Ship building: A plethora of rules.

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Michael Taylor:
The other thing about the T20 SDS is the formulas behind jump drive size and cost, and maneuver drive size and cost exactly equate to High Guard formulae. Which is good, because it ensures backward compatibility to some extent.

dont we have a plethora of plethoras here?

"...to some extent" being the key phrase. One big difference being in HG you only had to have a powerplant with the same numerical rating to run the drives and the EPs only had to be counted for computers, weapons, screens and agility. T20 requires the EPs to be counted against the drives as well as the rest. That's a wrinkle that makes it not quite backwards compatible in my books and so yes the two are different enough on just that issue, and there are others.

 

[aramis]

Computers are another major issue between HG and T20. T20 computer rules are MUCH more involved, but can result in very different choices.

Here was the compatibility goal of the playtesters, no matter what Hunter chose: to be able to seamlessly play HG ships in T20, while expanding the rules to include our pet additions. Hunter's was clearly computers... and I like what came out far better than the initial version I saw.

You can, just like MT, use HG designs as is without problem, other than they won't actually be reproduceable in the system. They are compatible result, not compatible design, relationships.

 

[Scarecrow]

Originally posted by robject:
Wow, you're building ships that require 50% fuel? Jump-5 critters? Sounds mil-spec...

Not literally, no.

All I meant was that in Book2 ships, there tends to be an unconvincingly large amount of the ship given over to fuel, usually more than there is habitable space and the engines are unconvincingly small.

I like ship designs where the engines (drives and powerplant) take up about 30-40% of the ship's volume (like say, Serenity, Galactica, Tantive IV, Naboo Royal Cruiser, Enterprise (any of them) or pretty much most Hollywood spaceships).
I also like fuel to be tacked on. It's nice to see fuel tanks in a deckplan design but they should take up no more than about 10-20% of the volume.

What I've taken to doing now is divide all fuel and drives down the middle and then create two honking great engine pods that have fuel scoops at the fore (on streamlined ships), followed by the fuel, then the Jumps and then the Maneuvres. It means I can tack huge engine pods on to the outside of the ship (even though only a tiny part of them is actual engine) and have most of the hull left for habitable areas (life support not withstanding).

I know High Guard pretty much halved the fuel requirements for ship design but it also added a lot of other rules too and I can't be bothered with it so I just stick to Book 2 and invent 'work arounds'

Crow

 

[Tobias]

Originally posted by Scarecrow:
I know High Guard pretty much halved the fuel requirements for ship design but it also added a lot of other rules too and I can't be bothered with it so I just stick to Book 2 and invent 'work arounds'

High Guard fuel requirements are no lower than Book 2's for most vessels, and even higher for some.
Any Jump-4 ship will require ~half of the total volume in fuel. That's just a basic fact in Traveller ship designs. It's not all that unreasonable either - "real" deep space ships would be mostly fuel tanks as well (though for different reasons.)

Regards,

Tobias

 

[aramis]

Here is where MT's feel is more Space Opera than the rest: Lowered JFuel, and not terribly bad PP Fuel, plus no MD fuels.

Serentiy uses no reaction mass of note.
SW ships use incredibly insanely high efficiency Ion systems, and are using whatever they happen to find nearby as fuel, including, if one can fit it in the chutes, the trash.
Star Trek ships are about 10% fuel, but if it goes, so does the whole ship.
Classic BG never really tells us how much, but what is in the prints indicates about 10-15% for shuttles and fighters, and probably twice that for the old girl herself... but we do know that the fuel breaks down in to really toxic stuff!

Traveller, even TNE, is unrealistically low fuel consumptions for the MD's... raning from none (CT, MT, Some T4, Some GT) to Way Low (HEPlaR, with it's high frac-C exhaust...).

Unless and until a non-conventional thruster (I assume MT's are actually using the local masses as their reaction mass...) is developed, spacecraft will need LOADS of reaction mass, say 50-90% or more. (When you count all the exoatmospheric stuff, most satelites run 40-70% for the booster plus sat...).

CT made big ships cheap on the power plant fuel... all Traveller is heavy on the J Fuel. All of them massively short the needed reaction masses either by gravitic means or by unrealisitically high reaction mass velocity.

 

[Tobias]

Originally posted by Aramis:
Here is where MT's feel is more Space Opera than the rest: Lowered JFuel, and not terribly bad PP Fuel, plus no MD fuels.

"Not terribly bad"? MT ships use PP fuel at a rate more than 6 times higher than CT! It is so much that many MT starships have to carry more fuel than an equivalent CT ship, even with the reduced jump fuel.

Regards,

Tobias

 

[aramis]

You just haven't made yous ship designs right. MT ships need two rates: full up and minimum volume.

Also, double check the erratta.

 

[mike wightman]

MT allows you to either build a big power plant but run it at a reduced rate most of the time to conserve fuel - combat eats into your fuel endurance though - or you can build different power plants to power different ship systems and keep most of them on "pilot light" setting

Either way you do it you can reduce the amount of fuel that is needed aboard a ship in MT.

 

[Tobias]

Originally posted by Aramis:
You just haven't made yous ship designs right. MT ships need two rates: full up and minimum volume.

The two rates in the MT rules, like 30/90, are for constant operation and 8-hour shifts, respectively. In the basic MT rules, there is no provision whatsoever to run a power plant at a reduced rate. You can wiggle around this by including multiple power plants, but this poses additional problems regarding start-up, and in any case it is of no benefit for ships whose maneuver drive consumes most of the power.

Also, double check the erratta.

Unless there are new and mysterious errata unknown to me, TL 13+ Fusion plant fuel consumption has not changed.

Regards,

Tobias

 

[mike wightman]

The idea to run power plants at reduced rates or to have multiple powe plants appears in an article in Challenge or Digest, I can't remember which at the moment.

In HG it was explicitely forbidden, in MT it wasn't mentioned, and thus allowed the game designers the wiggle room.

There is an example of a ship built with multiple power plants in MT Digest 3.

 

[mike wightman]

Found it.

It appears in the Questions and Answers section of Travellers' Digest issue 21.

It is an "advanced designer's trick", endorsed by Joe Fugate, to use booster powerplants of limited duration for things like weapons screens, agility, and the like.
It also mentions not providing environmental systems to fuel tankage amongst the others.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Ummm... we are talking about a fusion plant, right? I would think running it on a "pilot light" setting wouldn't be very likely given the efficiencies assumed in Traveller. I would think you would end up with OFF and ON.

 

[robject]

Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
IMHO, T5 should be based on a cleaned-up FF&S2, but with a large number of pre-designed modules that you can plug together to build a ship with.

It should also have software available to make life easier for you.

Andrew, I recall that there were some folks trying to clean up FFS2. Do you know who or where they are?

Wait... I'm going to move to the T5 forum and post that question. Take the temperature, so to speak.

 

[GypsyComet]

The goal should be the same as was attempted in T4: provide the spectrum from one parameter (displacement) to many. Where T4 failed was that the simple end was done first (derived from FF&S1) and in a hurry, then the successively more complex systems were done with a different set of assumptions, and in a hurry.

The lesson: Slow down, and develop the combat system and mind-numbingly complex end *first*. Use that to build the simpler versions, with the simplest version being the pre-built standard designs. Publish in about the same format as T4 did: a large set of pre-built designs and the simplest iteration in one book (or perhaps the middle incarnation, if the simplest is in the core rulebook), and the seperate book for the high end.

The goal is two or three books that are completely cross-compatible. Publish in whatever order makes marketing sense, but have them all in hand.

If I'm a brand new player, I should be able to look at a collection of pre-builts and a set of basic components that let me do the "if I take the J-1 out and put in a J-2, how much cargo am I losing?" calculation in about a minute of table consultation. No more.

A year later, that same player should be able to pull out the "Traveller's Guide to Gearheading" and figure out how many lockers to pull out of THE SAME SHIP to tweak the thrusters from 1.2G to 1.3G.

 

[GypsyComet]

Oh yes, and MIX THE TABLES INTO THE TEXT. One of the (Marc determined) biggest mistakes in FF&S2 was the "tables at the back" thing. High Guard and MegaTraveller are the UI style to aim for: explanatory text wrapped around heavily annotated tables.

 

[aramis]

As long as the "Pilot Light" setting is no smaller than the scale efficiency point, and the drive is twice that point, there is no logical dichotomy; it is simply two plants with one being a starter for the other...

Since the scale efficiency poinnt for MT Fusion is 15KL, you need at least a 30KL plant to do it, logically.

Lets say you need 20MW running power, off a TL15 base of (IIRC 2MW/KL) and 0.0015 KL/H... pardon me if I got the nummbers wrong... working from memory...
That becomes, assuming the x3 Scale efficiency for 15KL+, a minimum of 15x6x3 MW, and 15x0.0015x24x28 KL/Mo; 270MW, and 0.0225 KL/H = 672 x.0225 = 15.12 KL/Month of fuel. Hmm... that's pretty much HG rates... 1T PP, 1T fuel.

So, for smaller plants, fuel rates don't drop; just a hair past HG. What drops is Scale Efficiency... IIRC, it's at 8 KL that it's double; so a 14KL plant is only 14x6x2=168 MW, for 14.112 KL/Mo.

Of course, this also assumes the usual 28 day traveller month.


Consider this when you gripe about MT fuel rates: TNE changed hourly rates to larger units of time, but used the same table, other than that... and the same Jfuel rate; it adds massive maneuver fuel costs, too. T4 uses the same as TNE, save for J-Fuel.

 

[archhealer]

As for 'booster plants', I've done this with huge batteries/capacitors. They supply an extra # EP, but only for # time before they're drained. Works for us. I usually insist they take a long time to charge, because they need to be really beefy to supply that much power that fast.

 

[Scott Martin]

I think that I'd go for both Embeded tables *and* all of the tables as an addendum. FF&S-1 did have the nice tab colouring so that you could readily switch between sections without lots of page flipping, and this is something else that I'd push for in future traveller products, not just technical archietecture.

I suspect that one of the reasons for the "bring back the LBB's" is that they made it easy to find what you were looking for (hmm... world building is in book 3, and here it is) while the traveller book, while slick (in comparison to the LBB's) made it a lot harder to find the info you were looking for.

I certainly agree with the rest of GypsyComet's commentary, both with the layered approach and especially the proofreading time.

I hope never again to purchase a traveller product with duplicate tables in a data addendum, or worse duplicate tables *on the same page*


Scott Martin

 

[mike wightman]

I liked the way Starter Edition CT had a separate book for all the charts and tables.
Once you knew the rules well enough the charts book was all you needed to run the game.

A similar system for the technical architecture could work well - especially if supported as a PDF version.

 

[GypsyComet]

The booster plants idea could easily work as a single plant, but the point was to make more efficient use of fuel volumes, and with no real fractional output rules for powerplants, it is FAR easier to track as a group of seperate powerplants, both during design and during play ("Plants 2 and 3 online, Cap'n!"). It also makes for some interesting deckplans, as you don't have to handwave one large plant into two or more big lumps on the plans; it's how they were designed...