or power plant letter is correlated with hull size, the number obtained is termed maximum potential. For jump drives maximum potential is the ship’s jump number (Jn); for maneuver drives, the maximum potential is the maximum acceleration (in Gs) that ship is capable of. For power plants, the maximum potential is the power plant size rating (Pn).

So, if the Maximum Drive Potential Table says "6" the ships jump number is 6, no more, no less.

A J-6 drive can of course also do J-5, but it is still a J-6 drive requiring 0.1MJn Dt jump fuel.