Blade-1

[rust]

My setting is a human colony on a water world, and the colonists there use
both blades and spears as divers' weapons and tools. In an underwater envi-
ronment such weapons / tools are most useful, especially since they are ea-
sy to produce, quite cheap, easy to handle, and rarely "misfunction".

 

[atpollard]

Seems like wimpy walls, but maybe if you gave them armor???

Interior walls could easily resemble a good surfboard - thin fiberglass outer layers with a foam core. They are for 'privacy' only and not intended to be airtight (per Suppl 7).

 

[Fritz_Brown]

So 1000 points of damage to make a hole about 2 square meters in size, that means each point of damage should create a hole about 20 square centimeters...

Call it a hole 2.5 cm in radius, or about 2 inches in diameter...

Seems like an awfully big hole for 1 point of damage though.

BUT, I can see what it is relative and what I am trying to do isn't really actual physical damage. Say 1 point of damage can cause system failure in an area 2 inches in diameter. Seems like wimpy walls, but maybe if you gave them armor???

You don't have to actually punch out every square cm to make the hole, remember. You just have to take out the outline......

 

[Agemegos]

When defending your ship its always better not to shoot it up.

Better to be alive in a ship that needs repairs than dead in an undamaged ship. Either pack a weapon that you can win fights with or surrender when you can't run away.

 

[Plankowner]

You don't have to actually punch out every square cm to make the hole, remember. You just have to take out the outline......

Ah, good point.

I MUST go and read S7! (I stopped getting CT stuff right after Book6).

Back to the CD!

 

[tim_manley]

In the old game I used to run in the '80s blades were important for the simple reason that using firearms or energy weapons onboard a ship would cause damage to the ship. I made some rule that for every miss you still rolled damage. For every 20 points there was a role on the internal hits table or something similiar.

All boarding actions ended up being knife and sword fights.

 

[G. Fieendish]

When I ran a Traveller campaign, a very long time ago, I tended to issue any Navy characters that were generated, with rapiers as their default blade, on the grounds, that if the inertial compensators/deck plates went offline in combat, they would not be affected by inertia....

 

[Jetrock]

To me, the Imperial Marine cutlass is like the ultimate Swiss army chainsaw. Why? Because it's issued to a guy in battledress, whose amplified strength can poke through more than a non-battledress-wearer can. With some serrations on the back and a traditional blade on the front, the cutlass (made from bonded superdense steel) can pry open sealed hatches, slice through power cables (insulated grip!) and function as a (mechanically assisted) human Sawzall, in addition to being able to stab through a vacc or CE suit during boarding actions. Generally I used to assume that battledress would double the penetration/damage of a hand weapon (using MT rules) as a way to encourage their use among the battledress wearing gun-bunnies in the party. And because they were typically the ones running around with FGMPs, they were typically a bit loath to use them during boarding actions, and also didn't have a second hand free for the battle-axe.

 

[Agemegos]

To me, the Imperial Marine cutlass is like the ultimate Swiss army chainsaw.

Point. Bayonets these days are supposed to be good for everything except bayonetting the enemy. . . .

 

[Icosahedron]

I use blades because:

They are concealable (small ones)
They don't deafen you when used indoors
They are less likely to be confiscated
They make useful tools
They don't run out of ammo
They can be 'tuned' between lethal and non-lethal
They can be replaced/repaired at low TL
They are low-maintenance
They always work
They have no safety catch to forget
They kill only what you want to kill
They will also gut and cut the meat and strike a spark for the fire

What is a cutlass anyway? According to LBB1 it has an overall length of 800mm. subtract 150 for the hilt and you have a blade length of 650mm. That's an oversize machete - useful for troops or scouts to hack through jungle - I'd rate it as a pretty useful dual purpose weapon and tool to be skilled with.

 

[mike wightman]

One of Traveller's literary influences are the EC Tubb Dumarest novels - lots of knife-fights, and mesh armour.

 

[Ishmael]

Swords are cool

the only justification that is needed

 

[coliver988]

they are cool indeed.

There was a Traveller article in a magazine for a variant on pirates: they found a personal force shield sort of thing. High velocity/high energy weapons would not get through, but slower items such as blades would. The down-side of the force fields was that, after absorbing so much damage, they would implode. And since they were an Ancient artifact, you were never quite sure where that implosion point was. I want to say it was Zentag Pirates, but since I'm away from my stash I can't look it up at the moment (it was a more generic gaming magazine; if it was CT I would look itup on the CD's that came with me).

The image the author was trying to get was the more traditional pirate boarding action, with flying feet, hands, knives and swords - no simply using your FGMP to clear the way. Argh, mateys!

 

[BlackBat242]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by FlightCommanderSolitude:
The question I'm more concerned with is, "How did my scout end up with Pike-1?" <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Obviously she was stranded on a low tech planet and got in a situation or two of a less than gentle nature. Not being in a position to manufacture a laser rifle she adapted to the local norm for armament.

David Shayne

Or, she was assigned as a Ceremonial Guard for a Scout Liaison Office (remember the Swiss Guards in the Vatican and their Halberds and Swords?).

Andre Norton also had powered blades in several of her Science Fiction novels in the 1950s & 1960s... she called them "force blades", and they were illegal except for the Patrol and Scout Service.

She never defined how they worked, but she described them as still being usable when their power was exhausted or turned off. When turned on, they could cut through steel doors, etc.

I always pictured a small, throwing-knife-sized blade (with a full-sized hilt), that projected a single-plane force field that extended about 2" out from the edges of the physical blade, and about 3-4" out from the tip.

 

[PFVA63]

Space Zombies

Blades are useful at close quarters, allowed in places that guns are not, make decent tools and don't jam.

Hi,

Not only that, that can be quite useful for decapitating space zombies, to prevent them from coming back to eat your brians (or so I've been told).

Regards

PF

 

[navywarlord]

There was a Traveller article in a magazine for a variant on pirates: they found a personal force shield sort of thing. High velocity/high energy weapons would not get through, but slower items such as blades would. The down-side of the force fields was that, after absorbing so much damage, they would implode. And since they were an Ancient artifact, you were never quite sure where that implosion point was. I want to say it was Zentag Pirates, but since I'm away from my stash I can't look it up at the moment (it was a more generic gaming magazine; if it was CT I would look itup on the CD's that came with me).

Personal force shield? Kind of reminds me of the personal shields in the DUNE series (Atreides favorite) - Didn't Gurney Haleck tell Paul Atreides something like fast on defense but slow on attack for knife fighting (in order to defeat a personal shield). Too bad the shields attracted the sandworms

 

[Darkhstarr]

I came up with a justification back when I first GM'd Traveller inspired by the Lensmen novels where armor became so protective against energy weapons that bladed weapons came back into use. My take was that battledress (powered & unpowered)with its protection against laser & most other fire & impact projectiles(spears & arrows, clubs & stabbing weapons would be included ) has a unintended flaw. This vunerability would against curved slashing weapons that hit & draw the slash along the initial cut. This would include cutlasses, curved-edge blades, tulwars, katanas & similar swords & fighting knives. This would including some polearms & axes with curved slashing blades also. This would give a +1 attack bonus against battledress which would increase to a +2 bonus if the wielder was in powered battledress themselves. It proved satisfactory to most of my players, though I haven't employed in the recent convention Traveller games I have run.

 

[G. Fieendish]

Personal force shield? Kind of reminds me of the personal shields in the DUNE series (Atreides favorite) - Didn't Gurney Haleck tell Paul Atreides something like fast on defense but slow on attack for knife fighting (in order to defeat a personal shield). Too bad the shields attracted the sandworms

According to the Dune Encyclopedia (RIP), any coherent energy emitted by a laser caused the Holtzmann Effect shield generator, to overload itself (effectively the generator became a extremely shortlived quantum singluarity) causing a 0.01 Kt explosion (10 Tonnes/10,000 Kg of TNT equivalent), for the personal version with a radius of several hundred feet...
Result, anyone with a laser pointer, is potentially very, very deadly to anyone with a shield generator...

 

[Plankowner]

But there was also a feedback along the laser beam that took out the laser weapon as well wasn't there? BOTH shield and laser exploded causing lasers to go out of fashion very quickly and blade weapons to come back in style.

 

[Talia]

Blades are dead sexy. What other reason is needed?