Had to split to fit.
POINT DEFENSE
One of the Striker artifacts left in the MT rules is the Point Defense targeting system.
Basically, a point defense weapon could do one of three things: Shoot at targets (like anything else), shoot at direct fire weapons like missiles, as long as they were visible for long enough to track (the PD weapon had to be able to see the last 150m of the trajectory, and you could support other vehicles as well as your own), and shoot at incoming indirect fire. A tech 9 PD system gets 4 dice against indirect fire, plus two dice for each tech level higher, so that TL10 gets 6, TL11 gets 8 and so on. These dice are modified by individual DMs of plus or minus the difference in tech levels. Zero is the minimum. Thus, if your TL14 artillery fired at my TL9 PD system, I'd roll 4 dice (at -5 each, meaning that only 6s would knock down a projectile.) If my TL9 artillery fired back, your TL14 PD system would roll 14 dice (+5 each) for an average of 119 projectiles destroyed. Multiple rocket launchers, which shoot everything at once, have an advantage against PD systems due to overload--divide the hits by two. So, in the example given above, you would knock down an average of 60 rockets, rather than 119.
Nothing to it...but they didn't bother putting it in MT, even though they left in the PD fire control systems.
My additional recommendation would be to allow weapons with PD fire control to fire at moving targets with no movement penalty, since they are designed to destroy fast moving targets. I'd also limit the number of indirect fire rounds that can be destroyed to the rate of fire of the weapon, which puts a premium on things like rapid pulse plasma guns. A third recommendation would be to not permit anti-indirect fire with a PD projectile gun. You still might want PD fire control for a projectile weapon because of recommendation one, however.
ROCKET LAUNCHERS
Left out of MT were the Striker rocket rules.
Design Sequence 4: Multiple Rocket Launchers
Multiple rocket launchers (MRLs) are available at tech level 6+; they are constructed using the CPR gun design system, using the same characteristics as mortars with the following exceptions.
A. Launcher: A single launcher consists of a number of launch tubes, plus fire control and carriage.
1. Crew: A launcher's crew is the normal crew for that size weapon, times the number of tubes in the launcher, divided by 10 (but never less than 2). All crew except the gunner are required only for reloading; if the weapon is to be used only once, the rest of the crew may be dispensed with.
2. Weight: Each tube has a weight multiple of 0.01.
3. Volume: The volume of a tube is its weight times 25.
4. Price: Each tube has a price multiplier of 0.5 <0.05???>
5. Indirect Fire Range: There are three types of rockets: short range, medium range and long range. Their ranges are determined on the CPR gun tale, using the mortar, howitzer, and gun columns, respectively. The tech level of the rocket or the fire control modifies range, whichever is lower. At tech level 6, count up two rows. At tech level 7, count up one row.
Count down one row for each tech level over 8.
6. The rate of fire of a launcher is equal to the number of tubes.
B. Ammunition: Rockets are designed in the same way as CPR rounds. They are identical to mortar rounds with the following exceptions.
1. Weight: Rockets weight twice as much as listed.
2. Volume: A rocket's volume is equal to its weight in kg. divided by 500. <in kg>
3. Short range rockets have a base price multiplier of 4, medium range rockets have a multiplier of 8, long-range rockets have a multiplier of 12.
4. The RAP option is not available for rockets.
C. Remote MRLs: Properly equipped launchers may be fired from a distance by communicator signal. Both the gunner and the launcher must possess communication equipment and must be in communication. In addition, the launcher must include control equipment, which costs Cr1,000 and weighs 15kg; the gunner must also have control equipment, which costs Cr1,000 and weighs 1kg. A single gunner may control any number of launchers, but may fire only one mission at a time. Only one fire control system is necessary per gunner.
OK. Those are the actual rules as laid out in Striker. To convert to MegaTraveller, I'm going to key all the price and weight multiplier to the Mortar table.
Weight: Each tube weighs 1/25 (.04) times the weight of a mortar of the same diameter.
Cost: Each tube costs .5 times the price of a mortar of the same size.
Range: Ignore the range shifts. The original table had four times as many entries, so it only has an effect if you have a TL12+ system (in which case you would shift down 1, so that a 12cm short range rocket would have a range of 8km rather than 7km).
Cost of Ammunition: Any reasonable warhead should be available, and the cost would be 4/3 the mortar cost for short range, 8/3 for medium range and 4 times for long range.
DISPOSABLE ROCKET LAUNCHERS, GRENADE LAUNCHERS, AND OTHER INFANTRY HEAVY WEAPONS
Combat factors for all of these weapons are given in Book 1, but costs and weights are nowhere to be found. I could type up the list from Striker and post it, if anyone is interested. I think it would be much more likely that a character might have access to a rocket launcher than to a 16cm howitzer, so if one set of data was to be left out, I'd rather see it be the howitzer set. Better to include both, of course, but I mentioned the proofreading before...
ARTILLERY SET-UP TIME
Set-up times for artillery in MegaTraveller would agree closely with Striker if they were in thirty second combat turns instead of seconds.
MASS DRIVER GUNS
There is a major error in the translation of mass driver guns from Striker into MegaTraveller. The same calculations are used to figure rate of fire, but in Striker, it's rate of fire *per second*, and in MT, it's ROF *per minute*. I think the former is correct, and a multiplier factor of 60 should be noted in the margin of the book. There is one design in 101 Vehicles using an MD gun.
To be consistent, its ROF should be multiplied by 60.
SMOKE AND ANTI-LASER AEROSOLS
In Striker, dense smoke and anti-laser aerosols degraded laser performance for laser of TL8-12. TL13+ X-Ray lasers ignore these rules. A unit/vehicle in dense smoke or aerosol cloud may not be communicated with by laser, may not be targeted by a laser designator, and gain an armor factor versus laser weapons as follows:
Dense Smoke 25 vs TL7-8, 20 vs TL9-12
Anti-Laser Aerosol 50 vs TL7-8, 45 vs TL9-12
Prismatic Aerosol 80 vs TL7-12
It's not clear in the original how this was supposed to work in combination with a vehicles armor. Armor factors are not strictly additive. The annoyingly technical solution would be to find the weight multipliers for the two armor values (say 20 for the tank +25 for the smoke, 5.95 and 9.17 respectively), add them together (15.12) and find the armor value corresponding to that, rounding excess down (30, in this case). The quick and dirty solution would be to use the higher of the two.
A canister provides 4 turns (2 minutes in Striker) of coverage to a stationary object, and 1 turn to a moving object. Those laser sensors that are not described in the vehicle design system can automatically trigger a canister if a beam is sensed. Laser sensors detected a beam on an 8+ (2d6) at TL8, 7+ at TL9, and so forth down to 2+ and TL14+.
Since these canisters are small and cheap, and pretty effective against TL12-lasers, it should be noted that my military vehicle designs at those tech levels which rely on laser armament alone are probably less effective than I had considered when I did them.
RADAR
While I generally like the composite Active EMS system in MT, for certain applications not requiring great robustness, or requiring low cost, it would be nice if radar continued to improve beyond TL9. In Striker, Radar tables for up to TL13 are included, and could be used directly in MT. Also, radars of intermediate ranges (other than 5*10^n) are included, and would occasionally be useful.
That's it for right now.
Rob Dean
