Ship Building IYTU

[mark_rotteveel]

Cool poll sir. Generally speaking, I tend to use the standard ships for the military stuff, and custom build the ship for the party.

It's usually about 200T or 300T, probably about 45 years old, and held together with Duct tape and toothpicks

We normally keep the ships small so that we don't have to have NPC's as crew - we have had a couple of characters each at some stages, but usually you'll play a stay-on-board navy type, and a get-your-feet-dirty Army/Marine type. We've found that works well.

 

[far-trader]

Thank you Rotters and a belated welcome aboard in case I missed it earlier. Glad you popped in and played, and everyone else too.

I like the small(er) ship universe too for the PC's and I agree any ship a bunch of border-line thieves is likely to lay hands on is going to be held together by the handyman's secret weapon, DuctTape(tm).

 

[far-trader]

Poll Summary

I should have done this at 50 votes but I really didn't think it'd have this much interest when I posted the poll. Thank you everyone for taking the time to participate, and by all means keep voting if you come along after this, I'm glad I decided to keep it an open ended poll.

So lets see what we have at 55 votes...

The majority of those voting, 58%, build more than 7 pesonal designs. No real surprise, once you get started you're likely hooked.

Happily, to me anyway, the majority again like to build for the small ship (PC involved imo) universe with 65% doing small starships of 100T to 999T.

Somewhat surprising the majority, at 53%, don't apply any budget considerations. Interesting and understandable but not how I'd have thought or wished it.

And finally the TL curve is coming out quite nice. A decent roll up to TL12 and slower roll out to TL14 before the not unexpected spike at TL15.

Once again thank you all, its been fun

 

[nobby-w]

Lots and lots ...

MTU is set in a historic era - collapse of the Rule of Man. For that I re-did pretty much every ship in the 'verse as I needed an economy of TL10-12 ships.

Quite interesting in this setting is that you always have to make compromises - you can't produce a ship that does everything in the way you can at TL15. You can have speed, armour or firepower - in fact, you often just get good at one and OK at one of the others.

I did a couple of TL12 capital ships - a 30kt-ish cruiser with a particle accelerator and a 55kt heavy cruiser with a big meson gun. Both ships had crap speed (agility 2) and mediocre armour (about factor 3-4). Neither had fighter squadrons.¹ Funnily enough, I did a TL11 J2 capital ship as an example of a Vilani cruiser from the Terran wars era. This actually worked better as it could still carry a big particle accelerator and had better agility than the J3 Terran ships, although still fairly low at agility-3. However, it had good weapons and armour due to having less hull percentage committed to jump fuel.

The upshot of this is that capital ships are little more than lumbering gun platforms IMTU.² I pimped out small-midrange weapons (2-3t laser barbettes that improved battery factor and damage and upgraded bay weapons a bit), meaning you could do smaller 1-5kt ships that were actually some use in a battle.

¹You would never do a battlecruiser with a fighter squadron in TCS as it's much more efficient to carry it around in a separate ship that doesn't have the baggage of the armour and power plant for agility.
²Still, you wouldn't want to get in range of their main armament. They're still useful in planetary assaults and defences, If you bring them in-system they will destroy smaller craft quickly, but you can't use them in a pursuit role.

 

[flykiller]

changed my vote to "more". have quite a stable now.

 

[aramis]

My last ATU has 9 designs in the player's guide.

I semi-built 5 more that didn't have players looking at specs. 1 was an aggressor unit, while the rest were incomplete, data filled in as needed.

 

[ovka]

I would prefer to use someone else's statted-out ships.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka

 

[robject]

If you include re-designing existing designs for other Traveller rulesets (CT => T5 or MgT), then around a hundred.

 

[warwizard]

Seeing as I've been a gearhead for 38 years off and on, I have done many hundreds of designs in multiple rule sets starting with book 2 '77. And I've usually approached it from a war gaming prospective. Or I have some minimum specification and see if I can meet the chosen design parameters, such as what is the cheapest price for a J1 capable ship that can carry 300+ tons of vacuum safe cargo if you use planetoid hull and strap on cargo modules and keep the crew at 1 person. (only needs to meet 1g without the cargo) + use the money exchange rates given many places so you build the hull at TL 8 B port, import the tl 9 jump drive from that class A 1 parsec away buy a pair of surplus scout ship power plants, and so on. I find that to be an interesting challenge, but a terrible ship for adventuring, Single half stateroom, no comforts like environmental gravity, food is MRE like, eaten in the airlock / fresher that is the only safe ish place to take off the vacuum suit due to the planetoid hull leaking air, the player feels like he is a Russian cosmonaut in a Russian built ship, banging on pipes to break up the ice inside cause he does not have an air dryer for his environmental plant.

 

[SanDragon]

Makes all the ships I designed for my for possible Traveller universe sound positively posh.

Using MegaTraveller with Fire Fusion and Steel from TNE, I bashed together 13 ships with stutterwarp drives.

I wanted FAST ships!

 

[Ulsyus]

With great ship-design tools comes great responsibility to build... or something like that.

There's a great design spreadsheet for T5 1.0 here that can lead to many ship designs being run off. Tons of fun!

 

[Ran Targas]

Ship building is my favorite part of solo Trav ... And it's a great way to focus on something completely abstract and escape RL for a bit.

 

[aramis]

Ship building is my favorite part of solo Trav ... And it's a great way to focus on something completely abstract and escape RL for a bit.

Mine too. It's about the only thing in MGT2 I like...

 

[mike wightman]

You like MgT High Guard 2?

 

[LeperColony]

Personally, I've never had the interest in designing ships (or vehicles or weapons or...). I like that other people do it, and freely borrow/copy from what's out there, and I'll also use a good deal of handwavium if it's purely a matter of NPC capabilities.

 

[aramis]

You like MgT High Guard 2?

I like the design mechanics of the last draft I read.

 

[Ex_Pendable]

Designing ships gives you the opportunity to rethink how people do things.

 

[Straybow]

If you scrap Traveller straight-jackets (tonnage for bridge, staterooms, no steerage options, etc) you have to re-design them all

 

[Winged Cat]

Designing ships gives you the opportunity to rethink how people do things.

Indeed. I have been designing a series of ships (at least 8, so "More" in the poll) intended for use in a Traveller campaign I am in - but then I started getting more ideas. I am currently working on a set of 26 (one for each letter of the alphabet) ship designs (technically a bit more, since a few of them have specialized smallcraft intended for use with the main ship), many of them being approaches or functions that do not seem well addressed by existing ship designs.

(I intend to post them all over in Deckplans and/or The Fleet once I have them all ready. That will be a few weeks.)

 

[Whipsnade]

... many of them being approaches or functions that do not seem well addressed by existing ship designs.

I'm certain I'm not the only one who would love to read a bit more about the approaches and functions existing designs don't address too well.

You needn't post deckplans or full designs, just something along the lines of "This is an X dTons design which does Y because of Z".