"Maybe we'll fix that."
- Thread starter whartung
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About the only thing similar (mechanical wise) is the pressurization. Not really anything else.
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Landing cycles and structure supported on gear points as opposed to an evenly supported hull by water for another. I'm sure I could come up with more though I don't see the point.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Do ships in travel even need to worry about hull stress though? The magic of acceleration compensators cancel all lateral stresses.
The hull itself is better armoured than a TL7 MBT (thanks for that one HG_B) and made out of materials far in advance of what we have today.
The only things I can see wearing out are electrics, plumbing, life support systems, engines - basically anything that involves moving parts or electricity will eventually need replacement.
But that's what the annual maintenance bill is for...
The hull itself is better armoured than a TL7 MBT (thanks for that one HG_B) and made out of materials far in advance of what we have today.
The only things I can see wearing out are electrics, plumbing, life support systems, engines - basically anything that involves moving parts or electricity will eventually need replacement.
But that's what the annual maintenance bill is for...
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Do they though? I know I've gone both ways on it, I'm still not sure they can act on the hull itself the way movement works.
In MT perhaps. Not in all versions though. Can you hole MBT armour with small arms? Breech a man sized hole in battle-plate with the same small arms and a little more determination and ammo? No, I don't think so, yet you can in CT and some other versions iirc. That certainly says ships in those versions are not the ruggerd hardened thick armoured hulls HG_B is envisioning
Much more like lightweight airframes. Speaking of which how about that part of it too. As I recall it wasn't until TNE/FF&S1 that ships weighed several times their displacement which would hint at heavy hulls.I don't recall the specifics in MT on either account. And frankly given the editing (or rather apparent lack of any) in that I have long taken anything and everything in it as highly suspect.
I'll grant materials far in advance of what we have today. But does that necessarily translate into durability? And against what kinds of wear forces and environments of the same far future and exotic locations. How long does plasteel last exposed to a corrosive or insidious atmosphere? Or repeated stesses of hot and cold extremes of space? Or multiple plunges into the atmosphere of gas giants? Or...
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That does raise an interesting point, namely that there's no single true figure for service life. Whatever stresses starships are normally exposed to, some will be exposed to more than others. And some will be better able to take it than others. When you build a bunch of supposedly identical vessels, some of them will be lemons and some will be creampuffs. Commercial ships do as many jumps as they can manage and are seldom mothballed; military ships can spend weeks and months and even years between jumps. On the other hand they do wilderness refuelling and get shot at, something civilian ships rarely experience.
I'm actually rather impressed with the meatiness of the information about the AHL service lives. I wonder who worked them out and how he did it. Did he just pull them out of thin air? Did he find some Real Life list of naval vessels and convert it to the Far Future? Did he establish die rolls and roll for each ship?
Hans
Captain Midnight
SOC-12
What happens if the inertial compensator malfunctions, or is damaged, or is shut down for whatever reason (e. g., shutting it down for repairs or refit, or the power plant goes off line)? Does the ship tear itself to pieces? If the owner's manual for the ship has a big warning written on the front saying "Loss of power to the inertial compensator will result in massive structural failure; do not ever shut down power plant", then that has to be considered a major flaw.
What happens if the inertial compensator malfunctions, or is damaged, or is shut down for whatever reason (e. g., shutting it down for repairs or refit, or the power plant goes off line)? Does the ship tear itself to pieces? If the owner's manual for the ship has a big warning written on the front saying "Loss of power to the inertial compensator will result in massive structural failure; do not ever shut down power plant", then that has to be considered a major flaw.
Well, a sudden 6G load on people is mildly traumatic. A sufficiently prolonged 6G load is lethal.
Ships without IC are limited to sustained 3G loads or lower, simply due to the squishies (people) aboard... And 3G is dicey.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
That's yet another bit of the magic of Traveller background tech - the acceleration compensators don't appear on damage tablesWhat happens if the inertial compensator malfunctions, or is damaged, or is shut down for whatever reason (e. g., shutting it down for repairs or refit, or the power plant goes off line)? Does the ship tear itself to pieces? If the owner's manual for the ship has a big warning written on the front saying "Loss of power to the inertial compensator will result in massive structural failure; do not ever shut down power plant", then that has to be considered a major flaw.
And yes, I could actually see a case where a 6g ship that deliberately switched off the compensators would tare itself to pieces.
Xerxeskingofking
SOC-13
What happens if the inertial compensator malfunctions, or is damaged, or is shut down for whatever reason (e. g., shutting it down for repairs or refit, or the power plant goes off line)? Does the ship tear itself to pieces? If the owner's manual for the ship has a big warning written on the front saying "Loss of power to the inertial compensator will result in massive structural failure; do not ever shut down power plant", then that has to be considered a major flaw.
well, one could argue that "never run out of fuel, or else the power plant will stop working" would be a major flaw, but it didn't stop steam powered ships form competing and then replacing sailing ships, because the advantages of steam power were too great to ignore.
bear in mind, if the compesator fails, you just need to stop applying thrust and simply coast to avoid structural stresses. it wouldn't be to hard to insert a safety override in the computer system that cut power to the engines if the compensator failed.
obviously, coasting along at many Km/S is not the best place to be if, say, your destination happens to be something big and solid like a planet.........
I would doubt the inertial compensators affect the structural integrity of the ship at all, they have to be anchored to the ship themselves and the energies they are compensating for would, if anything, increase the stress loading on the hull.
As Aramis points out though, the squishies on board would definately be compromised. Without compensators any ships maneouver, as low as .1g may lead to broken limbs, bruising, etc as crew are thrown off balance and 'fall'. When undertaking evasive maneouvres, the entire crew would need to be strapped in, severely compromising work efficiency. And anything at Agility-2 or higher may result in the equivalent of a Crew-1 damage result.
You could easily consider that PP damage equates closely to inertial compensator damage, in that every PP hit reduces the ships agility. After all, the MD is still fine and nothing else is affected by PP damage. It could be that agility is reduced by the Captain for crew safety and efficiency reasons after loss of power to the inertial compensators.
As Aramis points out though, the squishies on board would definately be compromised. Without compensators any ships maneouver, as low as .1g may lead to broken limbs, bruising, etc as crew are thrown off balance and 'fall'. When undertaking evasive maneouvres, the entire crew would need to be strapped in, severely compromising work efficiency. And anything at Agility-2 or higher may result in the equivalent of a Crew-1 damage result.
You could easily consider that PP damage equates closely to inertial compensator damage, in that every PP hit reduces the ships agility. After all, the MD is still fine and nothing else is affected by PP damage. It could be that agility is reduced by the Captain for crew safety and efficiency reasons after loss of power to the inertial compensators.
Recently I got to experience ground acceleration of 2.2g for a whole 12 seconds. It was impossible to remain standing and a 12 tonne bus was thrown around like a child's toy. It resulted in a lot of fairly serious injuries and several fatalities as unsecured items became lethal projectiles. Modern structural steel members twisted and broken like chopsticks. All in all not a good situation.
Hauling this thread back to its original intent.
It would be nice to have a concise list of elements in HG (design and combat) which people think may be problematic. Note all of those nice modifiers, there.
And, perhaps, nice to have, but not important to design and combat:
It would be nice to have a concise list of elements in HG (design and combat) which people think may be problematic. Note all of those nice modifiers, there.
- abuse of the combat line
- planetoid "class discount" (granted, a minor issue)
And, perhaps, nice to have, but not important to design and combat:
- metric for class quality + individual ship quality, with "average quality" working out to 80 year (service?) life.
- determine bulk missile costing schedule or whatever
- keep an open path up to operational and fleet-level strategic combat
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Well, short of redoing the entire ship design/combat for Traveller from scratch, which would be somewhat of a dream for me (lots of ideas but little time or energy to write them down), the areas of HG that need fixing IMHO:
Design sequences:
- There really should be some scaling up and down of armor (and meson screens.) Not only is this more realistic since the surface area of the ship (or the "bubble" protected by the meson screen) does not grow proportionally to the ship's volume - it would also provide a much needed boost to the survivability of larger vessels. As it stands now, apart from the few cases where autocrit prevention is important, a ship's size is mainly a major liability that tips the balance further in favor of battle riders and produces ridiculous results like fighters with the same armor thickness as dreadnoughts.
One possibility would be to use the same cut-off points as for the size DMs to hit, and introduce some "efficiency factor" for armor and meson screens along the same lines, either as a sort of flat bonus, or worked into the armor formula (for example instead of "3+3a" for TL 11 armor, you'd have "3a+3e" where "e" would be the efficiency factor.)
- I'd like to see some tech level scaling for Electronics and maneuver drives. For the latter, this could be accomplished relatively easily by a flat bonus for higher TLs. For the former, a simple table should suffice.
- "Military" components, meaning screens, weapons, armor and high-level computers, should be more expensive.
- Costs should rise with tech level. I don't really buy into the "local credits"/conversion idea. The way it is now, a lower-tech, less capable ship is often more expensive than its higher tech counterpart.
- This is not a major point, but I'd prefer a quick and simple design formula for spinal mounts instead of a table which seems to have some regular progression in it.
Combat:
Okay, let's not beat around the bush - combat is broken. The major issues:
- Inelegant line/reserve system.
- Reliance on clunky tables. (Though that probably can't be helped.)
- Gazillions of die rolls with larger ships.
- Unrealistic design effects such as the good old damage-soaking single plasma gun battery.
- Inability of small, agile ships to ever hit each other (and if they do, to do any significant damage.)
I've previously tried various fixes, but it's painfully obvious: The whole thing is broken. It may be serviceable as an abstract dice game, but it's neither very evocative nor elegant. It is especially unsuited for PC-level combat.
Design sequences:
- There really should be some scaling up and down of armor (and meson screens.) Not only is this more realistic since the surface area of the ship (or the "bubble" protected by the meson screen) does not grow proportionally to the ship's volume - it would also provide a much needed boost to the survivability of larger vessels. As it stands now, apart from the few cases where autocrit prevention is important, a ship's size is mainly a major liability that tips the balance further in favor of battle riders and produces ridiculous results like fighters with the same armor thickness as dreadnoughts.
One possibility would be to use the same cut-off points as for the size DMs to hit, and introduce some "efficiency factor" for armor and meson screens along the same lines, either as a sort of flat bonus, or worked into the armor formula (for example instead of "3+3a" for TL 11 armor, you'd have "3a+3e" where "e" would be the efficiency factor.)
- I'd like to see some tech level scaling for Electronics and maneuver drives. For the latter, this could be accomplished relatively easily by a flat bonus for higher TLs. For the former, a simple table should suffice.
- "Military" components, meaning screens, weapons, armor and high-level computers, should be more expensive.
- Costs should rise with tech level. I don't really buy into the "local credits"/conversion idea. The way it is now, a lower-tech, less capable ship is often more expensive than its higher tech counterpart.
- This is not a major point, but I'd prefer a quick and simple design formula for spinal mounts instead of a table which seems to have some regular progression in it.
Combat:
Okay, let's not beat around the bush - combat is broken. The major issues:
- Inelegant line/reserve system.
- Reliance on clunky tables. (Though that probably can't be helped.)
- Gazillions of die rolls with larger ships.
- Unrealistic design effects such as the good old damage-soaking single plasma gun battery.
- Inability of small, agile ships to ever hit each other (and if they do, to do any significant damage.)
I've previously tried various fixes, but it's painfully obvious: The whole thing is broken. It may be serviceable as an abstract dice game, but it's neither very evocative nor elegant. It is especially unsuited for PC-level combat.
a function of the strategic scale the game is set at. Could it be more detailed, yes. Can it get more detailed without delving into Operational issues (eg: battlefield flanking maneuvers, breakthroughs, specialized formations, etc)? Likely no and regardless, these are better explored in a new game.
Tables
a product of the 70's. For your die rolling concerns look up statistical combat in TCS, pg 15. There are no die rolls needed for large ships or groups of ships (eg: thousands of fighters).You could houserule away the 'damage soaking plasma gun', but then how do you deal with ships in the 1000-2000 ton range with only a few weapon systems. Loosing an entire system in one hit is a little harsh.
There are some good houserules around for fighter vs fighter combat. Personally I like using a dogfighting modifier. That aside, fighters cause automatic criticals on other fighters. And yes I'm aware fighter armour reduces criticals, just as fighter armour also reduces agility, computer size and/or fighter numbers; any one of which puts fighters at a huge disadvantage vs other fighters.
You hit the nail on the head. HG isn't designed for PC scale gaming. It is an abstract game that is great at providing context for PC gaming (careers & story background if interstellar conflict is involved), but that is pretty much it for RPG purposes.
I'm not really looking for "more detailed". I just don't think the implementation is very elegant, what with a single 100-ton ship holding the line against a BatRon etc.
Fundamentally, this and other problems can be attributed to the extreme inequalities of scale that appear in HG. A game that includes both 10-ton fighters and 500,000-ton super dreadnoughts, treating them both in basically the same way, probably cannot really succeed.
Actually my German copy of HG included the statistical method from the very start, but I don't find that to be very elegant either. I'd prefer a massed fire table with a random element, based on averages.Tables
Sure it's harsh. But then again, space combat is not for the faint of heart. In Bk2, every turret hit took out one turret. I don't think we ever saw that as a problem. In HG, it can take as many as seven weapon hits to whittle away a single turret.
Note that I didn't say fighters. I said "small, agile ships". Two SDBs, for example, can spend hours* pointlessly blasting away at each other - the only thing they can even theoretically achieve is to scrub the other's weapons off their hull, and that will take a loooong time and deposit a lot of radioactive material in the vicinity.
I do like the career section of HG. I also like, with some nitpicks, the design sequences. But the combat section fails even for providing background color for me.
*EDIT: Did I say "hours". Sorry, I meant "weeks". Taking the SDB from S9 as an example and assuming they use conventional missiles, it will take an average of two weeks to whittle away the other guy's weapons. However, it wouldn't even come to this because after the first few hits, the weapon factors would be reduced to the points where they cannot hit each other at all.
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True, or a single hit may take out up to 30 weapons of the same class...
I agree this combat will be a space version of the Monitor vs Merrimac, both will useless pound each other to boredom (as I already pointed in another thread).
And you forget that it will last weeks because none of them will run out of missiles, another thing to fix (there is a full therad on this).
And all this also points to another flaw the system has (and which I pointed several times in several threads): very few ships are truly destroyed. Most of mision killed ships are easily repairable by the side holding the 'field' and recovering the hulks.
Hi all after being gone so long. A topic close to my heart. I redesigned HG for my own purposes. I love the HG feel of combat and design.
The design system was built AFTER the combat system. I decided how I’d like combat to flow, what would be the important tradeoffs, and how the mechanics would work and made the design support that. I use an excel spreadsheet to design but this can implemented in a slot/module approach.
Some of my ideas….
Agreed. I took an arbitrary thickness of armor, say 1m for armor factor of 1 then calculated the % of a ships volume consumed by that, for a sphere and a few other solids. The difference between shapes was minimal in the grand scheme but use a multiplier for dispersed design.
To avoid big ships have ridiculously high armor ratings, the armor scale is non-linear (as is all combat values in my redesign). That is, an armor rating of 3 would be 9 times thicker than 1. To keep big ships in line, I estimated that a fraction of armor includes “cross bracing” something a smaller ship would not need. So your advantage of being a big ship tails off.
Result, fighters might sport an armor of 1, mid size ships 2-4, and big ships 2-6. Given the non-linear scale getting a high armor rating is a sacrifice in other areas.
At most you would have 7 rolls per ship. In practice maybe 4 as the crew requirements are higher when you have multiple different systems. There are no multiple table rolls, all bonuses and defenses are modifiers to the one roll. There are different tables and modifiers for each weapon type.
This, of course, presents a new problem, I’ll just make a bunch of small ships since those 120 beam lasers that give a rating of 7 can only fire at one. To address this, you can divide that 7 up into seven attacks of 1, still roll one time, and attack 7 ships with a factor of 1. Not an effective anti-fighter design as that factor 7 takes 42 times the space of seven factor 1’s. Note high factors are needed to punch through defenses, they are a modifier to you hit and damage roll. Second, depending on the battle scale, you need to group fighters and such into flights of 4, there are benefits but damage can spill over onto any fighter in the flight.
There is a role for the Commander, Pilot, Gunner, Engineer, Sensor/Computer Officer, Doctor, and in certain scenarios the Science officer.
A great Sensor officer gives you an advantage on your Sensor roll (subsuming all jamming, tracking etc.) you win you get a + for that round.
The best Fleet Commander (Fleet or Ship Tactics) gives their fleet + to the initiative roll if you win you get to see what you opponent plans to do first AND you choose range.
Good Pilots mostly make the difference to fighters or in ship-to-ship.
Gunners, goes without saying.
Engineer, you get a repair roll each turn, these guys help with that.
Doctor, it’s not all machines, well maybe it is then the “doctor” is the Tech, you get a repair roll each turn to recover crew hits or thaw out the frozen watch.
In some scenarios you are facing unknown tech and species, you have a minus until your Science officer figures it out.
I posted on this several years ago. Since then I have taken to heart many of the comments and simplified.
It does not have grids, facing, etc. The focus is on ship design and strategy. There are strategic choices to make, where to place ships, reserve, line, close. Do you launch fighters and forgo an attack or repair roll? Or did you design you ship with launch tubes (a volume hog) so you can launch without penalty? Do you use missiles now while your attack factor may be high but you opponent’s defenses are unharmed? In this design you have a limited number of missile salvos (typically 2-10).
It is still not a “fast game.” A turn is 5-10 minutes for two fleets each with about 20-25 ships/fighter formations. Or upwards of 50+ ships in some games if fighters are counted individually. A conclusion is usually reached in 8-14 turns, so a game is 2-3 hours long. It is far faster than I could ever play HG for the comparable ship size and numbers.
The design system was built AFTER the combat system. I decided how I’d like combat to flow, what would be the important tradeoffs, and how the mechanics would work and made the design support that. I use an excel spreadsheet to design but this can implemented in a slot/module approach.
Some of my ideas….
Agreed. I took an arbitrary thickness of armor, say 1m for armor factor of 1 then calculated the % of a ships volume consumed by that, for a sphere and a few other solids. The difference between shapes was minimal in the grand scheme but use a multiplier for dispersed design.
To avoid big ships have ridiculously high armor ratings, the armor scale is non-linear (as is all combat values in my redesign). That is, an armor rating of 3 would be 9 times thicker than 1. To keep big ships in line, I estimated that a fraction of armor includes “cross bracing” something a smaller ship would not need. So your advantage of being a big ship tails off.
Result, fighters might sport an armor of 1, mid size ships 2-4, and big ships 2-6. Given the non-linear scale getting a high armor rating is a sacrifice in other areas.
I include this as an energy point or volume savings for the same rating. A simple slot approach would be to give a higher TL ship an effective higher volume for design purposes. For example a higher tech ship might get more slots/modules for a given volume than a lower one.
Yes. I scale cost with volume, as there is a non-linear scale; military grade ratings for weapons, etc. are very expensive. An average Free Trader may have Sensor 1, a Patrol Cruiser Sensor 4. I implemented a design parameter called “Structure.” Increased Structure increases the % of your ship you can dedicate to weapons, again the volume consumed is non-linear. A merchant or pirate ship can’t afford a huge % dedicated to structure, a military ship can as it is not expected to make money.
In my design cost are in constant TL 12 credits. So low TL are “cheap” to build for a high TL planet but still budget busters for the low TL planet. For example, the Saturn V is expensive to a TL 7 culture but by TL 12 it is cheap.
Done. A spinal mount in my thinking is any weapon system fixed into the hull, for a given rating you get a volume savings for this (one derived from the HG bay tables vs turret tables). You can use up to a certain % of your ship volume for the spinal and weapons of any sort. In a slot/module design approach I would make this a simple cost savings as for larger ships as you pay a targeting penalty for a spinal. The fighter fixed mount idea is subsumed as a spinal.
For myself I’ve never been too perturbed by this. I do however make it easier to “break-through” the line and have included a rule where ships can “close” to get at reserves. It’s a simple roll modified by ship number difference and drive G difference. That is 1 ship can’t hold off multiple ships, or a bunch of slow ships are not going to stop a reasonable number of fighters. To better get my pacific theater fix, one weapon system you can have is called “point” which is a mis-mash of your TL fastest tracking and targeting weapons. This “flak” is a modifier to fighters getting through the line.
Everything I do is by formula. Original ones were derived from the HG weapon rating progression table. Every weapon follows the same progression (e.g. n^2+1) there may a simple scale factor and price and energy point factor. The energy point factor is the big one as the total weapon volume, when I did the design I took into account the total power plant volume you’d need to power the thing.
God yes. My redesign was motivated by wanting massive battles, quick and with a pacific theater/battleship duel feel. My solution, there are a couple ways you can roll your to hit, All-or-Nothing one roll for all your weapons (you get a +1 for this to encourage you). At worst each weapon type (spinal, beams, energy, particle, missile, etc.) gets one roll. That is, the details of how many beam laser you have and how they are grouped doesn’t matter. You have, e.g., 20 beam lasers. That is a rating 4, that is the modifier/attack factor for your beam. You make one roll with that factor.
At most you would have 7 rolls per ship. In practice maybe 4 as the crew requirements are higher when you have multiple different systems. There are no multiple table rolls, all bonuses and defenses are modifiers to the one roll. There are different tables and modifiers for each weapon type.
This, of course, presents a new problem, I’ll just make a bunch of small ships since those 120 beam lasers that give a rating of 7 can only fire at one. To address this, you can divide that 7 up into seven attacks of 1, still roll one time, and attack 7 ships with a factor of 1. Not an effective anti-fighter design as that factor 7 takes 42 times the space of seven factor 1’s. Note high factors are needed to punch through defenses, they are a modifier to you hit and damage roll. Second, depending on the battle scale, you need to group fighters and such into flights of 4, there are benefits but damage can spill over onto any fighter in the flight.
No more. If you take a weapon 2 hit in my design two weapon factors need to go. If you are out of weapons? There is a chart for what is hit next.
In my design it is the relative agility of fleets that matters because you are not going to leave you slowest ship behind. Likewise I have a “closing” box/position. This is where you fighter duels may occur and where you went to send you fighters and agile ships so they are not hindered by the big ships. So the modifier of two equally agile ships/fleets is zero.
To make it PC friendly, crew skill/quality comes into play. Again top down design. In a fleet level scale it is simply a quality factor. For PC’s level combat, the weapons no longer need to be grouped, each gunner can roll independently for each gun, player description of what they do could be used to raise or lower a modifier etc.
There is a role for the Commander, Pilot, Gunner, Engineer, Sensor/Computer Officer, Doctor, and in certain scenarios the Science officer.
A great Sensor officer gives you an advantage on your Sensor roll (subsuming all jamming, tracking etc.) you win you get a + for that round.
The best Fleet Commander (Fleet or Ship Tactics) gives their fleet + to the initiative roll if you win you get to see what you opponent plans to do first AND you choose range.
Good Pilots mostly make the difference to fighters or in ship-to-ship.
Gunners, goes without saying.
Engineer, you get a repair roll each turn, these guys help with that.
Doctor, it’s not all machines, well maybe it is then the “doctor” is the Tech, you get a repair roll each turn to recover crew hits or thaw out the frozen watch.
In some scenarios you are facing unknown tech and species, you have a minus until your Science officer figures it out.
I posted on this several years ago. Since then I have taken to heart many of the comments and simplified.
It does not have grids, facing, etc. The focus is on ship design and strategy. There are strategic choices to make, where to place ships, reserve, line, close. Do you launch fighters and forgo an attack or repair roll? Or did you design you ship with launch tubes (a volume hog) so you can launch without penalty? Do you use missiles now while your attack factor may be high but you opponent’s defenses are unharmed? In this design you have a limited number of missile salvos (typically 2-10).
It is still not a “fast game.” A turn is 5-10 minutes for two fleets each with about 20-25 ships/fighter formations. Or upwards of 50+ ships in some games if fighters are counted individually. A conclusion is usually reached in 8-14 turns, so a game is 2-3 hours long. It is far faster than I could ever play HG for the comparable ship size and numbers.
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