Ship Design Systems

[aramis]

Scott elloquently states some of my complaints about the multi-staged design sequence ideas.

Quite simply put, an FF&S design is NOT equal to a BL design, nor an SSDS design. WHy? because these design systems have reduced the options drastically.

Personally, I'd rather see less granular design sequence. I don't mind the mass/volumme/power/cost categories, but to be honest, if I'm working in units where I need more than one decimal place, It's becoming too much hassle.

Further, most of my designing is done in-session. This means that MT & TNE are to complex for what I need. I'd love to see the option-sets of FF&S(1&2) in a granularity comparable to HG & T20. Quite honestly, building UP from the detailed won't happen unless the design team does so; even then, it's not likely to be inclusive.

 

[GypsyComet]

Looking down the road at the next edition is always a problem, but for Traveller I'm thinking it's the usual problem in reverse at this point. Unless someone comes along with another OGL bandwagon big enough for everyone to jump on, I just don't see the RPG environment being condusive to anything beyond the GT/T20/T5/CTr situation we have now. The other two companies in the business of multi-genre RPGs are not big on licenses these days (or ever, in the case of Hero) and/or are spectacularly unsuited to Traveller (yes, Rifts:Trav *would* be worse than anything said about T20).

As such, an FF&S3 project can, I think, afford to not worry about looking beyond T5. If playtest continues too long, FF&S3 may not even need to worry about T5, as it would/could set the stage for T5 instead of the other way around.

As for the different power paradigms you mention above, it may be possible to divorce MT/Striker from their B2/HG associations, as the older systems don't quote megawatt ratings. That said, I'd like to come up with an in-game justification for the two order of magnitude change in power requirements and the related fuel requirements. Sadly, we can't treat MT design as the abberation it was, unless we are willing to *completely replace* its design system as part of FF&S3. This doesn't answer existing MT designs unless an easy conversion is found, but I think that can be done.

One thing the book will need to do is akin to GTs "Designer's Notes" sidebars. Particularly if the book advocates, for example, back-revising MT power needs down by two orders of magnitude. Stepping back and telling the MT-favoring reader why we did this and how the change won't affect all his previous work or the jillions of designs on the web is VITAL to getting him to buy and accept the book.

 

[Scott Martin]

Hi Aramis

I can give you ship % used for power and maneuver drives for 1 to 6 G's at each tech level (10 to 15) along with costs and fuel requirements. if you are using Thruster Plates, then I believe that the range is tech 12-15 only. These would all be based on mass at ~10T/14m^3. Jump drives are still based on % volume, so that's easy as well.Since many of the "official" ships for TNE used this assumption, and were up to 50% off, this is probably "close enough for Canon". This will give you something *very* close to HG for fast design. My plan to include all of the "ancillary" components for weaponry (including power plants etc) should allow a fast "snap in" for weapons along the lines of LBB-2.

If you tell me what you want the format to look like, this is a fairly trivial thing to do, but one of my aggravations with T4 is that they changed the presentation to be more "Physics Correct" and made it more difficult for folks familiar with the *last* iteration to figure out what was actually in the tables.

Gypsy Comet:

As for MT, I confess that this is the system that I turned by back on: I looked at COaACC, rolled my eyes and returned to running my toy bots (um I mean BattleTech) campaign. Using something like FF&S as a design sequence pretty much resigns you to dumping CT and MT designs anyway, or completely rewriting them anyway. If you *really* need a fudge because the MT power plant generation numbers are WAY off, you can use the "power generated vs usable power" argument. I figure that most nuclear reactors in space waste the vast majority of their power on cooling / radiation to keep the vessel that they are installed in from melting. Your power plant may *generate* 200 GW, but a very small portion of that is likely to be usable electrical power. If you do this, then there should be no effect at all to MT designs (other than noting that the "power" from power plants was listed in "generated" not "usable" in MT with the appropriate Mea Culpa) This also "fixes" the fact that HEPLAR produces a couple of orders of magnitude more thrust than the energy put into it, since you are using the exhaust stream to dump heat. This will provide more effective power than if you were using an "indirect" propulsion (like Ion) and you probably don't care too much about "cooling" your exhaust plume.

As for the MW per EP problem, the 250 MW/EP first appeared in Striker, so I'm afraid that it's "Canon" in the LBB era...

Scott (brain full of useless trivia) Martin

 

[GypsyComet]

Originally posted by Scott Martin:

As for the MW per EP problem, the 250 MW/EP first appeared in Striker, so I'm afraid that it's "Canon" in the LBB era...

It was stated as an "approximation" in a set of "guidelines" to allow ships to interact with Striker combat. This was then made gospel by the folks who did the vehicle system for MT. That would be DGP, who apparently didn't think twice about the fact that these assumptions made all the standard ships and their related economics non-viable below TL15.

Of all the editions ship design processes, MT's is among the best presented, but it is still the one I'd ignore in the face of conflicting information.

 

[mike wightman]

HEPLaR can ce converted to High Guard numbers.

A rough conversion from FF&S looks like this:

for a 100t ship to accelerate at 1G requires a HEPlaR drive that takes up 0.5t, costs MCr 0.075, requires 0.5EP, and uses 1 ton of fuel per hour.
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> Drive number
1 2 3 4 5 6
HEPlaR 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0</pre>[/QUOTE]cost: MCr0.15 per ton of drive, EPs equal to drive tonnage are required, fuel equal to drive tonnage x 2 is required for 1 hour of operation.


I think the cost should probably be increased, and another thing to consider is if a ship should be armoured to an AR equal to the HEPlaR G rating, or some multiple of it.

Note, to get the numbers above I've assumed a ship density of 15 tonnes per displacement ton, which is the maximum FF&S allows before you have to calculate thrust/mass etc. etc. Plus the numbers came out quite nicely

 

[aramis]

I like it, Sigg. Nice work.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by GypsyComet:
As noted by Mr.-voiced-by-Sebastion-Cabot, such a project needs to be either intimately connected to T5, OR be universal enough to cover AT LEAST all the technology and options that have been considered Canon across the editions.

Which probably means taking the MT charts as the starting point since it is the most comprehensive list of ship tech across the TL scale.

This means, most obviously, providing HEPlaR and Thrusters, 1-ton "hull wart" turrets and TNE's "cans", CG that will allow *anything* to land given enough time, and an explanation, however dangerous, for why TNE could fit a useful jump drive into hulls smaller than 100 tons.

HEPLaR can ce converted to High Guard numbers from FF&S.

A rough conversion from FF&S looks like this:

for a 100t ship to accelerate at 1G requires a HEPlaR drive that takes up 0.5t, costs MCr 0.075, requires 0.5EP, and uses 1 ton of fuel per hour.
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> Drive number
1 2 3 4 5 6
HEPlaR 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0</pre>[/QUOTE]cost: MCr0.15 per ton of drive, EPs equal to drive tonnage are required, fuel equal to drive tonnage x 2 is required for 1 hour of operation.

For thrusters you just use the High Guard numbers.

Hull wart turrets - 1 and 2 tons from High Guard - restricted by hardpoint rule, 3t+ "cans", barbettes and the like are not restricted to hardpoint rule but are only available to the military.

The 1248 sourcebook explains jump torpedos and TNE jump small craft.

Much harder than *designing* these things would be the other holy grail of this project: back-processing designs from this project into the edition of the user's choice. I think it *can* be done, but not in any kind of hurry.

Redesigning TNE ships to work in T20 or High Guard is quite fun

It's often little rules that cause the most problem - the T20 small craft bridge for example.

Another problem is to have a unified way to blow all this lot up - the combat system influences design I find.

 

[robject]

Originally posted by Shere Khan:
any rules that do not provide for any and every form of Traveller, from LBB's and MT, through TNE, T4 and Gurps will simply fragment the fanbase further. [...]

Sometimes I worry about that, too. I think originally FFS2 was sort of unconsciously intended to merge TNE back into the CT universe.

Originally posted by GypsyComet:
I've said so elsewhere, but the goal that T4's design systems were aimed at is probably the ideal.

Three levels, mapping approximately to Book 2 (simple components), somewhere in the HG-to-MT range (more components with some things like drives going "custom", plus non-drive power considerations and mass are added), and FF&S/Striker (anything that can reasonably be customized has a design sequence).

Originally posted by Scott Martin:
Hey Gypsy Comet

The other issue is the chicken - egg problem.

Unless the T5 design team puts in a herculean effort to build an enormous set of components for the "Book2/Book5" analogue, then the "base edition" with simple components will be missing a LOT of pieces.

I know what GypsyComet means. A vast array of plug-and-play components, LBB2-fashion, with a robust ship design system, and finally detailed component design rules for everything.

I suspect that FFS-level design doesn't have to totally glaze the eyes over, and that its starship design rules are actually quite similar to High Guard. In other words, HG is just a small subset of something FFS-like.

Thus, I think all that's needed is a detailed design level, plus an MT-sized library of plug-and-play components.

Originally posted by Scott Martin:

If T5 is backwards compatible, then I suspect that there are a lot of folks out there who would be delighted to have their favorite setting / equipment / navy become "Canon" in exchange for permission to use said setting / hardware in a (for profit) product. This immediately gives whoever is handling the Traveller "brand" (presumably Marc Miller) access to tens of person years of development and playtesting, for minimal cost.

If a design system is done right, then building components/equipment with it can become a matter of prestige. Perhaps in the same way people post their starship designs on the web.

At one time, Greg Svenson (Svenson Small Craft, Ltd) designed some supply shuttles for me. It was very helpful, and I gave him credit in my campaign notes. So even the current systems have an element of this. I'd love to see T5 capitalize on that.

As Sigg and others have noted in many places here on COTI, the combat rules have a large bearing on what ship design looks like. Therefore, how combat works (personal as well as space) also informs the level of detail of a design system.


In an unrelated matter:

Originally posted by Shere Khan:

There are other problems with the OTU, IMHO, but they are too far entrenched to do anything about (UWP's)

Marc's looking for suggested corrections to specific UWPs. If you're the type who can't stand some of the howling errors there, offering to lend a hand in that arena would probably be very helpful to Traveller in general.

 

[Scott Martin]

Hi Sigg

My Bad, I thought that Striker (the original) conversions were "Canon". I take it that Striker was used as the bottom layer for MT? This would cvertainly explain the issues that MT had back-integrating with the rest of the Traveller universe.

There will still be significant issues integrating TNE and on with CT and MT: the actual specs for thruster plates in T4 are *much* more efficient than those in HG (same power requirements, if HEPLAR is 0.5 EP/100T/G, but mass of 1% per G instead of the 2% to 17%)

Anyway, nice to see that ther is at least a *plan* for how this will integrate, and the fact that folks arethinking in terms not only of the design, but how the specs need to integrate into the system, because neither can exist in isolation.

Scott Martin

 

[robject]

Scott, your inputs here are appreciated.

 

[GypsyComet]

Originally posted by Scott Martin:
I take it that Striker was used as the bottom layer for MT? This would cvertainly explain the issues that MT had back-integrating with the rest of the Traveller universe.

Yup. The lasers, CPR guns, and Plasma/Fusion guns in MT are all readily back-engineered using Striker, and the powerplant scale efficiencies and power requirements for ship-scale weapons started with Striker. Within the framework of Striker, they work.

The fault lays with not taking the Fusion scale efficiencies one or two steps further, with mapping fuel usage as linear for all scales, and by putting a very high power requirement on Thrusters. As such, any MT ship's powerplant requirement is 90+% determined once you have Thrusters and weapons defined. This meant that powerplants and the related fuel are strongly dependent on weapon load, making easy retrofits (well, easy under B2 or HG) either impossible or an expensive waste of power capacity.

While this isn't a bad thing in itself, the Striker fuel efficiencies simply don't map to Book 2 or HG, which are rather apparently more efficient. The effect was that powerplant fuel was suddenly a MUCH larger volume requirement than before. To *try* to recover the CT designs, the jump fuel requirement was hacked.

While this mostly worked, it was calibrated at the wrong TL. For whatever reason, MT's workarounds were calibrated assuming standard ships were built at TL15, despite statements in CT that most commercial and civilian ships were built around TL12 or so. As such, MT placed many of the things associated with the standard CT depiction of starships at TL14 or 15, making older ships almost cripples by comparison, and rendering anything below TL15 unsuitable for commerce under the standard model. With commercial ships just barely working at TL15, the military designs were pretty much hopeless.

Add to this the straightjacket of the provided designs on top of similar thought in HG (which, to be fair, lacked the details to think outside the box), and it took most of the MT period before someone had the "partial powerplants" epiphany that would allow the high-end HG warships AND the lower end merchants to function again.

 

[robject]

Thanks GypsyComet! Things that make you go "hmmmm".

...what's the "partial powerplants" thing? Running them at reduced levels? Assuming the numbers were for "100% utilization all the time", and back-calculating the average usage?

 

[daryen]

The "partial powerplant" is where you have two powerplants. The first has fuel for the full 28/30 days and runs (primarily) the thrusters and computers. (Basically, everything but weapons.) You then have a second power plant with fuel for only 2 or 3 days that powers the weapons.

Since you aren't going to be using the weapons continuously, you only need their availability for a fraction of the time. 2 or 3 days should be more than sufficient.

 

[far-trader]

Given the life expectancy of combat ships 2 or 3 hours of weapon's (and agility of course) power would be more than enough for any single encounter. I have designed like this but ignored fuel, taking it from the basic tankage and just reducing total endurance by the run-time of the extra power plant(s). It's easier to calculate (and makes some sense*) if the extra power plant(s) are a multiple of the standard one.

* That way they can be switched to the main role if the primary is damaged and/or parts can be easily swapped for emergency repairs.

 

[robject]

Clever! So really, weapons should come with their own power plants -- i.e. take up a little more volume and cost a little bit more, and have some general concept of "running out of ammo" when run with one of those rare "no refuel" scenarios.

 

[aramis]

I agree that the calibration is wrong...

But the basic methodologies are well done.

Personally Things I'd like to see:
1: MT-style Scale Efficiencies
2: HG-level detail
3: TNE style bridges and workstations.
4: wider range of weapon sizes
5: MT-style pen/AV/DP system (for scaling and consolidation purposes)
6: Wide range of alternate technologies and high technologies.
7: no more than one decimal place.

 

[GypsyComet]

One of the reasons I rather like TNE's turret cans and "more realistic" (your prefered flavor may vary) power requirements was that a completely self-contained weapon was quite possible: Weapon, controls, "hand-off" sensors, power, and fuel all in that 3 or 5 ton can.

 

[GypsyComet]

Originally posted by Aramis:
I agree that the calibration is wrong...

But the basic methodologies are well done.

Personally Things I'd like to see:
1: MT-style Scale Efficiencies
2: HG-level detail
3: TNE style bridges and workstations.
4: wider range of weapon sizes
5: MT-style pen/AV/DP system (for scaling and consolidation purposes)
6: Wide range of alternate technologies and high technologies.
7: no more than one decimal place.

(7) is easy at the lowest complexity level, a little tougher in the middle, and impractical to many avowed gearheads at the upper level.

(6) is icing after the Canon stuff, but worth doing.

(5) either MT or TNE will do for this, as they run the gamut of scales. I'm less thrilled by MT's as it is a log scale that is (once again) inherited from Striker. That said, it does provide better granularity than HG ("What's you ship's armor?" "Uh, ONE.")

(4) are we just talking ships here? If we try to include both MT and TNE lasers, then ship weapons would range from 10cm lensed lasers to tens of meters of PA "barrel".

(3) I agree here, though a sidebar mapping this to MT's CP would be called for. That said, the lowest level of complexity could also return to the old 20 ton standard, overtly treated like T20 does it: controls plus anything else otherwise abstracted out. It's the overhead charge related to being a spacegoing vessel, and is enough for some folks. The idea would be to use that at the lowest level and use the middle level as the intro point for workstations, AG/CG, life support, airlocks, etc. The trade-off would be a slight price break for the drop-in, since it would take a bit more space than going "custom" with the components. Civie ships typically go for the drop-in, while military designs spec such things "per chair". And again, the two levels would be interchangeable as far as the user is concerned.

(2) HG complexity would sit right between the two lower levels that I'm thinking of, and would involve mixing the two to some extent (as noted above). As this is part of my ideal result, that shouldn't be a problem.

(1) in that powerplants get more size efficient, if not fuel efficient, as volume increases? Or something else? I'd rather calibrate to TNE/T4 power numbers, which would make scale efficiency MUCH less necessary at the starship level.

 

[aramis]

Gypsy,

TNE is not scaleable in the same sense as MT is. MT combat is (excluding the HG crap) capable of both combined units and of resolving the effects of small arms upon ships, and ships weapons on infantry.

TNE has 2 different "Penetration" rating systems, and they aren't easily interchanged.

As for CP, drop it... it's a waste of time. TNE's crewstations for requisite crew was far simpler, and worked quite well.

As for the upper level: many are already moving to GURPS, why not let them? of the traveller players I've recruited in the last decade (more than a dozen), NONE of them are even slightly interested in gearheading. Other Ref's I've known have found the same thing: Gearheading is no longer a draw. It's a draw for the old guard, and a possible sliver of the market...

 

[Ptah]

Originally posted by Aramis:
I agree that the calibration is wrong...

But the basic methodologies are well done.

Personally Things I'd like to see:
1: MT-style Scale Efficiencies
2: HG-level detail
3: TNE style bridges and workstations.
4: wider range of weapon sizes
5: MT-style pen/AV/DP system (for scaling and consolidation purposes)
6: Wide range of alternate technologies and high technologies.
7: no more than one decimal place.

These are many of the things I'd like to see as well. A couple of comments.

(6) IMHO implementation of (6) has the potential to expand the market for T5 beyond the core fan-base (e.g., the loyal citizens of CotI ). Specifically, I can see a design system that would allow players interested in the Sci-Fi universes of Battlestar Galactica, Babylon-5 and Star Wars to recreate their favorite ships. The players, e.g., of the OOP Babylon-5 Wars might be enticed to try T5 if it could simulate their favored setting.

(7) Key to entice non-gearheads or those gearheads with little time on their hands. Alternatively, the game could ship with a spreadsheet for ship design that handles all the math allowing the player to focus on design instead of punching numbers in a calculator.

If putting together a wish list, I'd also like to see (8) alternate weapon effectiveness statistics. For example, one group of statistics might provide missiles that are highly effective, favoring carrier based fleets; another where defensive systems dominate, favoring large capital ship based fleets. These might be presented as system A, system B, etc. with notes on which type of ship combat they reflect. Again, part of the idea is to draw in players of other Sci-Fi settings and provide flexibility. On the business front, such an approach might provide for a greater range of follow-on products, e.g., "Ships for Star Carrier System" etc. analogous to the oft reviled but I beleive profitable "splat-book" approach.