Book 2, version 3
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Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
And, LBB8 (p24) makes that explicit with its lower limit on fusion powerplants. 250l is the smallest size you can make. Kinda small compared to a PP-A, though.
Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
And, LBB8 (p24) makes that explicit with its lower limit on fusion powerplants. 250l is the smallest size you can make. Kinda small compared to a PP-A, though.
I don't see why one necessarily implies the other.
Actually, I think that with the concept of formulaically producing "jump impulse" frees one to make more interesting ships. If you are trying to get 800 Jtons of jump impulse, you know exactly how to select 1 big honking drive, or 2 half-sized, or even 1 fairly big plus 2 smaller drives and still get the desired result.
To really, really make interesting ships, I think additional rules for the used market plus a customizations market. You know, like a yard in the outback where they takes used j-drives out of decommissioned escorts and drop 'em into an "Overhauled" Fat Trader.
I don't see why one necessarily implies the other.
Actually, I think that with the concept of formulaically producing "jump impulse" frees one to make more interesting ships. If you are trying to get 800 Jtons of jump impulse, you know exactly how to select 1 big honking drive, or 2 half-sized, or even 1 fairly big plus 2 smaller drives and still get the desired result.
To really, really make interesting ships, I think additional rules for the used market plus a customizations market. You know, like a yard in the outback where they takes used j-drives out of decommissioned escorts and drop 'em into an "Overhauled" Fat Trader.
Aramis re fuel rates: I think so, too.
[...]</font>[/QUOTE]Book 2 has a Purpose
The Book 2 drives, while following formulae, yet produce interesting results. Perhaps the results are solely because of a lower limit added to the formulae (I'm not sure), but ships up to 1000 tons are penalized due to their low volume.
The Type S is tight for space mainly due to the drive tables and the bridge volume.
Book 2's purpose appears to be to make smaller ships more constrained, by making the required drive percentages vary from ship volume to ship volume. There's something about this that's important to small ship adventuring.
Something's Missing from T4
This is something that I've been realizing very slowly now, ever since T4 came out. I played with QSDS a lot, but I went back to Book 2 and, frankly, haven't used T4 for six years now. Why? It has more than Book 2, yet rests at nearly the same complexity level. Thus it should be better. Perhaps I had become a grognard. But no, I had only known Traveller for two years, and launched myself and my group whole-hog into T4. We played only T4 for three years, so that by 1999 I had as much or more T4 experience as I had CT experience.
Something's Missing from my Hybrid System
On and off for the last three or four years I had been working on my own hybrid ship design system. Its working premise was that ships are extremely modular, to the point where a new ship could be created by simply scaling the working components of an existing ship. Want something 10% larger? Scale the hull, drive components, and fuel by 10%. 2000% larger? Scale by 2000%. Easy. I even added rules for adding multiple drives -- again, to scale performance generically.
It was elegant and cool. And I eventually totally abandoned it, because it was boring. Something was missing. What was missing, I believe, is a bit of chaos, or complexity (but not really complexity, if you know what I mean). Some subtlety in the building rules.
In nearly every respect it mirrored Book 2, except it removed size restrictions and allowed scaling -- scaling very like High Guard, in fact. I thought perhaps losing the inherent 'damage track' was part of the problem, but adding in damage tracks didn't seem to help. (Sigg, do you remember on COTI when we were talking about creating damage tracks?) The system still felt like High Guard.
They're Both High Guard Variants
And that was the problem. In removing the non-scaling elements of Book 2, the system had ceased to be anything like Book 2 except on a peripheral level only. I had partially and poorly re-invented an unofficial High Guard variant. Because that's what High Guard is: a generic shipbuilding system that's more or less scalable.
Book 2 is obviously not High Guard. They can be sewn together at the edges, but the distinctivenesses of each run deeper than mere presentation, and in fact are complementary and, therefore, should be retained.
Most of these thoughts weren't very clear in my head at all until last month, when Marc wrote this:
High Guard has a different purpose: designing military squadrons to bludgeon each other to smithereens. This is not quite the same game environment as small shipbuilding.
I don't see why one necessarily implies the other.
[...]</font>[/QUOTE]Book 2 has a Purpose
The Book 2 drives, while following formulae, yet produce interesting results. Perhaps the results are solely because of a lower limit added to the formulae (I'm not sure), but ships up to 1000 tons are penalized due to their low volume.
The Type S is tight for space mainly due to the drive tables and the bridge volume.
Book 2's purpose appears to be to make smaller ships more constrained, by making the required drive percentages vary from ship volume to ship volume. There's something about this that's important to small ship adventuring.
Something's Missing from T4
This is something that I've been realizing very slowly now, ever since T4 came out. I played with QSDS a lot, but I went back to Book 2 and, frankly, haven't used T4 for six years now. Why? It has more than Book 2, yet rests at nearly the same complexity level. Thus it should be better. Perhaps I had become a grognard. But no, I had only known Traveller for two years, and launched myself and my group whole-hog into T4. We played only T4 for three years, so that by 1999 I had as much or more T4 experience as I had CT experience.
Something's Missing from my Hybrid System
On and off for the last three or four years I had been working on my own hybrid ship design system. Its working premise was that ships are extremely modular, to the point where a new ship could be created by simply scaling the working components of an existing ship. Want something 10% larger? Scale the hull, drive components, and fuel by 10%. 2000% larger? Scale by 2000%. Easy. I even added rules for adding multiple drives -- again, to scale performance generically.
It was elegant and cool. And I eventually totally abandoned it, because it was boring. Something was missing. What was missing, I believe, is a bit of chaos, or complexity (but not really complexity, if you know what I mean). Some subtlety in the building rules.
In nearly every respect it mirrored Book 2, except it removed size restrictions and allowed scaling -- scaling very like High Guard, in fact. I thought perhaps losing the inherent 'damage track' was part of the problem, but adding in damage tracks didn't seem to help. (Sigg, do you remember on COTI when we were talking about creating damage tracks?) The system still felt like High Guard.
They're Both High Guard Variants
And that was the problem. In removing the non-scaling elements of Book 2, the system had ceased to be anything like Book 2 except on a peripheral level only. I had partially and poorly re-invented an unofficial High Guard variant. Because that's what High Guard is: a generic shipbuilding system that's more or less scalable.
Book 2 is obviously not High Guard. They can be sewn together at the edges, but the distinctivenesses of each run deeper than mere presentation, and in fact are complementary and, therefore, should be retained.
Most of these thoughts weren't very clear in my head at all until last month, when Marc wrote this:
I realized he was probably right, for small ships. The purpose of Book 2 was to make designing each small ship satisfying, like a mini-game.
High Guard has a different purpose: designing military squadrons to bludgeon each other to smithereens. This is not quite the same game environment as small shipbuilding.
Aramis re fuel rates: I think so, too.
[...]</font>[/QUOTE]Book 2 has a Purpose
The Book 2 drives, while following formulae, yet produce interesting results. Perhaps the results are solely because of a lower limit added to the formulae (I'm not sure), but ships up to 1000 tons are penalized due to their low volume.
The Type S is tight for space mainly due to the drive tables and the bridge volume.
Book 2's purpose appears to be to make smaller ships more constrained, by making the required drive percentages vary from ship volume to ship volume. There's something about this that's important to small ship adventuring.
Something's Missing from T4
This is something that I've been realizing very slowly now, ever since T4 came out. I played with QSDS a lot, but I went back to Book 2 and, frankly, haven't used T4 for six years now. Why? It has more than Book 2, yet rests at nearly the same complexity level. Thus it should be better. Perhaps I had become a grognard. But no, I had only known Traveller for two years, and launched myself and my group whole-hog into T4. We played only T4 for three years, so that by 1999 I had as much or more T4 experience as I had CT experience.
Something's Missing from my Hybrid System
On and off for the last three or four years I had been working on my own hybrid ship design system. Its working premise was that ships are extremely modular, to the point where a new ship could be created by simply scaling the working components of an existing ship. Want something 10% larger? Scale the hull, drive components, and fuel by 10%. 2000% larger? Scale by 2000%. Easy. I even added rules for adding multiple drives -- again, to scale performance generically.
It was elegant and cool. And I eventually totally abandoned it, because it was boring. Something was missing. What was missing, I believe, is a bit of chaos, or complexity (but not really complexity, if you know what I mean). Some subtlety in the building rules.
In nearly every respect it mirrored Book 2, except it removed size restrictions and allowed scaling -- scaling very like High Guard, in fact. I thought perhaps losing the inherent 'damage track' was part of the problem, but adding in damage tracks didn't seem to help. (Sigg, do you remember on COTI when we were talking about creating damage tracks?) The system still felt like High Guard.
They're Both High Guard Variants
And that was the problem. In removing the non-scaling elements of Book 2, the system had ceased to be anything like Book 2 except on a peripheral level only. I had partially and poorly re-invented an unofficial High Guard variant. Because that's what High Guard is: a generic shipbuilding system that's more or less scalable.
Book 2 is obviously not High Guard. They can be sewn together at the edges, but the distinctivenesses of each run deeper than mere presentation, and in fact are complementary and, therefore, should be retained.
Most of these thoughts weren't very clear in my head at all until last month, when Marc wrote this:
High Guard has a different purpose: designing military squadrons to bludgeon each other to smithereens. This is not quite the same game environment as small shipbuilding.
I don't see why one necessarily implies the other.
[...]</font>[/QUOTE]Book 2 has a Purpose
The Book 2 drives, while following formulae, yet produce interesting results. Perhaps the results are solely because of a lower limit added to the formulae (I'm not sure), but ships up to 1000 tons are penalized due to their low volume.
The Type S is tight for space mainly due to the drive tables and the bridge volume.
Book 2's purpose appears to be to make smaller ships more constrained, by making the required drive percentages vary from ship volume to ship volume. There's something about this that's important to small ship adventuring.
Something's Missing from T4
This is something that I've been realizing very slowly now, ever since T4 came out. I played with QSDS a lot, but I went back to Book 2 and, frankly, haven't used T4 for six years now. Why? It has more than Book 2, yet rests at nearly the same complexity level. Thus it should be better. Perhaps I had become a grognard. But no, I had only known Traveller for two years, and launched myself and my group whole-hog into T4. We played only T4 for three years, so that by 1999 I had as much or more T4 experience as I had CT experience.
Something's Missing from my Hybrid System
On and off for the last three or four years I had been working on my own hybrid ship design system. Its working premise was that ships are extremely modular, to the point where a new ship could be created by simply scaling the working components of an existing ship. Want something 10% larger? Scale the hull, drive components, and fuel by 10%. 2000% larger? Scale by 2000%. Easy. I even added rules for adding multiple drives -- again, to scale performance generically.
It was elegant and cool. And I eventually totally abandoned it, because it was boring. Something was missing. What was missing, I believe, is a bit of chaos, or complexity (but not really complexity, if you know what I mean). Some subtlety in the building rules.
In nearly every respect it mirrored Book 2, except it removed size restrictions and allowed scaling -- scaling very like High Guard, in fact. I thought perhaps losing the inherent 'damage track' was part of the problem, but adding in damage tracks didn't seem to help. (Sigg, do you remember on COTI when we were talking about creating damage tracks?) The system still felt like High Guard.
They're Both High Guard Variants
And that was the problem. In removing the non-scaling elements of Book 2, the system had ceased to be anything like Book 2 except on a peripheral level only. I had partially and poorly re-invented an unofficial High Guard variant. Because that's what High Guard is: a generic shipbuilding system that's more or less scalable.
Book 2 is obviously not High Guard. They can be sewn together at the edges, but the distinctivenesses of each run deeper than mere presentation, and in fact are complementary and, therefore, should be retained.
Most of these thoughts weren't very clear in my head at all until last month, when Marc wrote this:
I realized he was probably right, for small ships. The purpose of Book 2 was to make designing each small ship satisfying, like a mini-game.
High Guard has a different purpose: designing military squadrons to bludgeon each other to smithereens. This is not quite the same game environment as small shipbuilding.
daryen
SOC-14 1K
No, the Type S is tight due to the nonsensical power plant fuel requirements.
Either use the Bk5 power plant fuel rates like Aramis said or (even better) give each power plant letter a fixed fuel cost (1 or 2 dton per letter), and the Type S suddenly becomes much more useful.
That all said, I still believe that Bk2 and Bk5 are incompatible with each other. They have very different fundamental assumptions, from drive sizing (big maneuver v. small maneuver) to tech level requirements (item v. capability). They don't work together and can't really be made to.
So, if you want to expand Bk2 to use as an alternative to Bk5 to get a small ship universe, go for it. Just don't go in thinking Bk2 and Bk5 can be made compatible.
Either use the Bk5 power plant fuel rates like Aramis said or (even better) give each power plant letter a fixed fuel cost (1 or 2 dton per letter), and the Type S suddenly becomes much more useful.
That all said, I still believe that Bk2 and Bk5 are incompatible with each other. They have very different fundamental assumptions, from drive sizing (big maneuver v. small maneuver) to tech level requirements (item v. capability). They don't work together and can't really be made to.
So, if you want to expand Bk2 to use as an alternative to Bk5 to get a small ship universe, go for it. Just don't go in thinking Bk2 and Bk5 can be made compatible.
daryen
SOC-14 1K
No, the Type S is tight due to the nonsensical power plant fuel requirements.
Either use the Bk5 power plant fuel rates like Aramis said or (even better) give each power plant letter a fixed fuel cost (1 or 2 dton per letter), and the Type S suddenly becomes much more useful.
That all said, I still believe that Bk2 and Bk5 are incompatible with each other. They have very different fundamental assumptions, from drive sizing (big maneuver v. small maneuver) to tech level requirements (item v. capability). They don't work together and can't really be made to.
So, if you want to expand Bk2 to use as an alternative to Bk5 to get a small ship universe, go for it. Just don't go in thinking Bk2 and Bk5 can be made compatible.
Either use the Bk5 power plant fuel rates like Aramis said or (even better) give each power plant letter a fixed fuel cost (1 or 2 dton per letter), and the Type S suddenly becomes much more useful.
That all said, I still believe that Bk2 and Bk5 are incompatible with each other. They have very different fundamental assumptions, from drive sizing (big maneuver v. small maneuver) to tech level requirements (item v. capability). They don't work together and can't really be made to.
So, if you want to expand Bk2 to use as an alternative to Bk5 to get a small ship universe, go for it. Just don't go in thinking Bk2 and Bk5 can be made compatible.
daltoncalford
SOC-12
Actually, that statement assumes that all things are presented at the same tech level.
The LBB items, although limiting the overall performance by TL, does not say what techlevel the individual components are made.
For example, is the type A drive built at a TL9 starport or a TL15 starport? What efficiencies/definciencies are inherent in the standard design. LBB2 is based upon standard designs while LBB5 is around custom designs.
You can include both systems in the same traveller universe, by applying some economics and tech level modifiers to represent the differences.
You can merge all the different design flavours as long as you allow for economic/engineering efficencies and deficencies.
best regards
Dalton
daltoncalford
SOC-12
Actually, that statement assumes that all things are presented at the same tech level.
The LBB items, although limiting the overall performance by TL, does not say what techlevel the individual components are made.
For example, is the type A drive built at a TL9 starport or a TL15 starport? What efficiencies/definciencies are inherent in the standard design. LBB2 is based upon standard designs while LBB5 is around custom designs.
You can include both systems in the same traveller universe, by applying some economics and tech level modifiers to represent the differences.
You can merge all the different design flavours as long as you allow for economic/engineering efficencies and deficencies.
best regards
Dalton
daryen
SOC-14 1K
Well, if you do want to expand Bk2 shipbuilding, you will have to touch on HG. You don't have a choice. After all, from what better place can you draw from to get enhancements? I don't see the problem.
Regardless of what you replace them with, the fuel requirements for Bk2 power plants are silly. Sane-izing them only makes sense, and taking ideas from HG to so so also only makes sense.
All I ask is that, regardless of how much HG is raided for ideas for enhancements, that Bk2 construction and HG be recognized as independent systems.
daryen
SOC-14 1K
Well, if you do want to expand Bk2 shipbuilding, you will have to touch on HG. You don't have a choice. After all, from what better place can you draw from to get enhancements? I don't see the problem.
Regardless of what you replace them with, the fuel requirements for Bk2 power plants are silly. Sane-izing them only makes sense, and taking ideas from HG to so so also only makes sense.
All I ask is that, regardless of how much HG is raided for ideas for enhancements, that Bk2 construction and HG be recognized as independent systems.
daryen
SOC-14 1K
Actually, we do know that. Bk3 pp14-15 (or TTB pp86-87) gives us just that information. It is a stated fact, not an assumption, that Bk2 shipbuilding is component based, not capability based.
It assigns specific TLs required to produce drive modules. So, for example, we know that TL9 is all that is required to produce jump drive A and maneuver drive A. (The chart does say "drives", so it is an open question as to whether power plants are TL limited or not.)
This means that Types S, A, A2, R, and Y ships are TL9. Type T is TL10. Type M is TL11. Type C is TL12.
daryen
SOC-14 1K
Actually, we do know that. Bk3 pp14-15 (or TTB pp86-87) gives us just that information. It is a stated fact, not an assumption, that Bk2 shipbuilding is component based, not capability based.
It assigns specific TLs required to produce drive modules. So, for example, we know that TL9 is all that is required to produce jump drive A and maneuver drive A. (The chart does say "drives", so it is an open question as to whether power plants are TL limited or not.)
This means that Types S, A, A2, R, and Y ships are TL9. Type T is TL10. Type M is TL11. Type C is TL12.
