BR, BL and FF&S are some of the best supplements for Traveller ever made. If you like that sort of thing.
In CT, they were making a Sci Fi game and just Making Stuff Up. Thankfully, it came out before Star Wars, we don't know how much of a fundamental impact that would have had on a new Sci Fi game of the age. Instead, it was a but more "shotguns in space" than laser swords and snub fighters.
During its lifespan, Chadwick was able to come up with an armor model (as in how armor reacts to damage), and used that for updating the combat system through AHL and Striker.
HG was GDWs stab at simplifying space combat, understanding the cruel reality space combat is lethal and "easy". The lack of terrain, no LOS, the natural lengths of what a turn must be in a "space is big" environment, the line 'em up Napoleonic style makes sense, as a game. Actual maneuver, in the large, probably didn't alter the outcomes all that much.
In MegaTraveller, they continued on with the building style systems, but really did not have a solid underlying physical model foundation that they were basing it on. MT was a bit of a mess in all sorts of ways.
Coming back to TNE, Chadwick was able to dig in, and come up with not just a refined armor model, but also all of the power models. Fundamentally, "what happens when X Mj hits Y armor", and then extrapolate from there. Add in his power models (different ways to create Mj), and, finally, a sensor model, the rest flowed from that.
After doing the physics of it, they learned that Lasers pretty much Don't Work at space ranges, so they had to come up with something to make them viable for flavor purposes (gravitic focusing). Once that was done, you still have a "realistic" laser, its just artificially small in size to make it playable.
TNE used Range Band combat to simplify combat because with typically 2 ships, all that mostly matters is the range, and they just need a model to simulate that properly. You could step up to simple Mayday style vector system and move on from the range band if you add another ship.
But BL came along, and attacked the whole space combat problem in detail. Given the Truths documented in FF&S, this is the physical world they're modeling, here's the math behind the models, etc. Given that, what is ship combat like? Clearly the TNE rules they published were a subset of what became BL.
The key here is, again, they started with a model, and then applied it to a combat situation. They didn't start with combat, they didn't start with a "space view" per se (obviously somewhat, as noted by the laser compromise). They started with a model and the chips lay where they lay.
Once they decided how lasers work, notably how they penetrate, this more than warranted the detailed hit location model. BL is "death by knitting needles". Fierce, focused, piercing lasers burning long, small holes into your ship. Once you have these needles poking in, you need to know what they're poking. Especially for a RPG supplement, it's good to know when the laser burns its way into the engineering compartment and fries Ted to a burnt crisp. "If only he was sitting, two chairs over..."
They notably, as a design decision, simply side stepped kinetic energy on a large scale. i.e. large, multi-ton missiles slamming into ships traveling at net 100's of km/s. They consciously skipped that because the game isn't fun. Too much energy too little time, and it also makes the actual "last mile" problem particularly difficult. A fraction of a fraction of a second distinguishes between a near miss and an exploding Sun. "Well stick with lasers".
This is why we have bomb pumped missile warheads. Skips that whole kinetic contact problem. Also helps deal with "light speed weapons up close rarely miss" problem. We'll blow the missiles 1000's of kms away, to give it all a bit of a fudge factor.
Battle Rider scaled it up. It simplified the level of detail. It's a game of detection and maneuver. It focuses on crits because that's what disables large ships, death by a thousand knitting needles doesn't really do much until you hit something Important. So, we'll skip all of that little stuff and focus on the Big Hit.
But, understand, the underlying model of BL and BR are fundamentally the same. The penetration model they use for a Gauss Rifle blasting through your body armor and into your liver is the same as the laser burning through battleship armor into the Maneuver drive. The scales and materials are simply different. Mj vs Armor.
We don't know what the future will bring, obviously most of the TNE techs are the stuff we have today graphed out into the future with a lot of speculation.
But the fundamentals are sound, IMHO. I don't think we'll see gravitic focusing any time soon, this kind of puts a big damper on using lasers at space ranges. Space combat may well be very kinetic, especially early on. Up close and explosive, where armor doesn't really matter because the net energies are so high. We still don't have anything like HEPlaR. But curious enough, Chadwick later said that he thinks he underestimated the efficiency of HEPlaR, he feels that even more capable drives may be possible.
But, until then. It's lasers in space.
I REALLY need to play with BR to see how dynamic the sensor game is. I have no feel for it.
