For many years I've gone about converting ships in the sub 5Kt range back to LBB2 build rules from High Guard rules (where possible), now due to some TL issues the odd ton hear and their is out, But I usually just re-fluff any discrepancies away as a different model. ATM I'm doing an audit of my old work. currently working my through Sups 7&9, anyone interested in the fruits of my labours should stay tuned as those that don't require House rules to allow some of their equipment will be posted soon, then I'll move on to those found in Adventures, before looping back for the House Rule ships.
Project LBB2 Conversion
- Thread starter Sir Brad
- Start date
Hi Brad. Didn't catch this note the first time 'round; took a spam message to get my attention. I think there are a number of people here who would be interested in seeing your progress, and of course may have any number of suggestions and questions about how you're doing it!
(And of course I have to plug Traveller5, which has a LBB2-based ship design system)
Not a plus as far as I'm concerned, Rob. Now, if you'd said that T5 had an HG-compatible Book 2 type ship design system, I'd have been intrigued.
Hans
Shocked, shocked I am!
As with all things T5, Marc took a Traveller system (here, LBB2) as a starting point, then morphed it significantly (LBB2 quickly becomes inadequate for anything beyond role-playing with small merchant ships). But the family resemblance is there.
Disclaimer I am not an impartial judge.
Onward then:
Well, the ship design system is compatible with HG in a number of ways. It has HG-compatible weapons, weapon emplacements, and defenses, for example. High Guard starships can use T5's starship combat system, with a few assumptions and a little tweaking (and it manages squadron and fleet combat better than HG).
The system also has aspects resembling MegaTraveller - sensors and power plants for example, and a wider range of starship technology (comfortably into the 20s), with more general-purpose add-on technology for higher TLs. And smallcraft design is part of vehicle design, rather than its own thing.
And it surpasses both of these in other ways, including weapon types, sensor types, and emplacements.
It does not surpass or even approach the flexibility (and complexity) of Fire, Fusion, and Steel, much to the chagrin of some.
But, what I don't know is how Marc is going to allow High Guard designs to be grandfathered into T5. Maybe he isn't. My thought is that it would be nice if they could be used, as-is. Maybe it's just a matter of explaining conversion in a few steps. I don't know.
Now, back to the topic
House ruling will probably be necessary once you get beyond the 1,000t mark or so. A few clever folks here have posted their "House LBB2" drive potential table extensions. Marc's extension, in brief, is to "double" drives for double the performance, and from there to theoretically allow parallel sets of drives for multiplied performance. The idea is nothing new -- others have done this as well.
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OK, I misspoke. I'm not wedded to High Guard. IMO it has some significant problems (the power plant fuel consumption rate is probably the one that bugs me the most). What I meant to say was that I really think that T5 ought to have an easy to use plug-and-play (if that's the expression I want) system akin to Book 2 and a more complicated system akin to HG, both of them with the kinks worked out, but more importantly mutually compatible. And then take those two systems and redo all the classic ship designs with these new (and hopefully improved) systems.
As for grandfathering -- please, please, please, PLEASE don't. Make sure the designs actually correspond to the system and that they make sense. For once, iron out those bugs ahead of time.
And one concept I'd love to see Marc getting behind is the notion that having two different versions of the same ship doesn't mean that they're actually different -- it just means that they are the same ship seen through two different slightly distorting lenses (Or, in some cases, severly distorting lenses -- I'm looking at you fuel-guzzling-power-plant and you 5%-fuel-per-parsec and you HePlAR-drive-instead-of-thrusters and you 20%-less-interior-space-for-streamlining, etc.
).Hans
The devil's in the details, as we say in the software world, but Marc's vision has mutual compatability and kink-free as requirements. Also, larger ships tend to be less plug-and-play, and more formulae based.
Let's talk about that, because that's a strong reaction. But then, when I think of Book 2 designs being grandfathered in to High Guard, I also have a similarly negative reaction, along the lines of "why didn't they just do <X, Y, Z> instead?".
So, perhaps I should say an upgrade path for High Guard designed ships. But if that, then it's not going into the core rules (nobody's told me it won't be there, but I can't see why it would be). Also, I expect the published Big Ships to be re-done in T5. And perhaps HG is not critically important; the ability to consistently and meaningfully represent the Traveller universe's starships is.
And one concept I'd love to see Marc getting behind is the notion that having two different versions of the same ship doesn't mean that they're actually different -- it just means that they are the same ship seen through two different slightly distorting lenses (Or, in some cases, severly distorting lenses -- I'm looking at you fuel-guzzling-power-plant and you 5%-fuel-per-parsec and you HePlAR-drive-instead-of-thrusters and you 20%-less-interior-space-for-streamlining, etc.
I don't grok. Can you explain this a different way? Do you mean "this ship, when looked at thru the OTU lens, means X, while if viewed thru the 2300AD lens means Y, and when viewed thru the TNE lens means Z"?
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Tekrat04
SOC-11
I'll echo that sentiment.
Yes it's a strong negetive reaction, but for thoes of us who can look at the numbers and actually understand what they mean, the starship design system was broken since day one. From LLB2 to MGT-HG, it's all garbage in garbage out.
Too many of the numbers were just pulled out of hat without thinking it throught. The fuel requirement or the 1 to 1 strorage cost for small craft and cargo comes to mind here.
There is also too many expectation of stealing from Peter to pay Paul in the system. An example of this is the corridors, the volume that they occupy is either taken from the different sub-systems (bridge, stateroom, etc...) or added to the total volume of the hull. Either way it make the numbers totaly meaningless.
For me the design of a starship has four basic elements to it, the narration, the statistic, the exterior layout and the interior layout. Each of these elements need to support and reinforce the others, after all the are describing the same ship. No starship in the entire history of Traveller has achive this. The starship design system is squarely to blame for this.
Fixing the problems and making backward compatible cannot be done.
It has to do with my belief about the most effective way to work a shared universe (Shared in the sense that multiple people work on it and have to take each other's work into account). It really isn't useful to make a distinction between the CT Universe and the MT Universe and the TNE Universe, etc. It doesn't really help to point out that when Leviathan was written back in 1980, no one knew that the Outrim Void had been crisscrossed by Scouts, Aslans, merchants, Floriani, and who knows who else for seven centuries, making it entirely reasonable to send an exploratory vessel off into the unknown Void as of Year 1107. Because now, 30 years later, we DO know that, and logically that invalidates a lot of Leviathan and makes it unusable for anyone who wants to stick to the OTU of today. (Note that I'm not saying it makes Leviathan a bad adventure; as you know, I wrote up a version for JTAS Online that backdated it to Year 400, and great fun I had doing it too).
(Granted, there's always the option of simply ignoring any inconvenient discrepancies. I know that there are people who think that's a perfectly viable option. All I can say is that I just don't get it.)
Anyway, I feel strongly that the best way to go about it is to say that there is one, and only one, OTU and that any discrepancies are the result of errors (which can be fixed) and not that there are several different universes with differing physical laws.
So when The Kinunir (using Book 2 design) tells us that the Kinunir is a 1200T design and Fighting Ships (using HG) tells us that it is a 1250T design, it doesn't mean that they were 1200T in 1105 and had 50T added at some point. It means that "in reality" they were always 1250T and The Kinunir got it wrong. Even if it wasn't wrong back when it was originally written. And when CT tells us that a Jump-4 ship uses 40% of its volume on jump fuel and MT tells us that the very same class of ship uses 25%, one of the two are just plain wrong. And if an MT adventure had featured a 4J4 ship, that adventure would never had taken place in the OTU, because you can't build 3J4 ships in the OTU and never could.
So what I mean is that "this ship, when described in CT, was said to devote 4T to power plant fuel, while in MT is was said to use 25% for jump fuel, and in TNE was said to use HEpLAr drive, but in "reality" it actually has neglible power plant fuel tankage, 40% jump fuel, and thrusters".
Or whatever you decide is the "truth". As I've said before, naturally I'd prefer that discrepancies be resolved the way I think they ought to be resolved, but I'd much, much rather they be resolved someone else's way than not resolved. In many cases there are lots of possible truths, but only one of each can be true in any single universe.
Above all, don't change "reality" just to meet new rules; only change it if there's a good reason to retcon "reality". If there isn't take another look at that rule instead.
Hans
Well, it sounds to me like you're just explaining how rules get overruled, so to speak, and how much weight specific later rules may have on specific former rules, based on gameplay and mechanic-related concerns, for example, but possibly on other criteria as well. Fair enough.
The problem with Hans' approach is that, for someone using the outlier systems, their universe is that game's setting, not the "meta-settig" OTU.
When I run MT, it doesn't matter that, in CT, TNE, T20, and T4, tonnage is Jn*10%... because when I run MT, anything that contradicts isn't part of the MTU, where fuel is (Jn+1)*5%. Likewise, when I run T20, no Bk2 designs exist; T20 doesn't grandfather them in, and Hunter, Myself, Dr. Skull, and some the rest of the lead playtesters redesigned all of the classics from scratch in T20 terms.
In game terms, grandfathering is simply bad, period.
Perhaps, from Hans' game-system-agnostic view, the meta-setting described differently by the various editions exists, but to me, it's currently 12 distinct variant settings (CT77-80-NoHG, CT81-on-NoHG, CT+HG, MT, TNE, T4, T20, GT, GTIW, HT, T5, MGT), each closely similar, but each different. CT+HG is close enough to MT's that I don't have a problem mixing and matching those two, but TNE is a different enough set of rules, and different enough paradigm set that it doesn't feel like the same universe when played. Despite much of the history being shared.
When I run MT, it doesn't matter that, in CT, TNE, T20, and T4, tonnage is Jn*10%... because when I run MT, anything that contradicts isn't part of the MTU, where fuel is (Jn+1)*5%. Likewise, when I run T20, no Bk2 designs exist; T20 doesn't grandfather them in, and Hunter, Myself, Dr. Skull, and some the rest of the lead playtesters redesigned all of the classics from scratch in T20 terms.
In game terms, grandfathering is simply bad, period.
Perhaps, from Hans' game-system-agnostic view, the meta-setting described differently by the various editions exists, but to me, it's currently 12 distinct variant settings (CT77-80-NoHG, CT81-on-NoHG, CT+HG, MT, TNE, T4, T20, GT, GTIW, HT, T5, MGT), each closely similar, but each different. CT+HG is close enough to MT's that I don't have a problem mixing and matching those two, but TNE is a different enough set of rules, and different enough paradigm set that it doesn't feel like the same universe when played. Despite much of the history being shared.
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