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General Do you have vicious Nobles?

He has computer help, but he doesn't have time to read a tutorial on evasive maneuvers when the enemy is lining up their spinal mounts. Being able to make the right decision on the spur of the moment may be the difference between victory and death.

And for the 1700 skipper, not only knowing how to take profit from the wind while the battle was on, but to know how to navigate or how to ride a storm was also critical. Is in those matters a computer may be quite helpful (and even to take some decisions about evasive maneuvers, not giving a tutorial)

As said, things to know are different, but I guess the 1700 skipper must be quite wiser than the starship one…

Officers trusting enlisted to know their jobs? Not in my Navy. There's a whole subset of the maintenance procedures relating to spot checks where some division officer or department head will stand over the technician's shoulder and verify they did what they were supposed to do and did it right. Knowing all the other jobs means being able to evaluate the results of your crews performance in a drill and identify which areas need work. The time to find out your Gunnery officer has been phoning it in is not in the middle of a battle.

Not only enlisted men, there are other officers with fields or responsibility. But even so, if you cannot trust the enlisted men to know their jobs, your navy is doomed, and your training officers should be court martialed.

Those evaluations are the duty of each officer in charge. If the Skipper must dedicate to it, he will not make his true duty. And a good skipper is the one who makes those officers efficient. A ship must be a well-oiled machine, and each officer trustworthy, or it is doomed.

The Navigator gets the ax as well for a misjump, of course, but unless the skipper has connections, his career is done. This may have changed a bit in recent years, but traditionally, everything that happens on a ship is the skipper's ultimate responsibility. In 2017, when 2 ships got into different collisions in the west Pacific, the 7th Fleet commander, a 3-star admiral, got relieved a few weeks before his planned retirement date. The CO and XO on both ships both got relieved as well, according to wikipedia, and things rolled downhill, as they will.

Sure, it’s the commander’s responsibility, but not to check the navigator’s job, but to make sure he is up to the task.

I guess this 3 star Aldmiral was not relieved because he didn’t know how to steer a ship, but because he had failed on his duty: making the ships work together and not go in each other’s way. The fact he could or not have avoided the collision if he had been in the steer is fully irrelevant.
 
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So one of the conceits of Traveller chargen is that your character isn't marking down skills gained in their career, but what skills were retained by the time you leave your career. So I'd consider an officer without one of the necessary skills to simply have forgotten it, or lost the edge, in the course of their career. Maybe your conning officer was so squared away that you never needed to correct or double-check them, and got out of the habit of doing so.
THIS.
Skills that are not maintained atrophy over time, hence the need to periodically requalify/refresh certain skills in order to keep them up to spec.
Because, if so, there's something seriously wrong with the the extended chargen for navy careers, starting with the fact that most of those skills are "locked" behind departments that would require Cross Training assignments in order to obtain them.
One solution to this problem would be to modify the "which tables are available when" conditions slightly.

Under RAW, the only times that you can roll on the skill table for a different department than your own is when you roll the Special Assignment: Cross-Training, which then makes your character eligible to transfer to that different department after re-enlisting.

What if ... that limited condition were slightly expanded.

One of the most common duty assignments that can be rolled in the extended chargen is ... Training, for a year.
It's basically an almost automatic survival roll, no real chance for decoration (let alone promotion, if you're an officer) and a chance to gain a skill roll.

What if ... a (regular) Training assignment allowed you to roll on ANY Departmental skills table (without restriction), but did make your character eligible for a departmental transfer after re-enlisting?

That way, it would be possible to use (regular) Training assignments to obtain skills from other departments without needing to roll a Special Assignment in order to do so.
 
And for the 1700 skipper, not only knowing how to take profit from the wind while the battle was on, but to know how to navigate or how to ride a storm was also critical. Is in those matters a computer may be quite helpful (and even to take some decisions about evasive maneuvers, not giving a tutorial)

As said, things to know are different, but I guess the 1700 skipper must be quite wiser than the starship one…
That's one I'd hesitate to argue either way. The 1700's skipper has the vagaries of the wind and the sea to contend with, but he never had to contend with orbital insertion or gas giant skimming or control consoles his crew are not proficient with.
Not only enlisted men, there are other officers with fields or responsibility. But even so, if you cannot trust the enlisted men to know their jobs, your navy is doomed, and your training officers should be court martialed.
'Trust but verify' was hammered into us. Better to verify, and in doing so to catch an inadvertent mistake (or training failure) than to let it cascade into a mishap. 'Do once check twice' is another phrase I've heard. Aviation is much more vulnerable to catastrophe from mistakes because you can't just stop everything and diagnose a problem, and much of aviation maintenance is written in blood.
Those evaluations are the duty of each officer in charge. If the Skipper must dedicate to it, he will not make his true duty. And a good skipper is the one who makes those officers efficient. A ship must be a well-oiled machine, and each officer trustworthy, or it is doomed.
So the skipper doesn't spot-check each tech's work. But I've done spot checks with my division officer and once with my department head. Nothing on me, the DivO and DH have to do so many a week and my turn rolled around from time to time.
Sure, ti’s the commander’s responsibility, but not to check the navigator’s job, but to make sure he is up to the task.
So if I'm a skipper, I am absolutely going to verify a jump calculation before I commit my ship to jump. Making sure the navigator gets his jump calculation qual done before he's allowed to navigate is a minimum, but I'm not taking ownership of a goofup if he's drunk or short on sleep or rolls snake eyes. If he jumps us into a star, I die, too. I am against that, and if I can stop it by looking over the numbers before we enter it in, then I will do that every time.
I guess this 3 star Aldmiral was not relieved because he didn’t know how to steer a ship, but because he had failed on his duty: making the ships work together and not go in each other’s way. The fact he could or not have avoided the collision if he had been in the steer is fully irrelevant.
This was my point in mentioning the Admiral.
 
But in the Army (historically) you could originally purchase a commission at any Company/Regimental Rank w/o prior experience, as long as you had the finances. So a well-off gentleman could purchase a commission for Ensign/Cornet, Lieutenant, Captain (or Captain-Lieutenant in the Colonel's Company), Sergeant-Major (later shortened to Major), Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel (who was generally the one who raised the regiment with permission, or sold his commission to a successor, as often did less-senior officers). Generals were appointed ad-hoc from the body of Colonels as necessary, who were normally absentee from their Regiments at any rate, leaving their Regiments in the hands of their Lieutenant Colonels, and the Colonel's Company under the command of a second Senior Lieutenant known as a "Captain-Lieutenant" in his absence. No rising thru the ranks was required.

During the English Civil War, this gave some pretty bad officers in some cases, but also resulted in some great officers, if they were men of prior or foreign battlefield experience (such as Lord Leven and Prince Rupert).
That doesn't change that with a more technical and advanced military that purchase of a commission to enter service as an officer is what is possible. Rather than allowing purchase of some higher rank right off, you have to go in at entry level. It's sort of like say legacy admissions to some prestigious university. You can get in with purchase, but you still have to prove at least minimally competent.

I'd also say as big as the 3I is, with as many worlds as it has, and that there are posts beyond its borders, there's no real shortage of slots for nobility to fill first then non-nobles second. Being say, the son of a knight, you purchase a commission and are sent to some piddly little escort ship somewhere protecting merchant ships in some forsaken system. It's your little ship and one other like it. The two have maybe a total of 30 Imperial Navy and Marines aboard and you are one of say, 5 or 6 officers assigned. You got the basic skills training before reporting and are expected to OJT the rest. It's expected you won't make it a career since promotions beyond the first one or two are rare where you are stationed. Instead, you end up doing a term or two, getting out, and put on the reserve list for possible future employment if there's like a major war or something.

But you can go home to eventually inherit the title, have a fancy uniform to show off, along with a few medals that mean little in reality. You got some experience and maybe even got to fight a pirate crew while you were serving.

I do have polities in MTU that do put officers in positions as you suggested above. Those usually rate loyalty to the government or other significant body, like a religion, above competence among their officer corps. Fighting wars in these is second to being reliably loyal to the ruling power(s).
 
If he jumps us into a star, I die, too.
Uh ... stars have 100 diameter jump shadows too ... so any misjump in the direction of a star would precipitate out of jump WELL outside the photosphere of a star.

Now ... "recovering" after a misjump (by navigating to an in-system fuel source, if at all possible) ... is a different matter.

Furthermore, misjumps are "usually" the fault of unrefined fuel, overdue maintenance or other "damage" to the drive systems, rather than being something you can (easily) lay at the feet of the navigator. Usually, misjumps are the result of a confluence of poor decisions (often out of necessity, although neglect can play a factor too), rather than being a single point of failure (navigator rolled a DERP).
 
Uh ... stars have 100 diameter jump shadows too ... so any misjump in the direction of a star would precipitate out of jump WELL outside the photosphere of a star.

Now ... "recovering" after a misjump (by navigating to an in-system fuel source, if at all possible) ... is a different matter.

Furthermore, misjumps are "usually" the fault of unrefined fuel, overdue maintenance or other "damage" to the drive systems, rather than being something you can (easily) lay at the feet of the navigator. Usually, misjumps are the result of a confluence of poor decisions (often out of necessity, although neglect can play a factor too), rather than being a single point of failure (navigator rolled a DERP).
So if my example is bad, this process applies equally to any other double-checking of subordinate's survival-critical work, if the given example is small potatoes. I do note that the minimum officer compliment in Book 5 is 2 Nav officers, presumably they check one another.
 
I disagree with pilot 0 just because while they don't normally have their hands on the helm, they have to give precise and exact commands at the right time to make things happen. The ability to press the buttons is not nearly as important as what buttons in what combination will make a 20,000T ship do what you want. With ship tactics on top of that gained in your XO or CO tour, and fleet tactics in your Commodore tour.
I'm basing it upon a study the USN did... Most skippers are no longer able to pass the handling quals they had to pass to hit command grades... usually several years before. They're not unskilled, but it's just not something one does day-in/day-out. In post-82 Traveller terms, it's reduced to level 0 to make room for the skills he/she really needs.
And remember, level 0 isn't no skill except in T4.1 or T5... where the This is Hard rule applies an unskilled penalty to any difficulty greater than skill.

Then again, given current computers, the actual maneuvering is better done by a well equipped computer, be the ship water, air, or space. It's been 30 years since a spacecraft was required to use human piloting for normal operations other than docking or landing. And the landing bit is a simple matter of government regulation.

If Traveller were truly realistic, from TL9 on, there would be no pilots - as the computers are more precise, more fuel efficient, and full time available... Likewise, astrogation? unless it's psionic, the precision needed is better left to the computer.

It's not, it's a space opera focused ruleset.
If you want realistic spacecraft assuming fusion, no edition of Traveller holds a dim LED, let alone a candle, to Albedo's Ship Soucebook.
 
I do note that the minimum officer compliment in Book 5 is 2 Nav officers, presumably they check one another.
My presumption has always been that the 1000+ ton starship crew requirements (LBB5.80, et al.) included multiple shifts of crews.
So you need 2 navigators (minimum) for a 24 hour standing watch rotation (each pulls 12 hour shifts of some sort).

LBB2.81 crew requirements were more about the 999- ton starship crews which could be down to as little as a single shift, because jump points would be within 12 hours of a world surface (and interplanetary journeys "basically never happen" since everything is interstellar only).
If Traveller were truly realistic, from TL9 on, there would be no pilots - as the computers are more precise, more fuel efficient, and full time available... Likewise, astrogation? unless it's psionic, the precision needed is better left to the computer.
My interpretation is that the pilot and navigator crew positions are there for oversight and systems maintenance, rather than "manual reversion" control duties. You need trained people who can VERIFY that what the computer is doing is the right thing, but other than that the computer is doing the "heavy lifting" of controlling the craft and doing the sensor fusion of information for the crew to work with.


So basically, the pilot and navigator are more like sysadmins (kinda), to borrow an IT analogy. The computer does most of the "work" that needs to be done, but the sysadmins are there to make sure the work gets done correctly/adequately/properly in a timely fashion without major errors. The sysadmins are "overseers" for the computer work product that gets produced (kinda sorta) and are there to keep everything running smoothly (among other things).

If you HAVE TO fall back on Manual Override, your pilot and navigator are going to need to have the skills to "do what the computer ought to have been doing for them" if they need to take direct and manual control of their crew position functions ... but that's more of an "ultimate fallback" type of backup role, rather than their primary duties.

I sincerely doubt that any craft with a computer in it (model/1+) is a proper "stick & rudder, seat of the pants" flying machine in the Traveller context. Small craft with a bridge and no computer can be, but anything with a model/1+ installed won't be, since the crew will be "flying the computer" and the computer flies the craft (see: fly by wire/fly by light controls).
 
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I'm basing it upon a study the USN did... Most skippers are no longer able to pass the handling quals they had to pass to hit command grades... usually several years before.
Well, that changes things. My skipper would have been one of the exceptions, I suppose, as he was very much a lead by example person in that regard and had to prove that he could do anything he asked of us, and I had based my assumptions around that. If most skippers fail piloting, then I stand corrected.

They're not unskilled, but it's just not something one does day-in/day-out. In post-82 Traveller terms, it's reduced to level 0 to make room for the skills he/she really needs.
And remember, level 0 isn't no skill except in T4.1 or T5... where the This is Hard rule applies an unskilled penalty to any difficulty greater than skill.
So, I don't think MgT or LBB1 offer Lv 0 of the skill to anyone? You either roll it and get it at 1, or you don't get it. As opposed to Merchants, who get it for achieving Rank 4.
Then again, given current computers, the actual maneuvering is better done by a well equipped computer, be the ship water, air, or space. It's been 30 years since a spacecraft was required to use human piloting for normal operations other than docking or landing. And the landing bit is a simple matter of government regulation.

If Traveller were truly realistic, from TL9 on, there would be no pilots - as the computers are more precise, more fuel efficient, and full time available... Likewise, astrogation? unless it's psionic, the precision needed is better left to the computer.

It's not, it's a space opera focused ruleset.
If you want realistic spacecraft assuming fusion, no edition of Traveller holds a dim LED, let alone a candle, to Albedo's Ship Soucebook.
My interpretation is that the pilot and navigator crew positions are there for oversight and systems maintenance, rather than "manual reversion" control duties. You need trained people who can VERIFY that what the computer is doing is the right thing, but other than that the computer is doing the "heavy lifting" of controlling the craft and doing the sensor fusion of information for the crew to work with.

I sincerely doubt that any craft with a computer in it (model/1+) is a proper "stick & rudder, seat of the pants" flying machine in the Traveller context. Small craft with a bridge and no computer can be, but anything with a model/1+ installed won't be, since the crew will be "flying the computer" and the computer flies the craft (see: fly by wire/fly by light controls).
This works for me.
 
1. You'll have to be able to astrogate, in order to be a line officer.

2. I'm working through Traveller military pilot training, and I think that after six years, they should be skill factor two or three, since pilot slots would seem limited.
 
That doesn't change that with a more technical and advanced military that purchase of a commission to enter service as an officer is what is possible. Rather than allowing purchase of some higher rank right off, you have to go in at entry level. It's sort of like say legacy admissions to some
prestigious university. You can get in with purchase, but you still have to prove at least minimally competent.

Oh certainly. I was merely clarifying the historical distinction and evolution of the practice in that the Navy due to the technical considerations was different than the Army. In a future technically sophisticated military setting, it certainly might be as you note above.
 
So, I don't think MgT or LBB1 offer Lv 0 of the skill to anyone?

For CT it was up to the referee to give level 0 in any skill (except gun combat, that every player had it), but in MgT you have several level 0 skills due to background and basic training...
 
I've long had the house rule that characters have level 0 in every skill on the service skills table, in addition to the common level 0 skills mentioned in the at referee's discretion.
When the character musters out they gain one level 0 skill of their choice from any table they qualify for per term served.
 
For CT it was up to the referee to give level 0 in any skill (except gun combat, that every player had it), but in MgT you have several level 0 skills due to background and basic training...
I went and looked it up, Piloting is on the Service Skills list for Navy, so since you get all service skills at level 0 when joining the Naval career, everyone has it. In MgT1, I don't know about other versions.
 
I went and looked it up, Piloting is on the Service Skills list for Navy, so since you get all service skills at level 0 when joining the Naval career, everyone has it. In MgT1, I don't know about other versions.
It's the same in MgT2e, although I'd argue that it would make more sense to replace it with the Electronics cascade skill as that is needed in every division of a warship )Bridge - Sensors, Comms, Computers; Gunnery - Sensors, Computers, maybe Remote Ops; Engineering - Remote Ops, Computers; Flight - Sensors, Comms, Computers, Remote Ops; Medical - Computers, maybe Remote Ops), whereas you don't need every single crew member of a Tigress to be (technically) able to pilot it. If every recruit gets trained to Electronics-0, they can be assigned to any division that needs crew and be able to be put to work immediately.
 
It's the same in MgT2e, although I'd argue that it would make more sense to replace it with the Electronics cascade skill as that is needed in every division of a warship )Bridge - Sensors, Comms, Computers; Gunnery - Sensors, Computers, maybe Remote Ops; Engineering - Remote Ops, Computers; Flight - Sensors, Comms, Computers, Remote Ops; Medical - Computers, maybe Remote Ops), whereas you don't need every single crew member of a Tigress to be (technically) able to pilot it. If every recruit gets trained to Electronics-0, they can be assigned to any division that needs crew and be able to be put to work immediately.
I would say computer 0 or even 1 is something everyone from TL 8 up would have simply because they've been using them all of their life.
 
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