AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
It's just an Excel graph of the X,Y coordinates in the respective Pos (position) columns.
Agility - thoughts
- Thread starter Carlobrand
- Start date
Yes. Tastes differ.
Here's an interesting fact about Yamato and an equivalent displacement oil tanker: they weigh the same. Yamato would almost certainly have bigger engines and be better designed for cutting through water, but they weigh the same. They displace the same volume of water - 72,000 metric tons - because they both weigh 72,000 metric tons.
But, let's play Space Battleship Yamato. Let's build an l-hyd tanker of the same volume as Space Battleship Yamato. Now lets give it the same size drives and power plant as Space Battleship Yamato. Which one is more agile? Answer: they're both the same, because CT Book 5 doesn't care what your mass is; maneuver rating and therefore agility is determined by volume, not mass. And yet, if I tried to build Space Battleship Yamato under MegaTraveller, it's going to end up being about 5 times more massive than the l-hyd tanker because armor is really, really heavy stuff. That's one of the reasons MegaTraveller plays very differently than CT Book 5: it's impossible to build a craft that is both heavily armored and highly agile, whereas that's pretty much the norm for any battlecraft in CT High Guard.
You can say that, but precisely because HG does not specify mass for anything, there is no reason to assume armor is heavy.
You can very well argue that by all relevant standards of logic it should be heavy, and that because of the relation of mass and thrust, the design system should be based around mass, rather than volume, as a resource. Which is why I'm doing exactly that. Opens another can of worms, to be sure, but seals a far larger one.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Sure, but it is no problem having a M-drive-6 and 6 G acceleration despite all that mass...
The armoured and agile ship in LBB5 would be
LBB5 random crappy warship:
Code:
BL-R1468J4-F49900-450J9-0 MCr 153 825 160 000 Dton
bearing E EE 11 Crew=1 139
batteries L LL 11 TL=15
Cargo=64 Fuel=77582 EP=13582 Agility=6
Code:
Dual Occupancy 64 153 825
USP # Dton Cost
Hull, Streamlined Custom R 160 000
Configuration Needle/Wedge 1 19 200
Scoops Streamlined 160
Armour 15 F 25 600 46 080
Jump Drive 4 1 8 000 32 000
Manoeuvre D 6 1 27 200 13 600
Power Plant 8 1 13 582 40 746
Fuel, #J, #weeks J-4, 4 weeks 4 13 582
Purifier 1 1 164 12
Bridge 1 3 200 800
Computer m/9fib J 1 26 200
Staterooms 5 20 3
Staterooms, Half 1134 2 268 284
Cargo 64
Demountable Tanks J-4 1 64 000 64
Spinal Meson J J 1 1 000 400
Bay Missile, 50 t 9 1 50 13
Triple Turret Beam 4 20 20 60
Single Turret Fusion 5 20 40 40
Triple Turret Sand 4 20 20 15
Nuclear Damper 9 1 20 50
Meson Screen 9 1 40 60
Pinnace 40 Dton 2 104 40
Nominal Cost MCr 153 825,35 Sum: 64 153 825
Class Cost MCr 32 294,92 Valid ≥0 ≥0
Ship Cost MCr 123 068,28
Crew & High 0 Crew Bridge 80
Passengers Mid 0 1139 Engineers 488
Low 0 Gunners 86
Extra SR 0 Frozen Service 480
# Frozen W 0 0 Flight 5
Marines 0 Marines 0Similar ship in MT with Agility-6 (142 000 Dt):
Not vastly different?
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AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
I think we can assume it's heavy, because the same armour in Striker is heavy (but small).
To be heretic, I would suggest the size of the armour in LBB5 is related more to its mass, than its volume. There is of course not a shred of RAW to support that.
STRIKER compatibility with HG is... it is... well it just isn't.
By the rules in the former, a HG fusion gun fired against a HG ship, no matter how heavily armored, would always result in a critical hit. Every single time. A fusion bay (considered to contain ten such weapons) would destroy any naval vessel in one go with near certainty.
Adopting a mass-based design system and disregarding STRIKER, I would in fact like to assume that the TL 14/15 jump in armor efficiency is due to the materials becoming much lighter, rather than heavier.
By the rules in the former, a HG fusion gun fired against a HG ship, no matter how heavily armored, would always result in a critical hit. Every single time. A fusion bay (considered to contain ten such weapons) would destroy any naval vessel in one go with near certainty.
Adopting a mass-based design system and disregarding STRIKER, I would in fact like to assume that the TL 14/15 jump in armor efficiency is due to the materials becoming much lighter, rather than heavier.
If you track the armor development in both, they do largely match. You can get more value with less thickness, translating to less volume.
Near as I can tell, most versions track on the materials science first posited in CT Striker, even if the values differ.
I was just curious how you generated the numbers for the graph.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
It's LBB2 vectors as numbers. Each row is a turn.
Start with the acceleration in polar coordinates (columns K,L), translate to cartesian coordinates (columns M,N).
Multiply by time to get added velocity (acceleration vector) this round and add to previous velocity (vector) to get new velocity (vector) (columns O,P).
Multiply velocity vector by time to get change in position, add to previous position to get new position (columns Q,R)
Columns Y,U,V calculates distance to planet and imposed gravitational acceleration, that is added to drive acceleration.
There are actually a couple of reasons to assume armor is heavy. First: it's heavy in Striker. They do in fact have rules in Striker for evaluating the armor of spacecraft that find their way into the battlefield. Were there a light armor, it would be very useful in Striker and could have been extrapolated to Striker's build system; there's absolutely no reason not to. Second, it's heavy in MegaTraveller. We can only say there's a light armor if it carries some disadvantage that would make it less useful on the ground than heavier armor, like being unusually thick. Something like a stuffed Whipple shield, thin metal plates with Kevlar or Nextel between.
A 500 MW/2EP fusion gun has a penetration of 103 to 21,000 km, 91 to 42,000 km, 68 to 84,000 km, assuming I calculated that right: output 40% of input, range square root of output, range modifier x1000 in vacuum. So, yeah, deadly within 42,000 km. You'd have to modify Striker, maybe change that range modifier, or decide that hexes were bigger than 42,000 km in CT High Guard.
I know. From HG80 onwards, basically. MT just shoehorned HG-derived systems into STRIKER, and TNE built on that.
I just don't think that was a particularly good idea.
Yep.
Note that there is nothing in the rules to keep you from designing bigger fusion guns than that. For example, you could just as well use a single 5000 MW gun as a bay weapon. The main problem there is that the armor/penetration table doesn't go that high.
Lasers are similar, actually. The standard 250 MW pulse laser has been artificially nerfed tobe a 3-lense model, which offers no mechanical advantages over a 2-lense model, leaving one to wonder why the design system even offers that option.
If it were a 2-lense model, it would have a STRIKER penetration of 86, meaning it would defeat every non-planetoid ship's armor.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Closest bit of CT canon to HG weapon ranges is in Mayday.
Note one Mayday hex is 1 light second.
It appears that warships fight at longer ranges with their more powerful weapons than the civilian/paramilitary paradigm of LBB2
Note one Mayday hex is 1 light second.
It appears that warships fight at longer ranges with their more powerful weapons than the civilian/paramilitary paradigm of LBB2
IMHO: Traveller designers had varying (and changing) ideas what the appropriate range for space combat should be, is all.
LBB2 (and MT) suggested a maximum effective range of 500,000 km - although in LBB2 you could fire beyond that at DM -5.
Mayday postulates a maximum effective range of ~4 million km.
In TNE's Battle Rider it depends, but the maximum range for a high-end ship is ~ 1 million km.
MegaTraveller addressed this, which made sense since that was an effort to merge elements of Striker and High Guard. They revised the range attenuation rules so that these weapons were at full strength only within a range of a few kilometers. Beyond that, their penetration was halved.
And if I want to reduce civilian hulls to something that more closely approximates their adventure setting behavior, I just reduce the attenuation rate from 5 range bands to 4.
I know. Unfortunately, that meant that things went cooky in the other direction: Up to 5 km, the fusion gun could reliably annihilate any spacecraft made by man (or non-ancient alien). Starting at 5.0015 km, it could barely scratch even a lightly armored craft. This is just one example of the extremely steep cut-off points present in several aspects of MT's combat system producing more headaches than the supposed simplification is worth - IMHO.
Of course this was not reflected in MT's ship combat system, which simply awkwardly stitched HG2 onto the MT Task system and a weird, nonsensical grid movement system.
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Yeah, that was a game system that tried very hard but failed in most respects. Game looked kind of rushed, like they could have identified and corrected many of the issues if they'd spent more time.
But its REALLY REALLY hard to hit things at range.
BR uses the Diff Mod system, where each Diff Mod effectively makes it twice as hard/easier as without.
And the range DMs kick in at 3 hexes. Each hex is 30,000km, and range 3, there's a +1, so it's twice as hard as range <2.
So, roughly, every 100Kkm, it gets twice as hard to hit. So, there may be things that can range to 1Mkm, but actually connecting, will be a trick.
I know. I based the estimate on the number of Diff mods you could realistically overcome: -6 through TL 15 fire control, -2 through overpowering your weapon (built in for many), -4 for shooting at a large (100 ktons +) target, for a total of -12; that is the modifier at 36 hexes (~ 1 million km.)
I actually like a system where there is no fixed maximum range, but things smoothly become more and more difficult at range, also depending on conditions.
I actually like a system where there is no fixed maximum range, but things smoothly become more and more difficult at range, also depending on conditions.
