Creatures

[Timerover51]

I am not sure if you are still working on this, but I will toss out some ideas.

First, predators generally tend to select animals near their own weight in size up to maybe 3 times their weight. The exception is the wolverine. Another is the cheetah. The closer a prey is to 3 times the predator's weight, the greater the hazard to the predator. A lone lion is not likely to tackle an adult Cape Buffalo. The risk of injury is too great. If you are using weight for computing hit points, which I view as quite reasonable, then for any herbivore, reduce the hit points by a factor of 3 as a rough guide.

Next, Traveller has way too limited a damage table for slug-throwing weapons. In The Traveller Book all slug throwers are 3D for damage except for the shotgun at 4D. That, to put is simply, is ridiculous. There is an enormous difference between the damage done by a 9mm Full Metal Jacket round and even a .30-06 180 grain soft point round. An elephant is not going to be severely wounded by a 9mm slug, but hit him with a properly place .375 H&H Magnum round and he is down and dead. Note, I did say properly placed. If you put a .375 solid through the intestines of an elephant, you might find yourself with a slightly wound but very upset elephant to deal with. A .600 Nitro Express gives you a little bit of a fudge factor if going to head or heart shots, but even then, proper placement of the bullet is key. Against that, you hit a Conan-type with a 9mm in the chest, and you have a mad Conan to deal with. Hit him with a .600 Nitro in the chest, and he is down and dead.

What you might consider doing to going to either Project Gutenberg or archive.org and looking up Sir Samuel Baker's book, Wild Beasts and Their Ways to get some idea as what is takes to hunt large animals. There are a couple of more books by Baker that I have found quite helpful. Then there is John Taylor's books, African Rifles and Cartridges and Pondoro for more data on hunting large and small animals. Barnes Cartridges of the World is also a very good resource, as well as showing you the vast range of cartridges out there. For very large creatures, such as whales, dinosaurs, and Megalodons, start looking at penetrating explosive shells. For whales, the alternative is taking them the old-fashioned way, by hand. Nantucket Sleigh Ride here we come.

Edit Note: With respect to damage from laser weapons on large to very large creatures, think very carefully. Hitting a large Imperial Mammoth with a laser carbine will likely burn some hair off and maybe some outer fat layer, but definitely get him upset. I might have doubts about a PC getting off a decent head shot on a charging irate mammoth. Do not even think about lasers on large sea creatures. Do you really want a very irate Sperm Whale or Megalodon coming at you head-on?

 

[Condottiere]

The point of a nine millimetre is deterrence, in keeping a healthy distance between the two parties, with the likelihood that closing that distance is likely to end fatally.

There's a documented case that a twenty two long rifle can take out a bear, in the hands of a canny and experienced hunter.

If size matters, you might need to empty an entire magazine of four millimetre darts from a gauss rifle, in order to stop the elephant, essentially slicing it to pieces.

 

[Timerover51]

The point of a nine millimetre is deterrence, in keeping a healthy distance between the two parties, with the likelihood that closing that distance is likely to end fatally.

There's a documented case that a twenty two long rifle can take out a bear, in the hands of a canny and experienced hunter.

If size matters, you might need to empty an entire magazine of four millimetre darts from a gauss rifle, in order to stop the elephant, essentially slicing it to pieces.

Twenty-two Long Rifle Solids are commonly used by poachers for head shots on deer. You can take out a lot of creatures with precise bullet placement. The issue is the precise bullet placement.

There are reports of hunters taking a head shot on an elephant, going for the brain, where they have knocked the elephant out for up to 30 minutes, depending on the caliber of the rifle, and then the elephant waking up and departing. One of the few cases of an animal actually being knocked unconscious that I have documentation for. There is a lot of skull surrounding an elephant's brain. That has also happened when a hunter misses the frontal head shot on the Cape Buffalo, and hits the horn boss instead. The buffalo is down and out, and then wakes up a tad angry.

 

[whartung]

Twenty-two Long Rifle Solids are commonly used by poachers for head shots on deer. You can take out a lot of creatures with precise bullet placement. The issue is the precise bullet placement.

Yes, you can. But it's all situational.

There's a difference between shooting a passive, stationary animal and one that is charging, or, even worse, charging at you.

The case about the laser weapons is interesting.

If you project forward to how TNE portrays lasers, they're essentially very hot knitting needles.

There could be interesting considerations about penetration along with, perhaps, cauterization of an animal taking a laser hit.

In contrast to being hit by a heavy, high velocity cartridge. 5 minutes on YouTube will pull up endless slow motion examples of a variety of cartridges hitting things like ballistic gelatin, though there are certainly some showing impacts on large pieces of meat (pork shoulders, etc.)

The ultimate goal is to cause catastrophic damage to kill the animal quickly, and humanely. But mostly quickly so that the wounded created doesn't going running off to slowly bleed out.

A laser shot may not have the "stopping power" of a kinetic round. It might, there could be a large flash as energy is transferred to the target, but with a kinetic round, that energy is dissipated internally, vs externally with a laser.

The permanent wound cavity of a large caliber bullet at high velocity is, well, large. It damages lots of things, all at once. Not considering a central nervous system hit, heavily damaging the heart, liver, and lungs tends to end discussion quickly. With a large wound cavity, precision is less important since there's an internal radius of damage.

A laser, however, is a needle. Penetrating, but not necessarily expanding.

Mind, if it turns the insides of the creature to high pressure steam, very quickly, there can certainly be an expansive effect, but I don't know if the force involved is enough to make a permanent wound cavity, vs just stretching everything around. Animals tend to stretch pretty well.

 

[Straybow]

A real laser of combat effective energy would create an explosion of vaporizing flesh and blood. Not a powerful explosion, but enough to make a very ragged wound track with plenty of bleeding rather than cauterization.


We're not talking about the old ruby laser from science class back in the day, which might indeed "punch a hole" through a small body or body part, or a deep hole into a larger person.


Also armor... metallic armor would give the target 3rd degree surface burns around the point of entry from metallic vapor, which is truly nasty stuff. Other types of armor and clothing will also create surface burns. Apparently, melting polypropylene actually mixes and solidifies in the flesh. Other plastics will cause lesser melt-burns.

 

[Straybow]

I think that once you depart significantly from human size scale things break down. You've generally made it doubling mass with each increment but start fudging the size arbitrarily above 3.2 tons. If you actually go to √2 increments it works cleanly and gets to the same point at the end.

Strength shouldn't be variable at those ever-increasing sizes. In fact, square-cube law dictates that strength will become increasingly restricted in range as mass increases. The larger the creature, the more the muscle tissue must be optimized to achieve the cross-section limited strength to keep up with volume mass. There is less room for variation, apart from variation in size itself.

One d6 averages 3½, so increments start at +2 near human size, then go to +4 each doubling in the range of bears and larger. When increment drops from doubling to √2, the increment obviously becomes +2.

I don't know why the size bonus for targeting the largest critters maxes out at +6. Apart from range penalties, at a certain point it really is can't-miss-the-broad-side-of-a-barn aiming. Then just use the size index as the to-hit modifier.

Hit points are a different problem. I'd start assigning hit points to body parts. Take out one leg of a sauropod and you have a move-kill. Dex and End probably don't apply to very small and very large critters in the same way as a human-scale combatant.

Size Table
Size   Mass  Strength  Beast
Mod   (kg*)    Scale   Power 
-8      3g    0.0005   x1
-7      6g     0.001   x1
-6     12g     0.002   x1
-5     25g     0.005   x1
-4     50g     0.01    x1
-3     0.1     0.02    x1
-2     0.2     0.05    x1
-1     0.4     0.1     x1
+0     0.8    ¼·1d2    x1
+1     1.5    ½·1d2    x1
+2       3      1d2    x1
+3       6      1d3    x1
+4      12      1d6    x1
+5      25     1½d6    x1
+6      50      2d6    x1
+7     100     2d6+2   x1
+8     200     2d6+4   x1
+9     400     2d6+8   x2
+10    800    2d6+12   x2
+11   1.6t    2d6+16   x3
+12   3.2t    2d6+20   x3
+13   4.5t    2d6+22   x4
+14   6.4t    2d6+24   x4
+15     9t    2d6+26   x5
+16    12t    2d6+28   x5
+17    18t    2d6+30   x6
+18    25t    2d6+32   x6
+19    36t    2d6+34   x7
+20    50t    2d6+36   x7
+21    72t    2d6+38   x8
+22   100t    2d6+40   x8
* Mass in kg unless specified

 

[Timerover51]

Another problem is correlating dexterity and endurance with mass. It really does not work out that way in the real world. A case in point.

Compare a 50 kilogram/110 pound alligator snapping turtle and a 50 kilogram/110 pound cheetah. Mass is the same, dexterity is totally different, and endurance is really hard to determine for the turtle, while the cheetah is an incredibly fast sprinter with limited endurance. Then you have the Cape Hunting Dog, at roughly half the mass of the cheetah, a bit slower, but just as dextrous and far greater endurance.

Another case based on water creatures. Compare a Florida manatee, a porpoise, and a green sea turtle of similar mass. The speeds are vastly different, dexterity likewise, and as for endurance, that would be very hard to judge as the manatee moves so slowly, the turtle is a bit faster, and the porpoise outruns both, even at cruising speed.

Then to further complicate dexterity, consider the elephant and it near and distant relatives the mammoths and mastodons. They are big, strong, but can be stopped dead by a 6 to 8 foot ditch, and probably would not be viewed as terribly dextrous. However, they do have this thing called a trunk, which can be quite dextrous, to picking up a single peanut off of the ground. It also makes for quite a deadly weapon.

Lastly, then in random rolling, what do you do with a 10,000 kilogram land predator? Predators typically take animals that are not that smaller than them to up to 3 times their size. A predator that big is going to need a fair number of as large to larger herbivores as prey, the number depending on whether the predator is cold or warm-blooded. Cold-blooded predators will need about their own weight in prey mass a year, while warm-blooded predators are going to need about 10 times their mass as prey a year.

 

[mike wightman]

The cheetah does not have limited endurance - it is limited in how long it can maintain its sprint speed just like humans, dogs, horses etc. It spends most of its hunt at slower but still fast speeds that can be maintained for a long time. They also very quickly recuperate from their hunt and start again - showing a high endurance.

As for dexterity, I doubt if the cheetah or the turtle could fire a pistol or a rifle, an elephant may just about manage to squeeze off a round or two from a modified trigger

 

[whartung]

As for dexterity, I doubt if the cheetah or the turtle could fire a pistol or a rifle, an elephant may just about manage to squeeze off a round or two from a modified trigger

Nah, the elephant just pulls the lanyard on the gun.

The dexterity you're talking about is digital dexterity. Cheetahs don't really have fingers.

But if watching my cat operate is any indicator, watching her pirouette in mid air to grab the bird or cat toy, and the speed with which she can do it? Seems pretty dextrous to me. I may be able to fire a gun, but I certainly don't have her hand/paw eye coordination, especially in a dynamic 3-D environment.

 

[Condottiere]

 

[Timerover51]

The cheetah does not have limited endurance - it is limited in how long it can maintain its sprint speed just like humans, dogs, horses etc. It spends most of its hunt at slower but still fast speeds that can be maintained for a long time. They also very quickly recuperate from their hunt and start again - showing a high endurance.

As for dexterity, I doubt if the cheetah or the turtle could fire a pistol or a rifle, an elephant may just about manage to squeeze off a round or two from a modified trigger

I was looking at dexterity in comparison to other animals, which I believe is what the original poster was thinking of.

 

[BackworldTraveller]

Beware of dexterous foxes...a fox had made it into his den when a hunter decided to poke about with the but of his gun to see if he could shift the fox...and got shot dead as a result...Sadly the recoil also did for the Fox!

 

[mike wightman]

I feel sorry for the fox.

The 'hunter' not so much.

 

[Condottiere]

 

[Timerover51]

Beware of dexterous foxes...a fox had made it into his den when a hunter decided to poke about with the but of his gun to see if he could shift the fox...and got shot dead as a result...Sadly the recoil also did for the Fox!

The guy violated about every rule of gun handling in the book, the first of which is Never, Ever point a gun at something you did not wish to kill. Second, is always unload a weapon before you use it for a purpose for which it is not intended. He definitely did not go through any NRA gun safety or hunting classes, or if he did, there was nothing between his ears except high vacuum so it could not attach to anything.

I just discovered in Illinois that there is no closed season on Coyotes, which are getting more plentiful and bolder all of the time. That might justify a rifle to do some taking.