AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Of course we are, it's called engineering.
The result of thousands of munchkins, munchkinising for decades:
Why would we design inefficient machines?
"Simplify, then add lightness.”
The Bridge, Ship Size, and Hull Size
- Thread starter robject
- Start date
The result of thousands of munchkins, munchkinising for decades:
Why would we design inefficient machines?
"Simplify, then add lightness.”
This isn’t engineering, it’s wordplay to get a desired result without actual engineering or consequences.Of course we are, it's called engineering.
The result of thousands of munchkins, munchkinising for decades:
Why would we design inefficient machines?
"Simplify, then add lightness.”
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Agreed.
Obviously† the ship does not change, either armour or bridge, just because you add an external tank, as all (two) published designs confirm.
† For some value of obvious.
I agree with this point. Absolute adherence to the rules-as-written can still enable local optimums within the rule set that range from irrational to nonsensical when considered as descriptions of actual (in-universe fictional) starships.
My favorite build in that genre was a 100Td ship with 900Td of drop tanks (it's a fragile J1/1G refueling tanker). 1000Td all-up, one-man crew despite the tonnage and having 50Td of drives. Yeah, stand back and squint and it maybe kinda works... but in almost any other ship, 50Td of drives would require 2 engineers while this one has none, without any justification besides "the rules say it doesn't need them".
Then you've got the single invincible rock fighter that can provide screening for an entire battlefleet against another battlefleet. At the time, the rules said it worked, but in "reality" it's bonkers.
Stuff like that. The difference between optimizing and munchkin-ing is that the latter exploits the points where the rules don't describe (in-universe) "reality" well.
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Straybow
SOC-14 1K
I dunno that an ad hoc rule in an adventure counts as a general rule.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
As a general rule I would agree with you, but A5 is TCS. Drop tanks are described in the section:
It's not an ad-hoc comment, it's official rules.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
RAW is what we have. You are just adding unwritten house-rules based on your idea of what the OTU should have been.
Write silly rules, get silly results. If ships of less than 200 Dt don't require crew for some arcane reasons probably involving the Imperial Ministry of Trade and the Scout Service saying "We can't be bothered by red tape", you can count on people taking advantage. Most of current engineering is about fulfilling silly requirement specs and legal obligations, so it's not so different... E.g. in Sweden you find a lot of two-story buildings, because for a long time only three-story buildings required elevators, so were much more expensive to build. That is not "how 'reality' works", that's engineers adjusting to silly rules, in reality.
If they actually meant that small Scout ships don't require full crews, they should have said so... They weren't shy of saying that when it came to unrefined fuel. There is no obvious technical reason (that I can find) 199 Dt ships require less crew than 200 Dt ships, or even less than 201 Dt ships.
It's just as much of an exploit to not require a medic on a 200 Dt ship, just because they are only required on ships of greater than 200 Dt, e.g. 200.001 Dt. Somehow most people don't seem to have any problem with that...
A lot of early CT fluff texts describes ship operating without any crew at all, under full computer control, e.g. A1, A4, and S7, so "in 'reality'" crews seems to be more of a convenience than a necessity.
Yet the rules very specifically say that's the way it works. Note, there are no "invincible" ships in LBB5, you just forgot to bring a spinal to a spinal-fight... (And fighters can't be rocks.)
What is the definition of the OTU, the rules or an ad-hoc comment in a fluff text? I go with the rules first. If you prefer some set of vaguely-defined unwritten house-rules instead, good for you.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
We don't have insurance, but I suspect you need Imperium certification to dock at an Imperium run starport.
There were a few other instances of "shy about saying so" in the rules. The Standard Hulls rule in LBB2 is one such -- they wanted to incentivize players who were building customized ships to select from a set with constrained performance, and in many cases the the incentive was hidden by not having the Standard Hulls align with any available set of drives. (That, plus simply hacking the hull cost table to enable some smaller standard ships to be affordable/profitable).
Likewise the "maneuver drives are fusion rockets" thing. In LBB2'77, it was just short of explicit, if badly managed (power plant only needed for the maneuver drive, power plant fuel allocation paralleled that of small craft fuel use -- the main problem was the lack of link of fuel use to ship tonnage). It was not explicit because Traveller was trying to be a Science Fiction simulation, and being specific about what the maneuver drive actually was would complicate simulating some SF settings. They fixed that later.
Not really. Medics don't affect ship operation except through referee fiat (or battle). This is also the case for navigators: CT doesn't have any rules mechanism that penalizes a ship that doesn't have one when required by the rules.
Engineers are required for ship operation under the rules as written. The rules say bad things happen when the drive bay is understaffed!
And this is the point I was making with the drop-tanker. In-universe, the drives in the 100Td ship with 900Td of drop tanks are identical to the ones in a 1000Td tanker of equivalent performance. Common sense would suggest that they should require an equivalent maintenance crew. The rules say otherwise, without explanation or justification.
"Seems." Except for player character crews, for some reason that is not explained, and though a mechanism (automation?) that is also not explained.
That is to say, it is (rules as written) possible to build 1000Td of ship with 55Td of drives that does not need any engineers at all, with no additional expense and with no need for explanation. This rule was written in the context of a ruleset (LBB2'81) wherein a rules-compliant 100Td ship would have a maximum of 15Td of drives, and one of 199Td could have 45Td of drives.
I misremembered the details, but I seem to recall an early TCS tournament that was won using the strategy of having one nigh-invulnerable (but weakly-armed) vessel hold the line while the rest of its fleet was in the reserve repairing battle damage. Allowed at that point by the rules, but in "reality" the opposing fleet could simply ignore it and engage -- how could one ship stop an entire fleet in three-dimensional space, even when abstracted to two dimensions?
The OTU doesn't necessarily follow its own rules or their implications, but that's a side issue.
I prefer precisely-defined house rules that are consistent with the intent of the rules as written, and prefer them to the rules as written when those rules lead to absurd outcomes.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
I don't know why they did it, and don't care to speculate. For all I know they just realised they had penalised small ships too much, and rather than redoing the drive table just made small hulls cheaper. Or perhaps they thought of Liberty ships, who knows?
As robject reminded us, it's explicit in the combat chapter.
The rules have no penalties specified for lacking a Pilot...
Malfunction penalties is for missing (required) Engineer. A 199 Dt ship requires no engineers, regardless of drive size, so has no penalties for any missing engineer(s).
Hence, starships don't cease to work or exist instantaneously without engineers to polish the drives. I completely fail to see that the Laws of Nature completely transforms as we add the last Dton to make the hull 200 Dt...
The ridiculous part is that ships of 199 Dt or less don't require engineers, not that crew requirements don't change as we hang inert objects on the outside of the hull.
It's the exact same ship, with the exact same drives, doing exactly the same thing, why would the crew requirements change?
The rules require crews, yet ships seems to be able to operate without them...
Sounds like the crew requirements are based on Imperial (or whatever flag you operate under) regs, rather than the Laws of Nature?
But it's not a 1000 Dt ship filled with equipment to be controlled and maintained, it's a 100 Dt ship with 900 Dt inert objects strapped to it.
Would strapping one more Dt of tanks to the ship drop the engineering requirements down to half an engineer?
Note that I'm not just trying to minimise the crew: If I make a 900 Dt ship with a 200 Dt tank, does it require one engineer per 35 Dt drives (≤1000 Dt), or one engineer per 100 Dt drives (>1000 Dt)? I call it a 900 Dt ship with crew requirements for a 900 Dt ship, so one engineer per 35 Dt drives.
Is it a ridiculous arbitrary limit? Yes, of course, but it's much simpler than MTs cost-based requirements reduced by TL, or T5s requirements based on "control panels" per function, and sometimes more "control panels" per function.
Yes, absolute screening of ships in a 4D battle is iffy, whether it's by one ship or ten.
Here sounds like just a question of that the enemy brought rocks and the opponent didn't bring any weapons that could damage rocks, so he lost. It's a failure of planning: the enemy can do lots of nasty things to you, and you have to prepare to counter them all. "If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!"
Quite, but "consistent with intent" and "absurd outcomes" are based on your beliefs about the authors intents and how a 53rd century stellar-tech society works, not necessarily the absolute truth.
That is presumably what we all do, but don't say that Traveller made you do it. It's just your game.
Ah, so you have experience with OSHA and Unions then.
The impact of a medic on a ship is economical. One less mouth to feed, one less stateroom to fill, one less salary to pay.
Every credit counts on the small ships, that's where the terabytes of screed from @Spinward Flow come from, gaming out those edge cases. (Because, you know, it's a game!)
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
To be fair, "gaming out the edge cases" is what drives evolution in biology (think about it...
) and accounting in pursuit of capitalism ... because the results of the effort are competitive advantages of various flavors and types. However, in seeking those advantages there are going to be inevitable tradeoffs ... such as a lack of resiliency/redundancy in the event of a casualty or setback of some kind. The trick is being able to judge if those tradeoffs are "worth it" in enough scenarios to justify the decision to go in that direction.Do you go high(er) skilled and few sophonts ... or do you go minimum skilled and more sophonts?
Lean crews aboard work reasonably well with adequate ground/shore support, but you aren't necessarily reducing the total amount of work that needs doing ... just who winds up needing to do it (aboard vs ashore).
As far as the "hull size: 1- don't need Navigators, Engineers or Medics" rule from LBB2 ... consider the conceptual state of the game at the time that such a rule was written. If every starship in existence needed a Pilot, a Navigator, an Engineer and a Medic as minimum crew (4) then the Scout/Courier would require a minimum crew of 4 (and adding a Gunner would mean 5!), at which point a lot of "flexibility" of the Scout/Courier is pretty effectively "bred out of the design" courtesy of the crew rules. Some of the knock on effects would be things like not having enough displacement left over for an Air/Raft berth and needing to have 5 staterooms aboard, not just 4. The "tonnage crunch" for the 100 (and 101-199) ton starship class would have been almost as debilitating as the power plant fuel requirements. The LBB2.77 XBoat would not be possible/permissible/legal even under LBB2.77 at that point. There would be a whole cascade of "small ship problems" for 100 ton ships due to high crew requirements AND high fuel requirements AND high bridge tonnage requirements relative to their 100 ton displacement.
My sense is that the rules writers of the time wanted to make the "proverbial one man scout ship" a reality in Traveller ... and not just because Cyrano Jones featured in a mildly famous episode of Star Trek (a decade prior) with a reputation of piloting a one man ship along the border as an independent scout and trader in rare merchandise. The only way to make that dream possible in Traveller would be to "relax the rules" on craft under 200 tons ... and that at the time, the rules were written in such a way that any "custom fraction" of tonnage rounded up to the "next step" on the tonnage table (so everything effectively defaulted to the tonnages listed on the drive table pretty quickly). It's only with LBB5.80 that "fractions of 100x tonnages" became an option worth considering ... at which point the Hole In The Paradigm used by LBB2 became apparent (and somewhat unavoidable) with hull sizes from 101-199 tons and how the "200 ton breakpoint for crew requirements" works in relation to those Small Starships In A Small Ship Universe™ wind up working.
The way I personally rationalize the "under 200 tons" reduced crew requirements for Navigator, Engineer and Medic working out in practice is that ships under 200 tons require "starport support" for things like engineering maintenance and are subsumed into the Berthing Fees expense (no extra charge) under CT. Basic idea being that the drives are "small enough" to get by with what amounts to "starport contractors" rather than requiring a permanent crew member stationed aboard the ship to oversee everything. So while a 100-199 ton starship is berthed at the starport, starport contractors come aboard to do all the work that would otherwise have required an onboard engineer to be doing and monitoring. The economics of that "works out" for the starport, because those engineering contractors (if paid Cr4000 per month) are going to be tasked with maintaining more than a single ship ... meaning there is "plenty of work to go around" for them to earn their pay, rather than just dealing with a single ship and its set of drives. They're basically "pool engineers" doing ground/shore support as part of the starport's services on a catch as catch can rotating basis, rather than ships "using their own" engineer that they keep on staff aboard (and on payroll plus life support).
Of course, a ship "under 200 tons" could CHOOSE to have an Engineer aboard if they want to in order to keep the drives operating smoothly, even if the regulations do not REQUIRE them to have such a bespoke crew member.
Remember, the LBB2 crew formulation is the MINIMUM allowed ... it's not the maximum ... you can have "more crew than the minimum needed" if you want (although that tends to have a somewhat ruinous effect on revenue tonnage fraction pretty quickly, so most small ships are not going to go in that direction). However, once you get to the 1000+ tons range, even under LBB2, you start getting into crew requirements by tonnage of ship, rather than by distinct department assignments. According to LBB2, a 2000 ton ship ought to have a crew of 20 (which is 10 per 1000 tons) ... regardless of drive tonnage, turrets, etc. ... in order to provide rotating shifts of crews for larger starships (typically 2000-5000 tons under LBB2).
So yes, the RAW for LBB2 crew may seem like it creates nonsensical edge cases in some departments, but that's only because LBB2 is trying to define the minimums in ways that are "friendly" to the Smallest Small Starships In A Small Ship Universe™ in ways that permit the proverbial "one man independent scout" to be possible (and practical) under the rules.
As for gaming out the edge cases ...
Let's just say that I'm a semi-retired Rules Lawyer who still takes on the occasional Pro Bono case for fun.
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Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
One man scoutship was a fairly common science fiction trope, possibly it's origins might be the availability of the automobile.
The only one man trader that I recall was in The Witches of Karres.
The only one man trader that I recall was in The Witches of Karres.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Minimum sized crews thanks to automation are all well and good until you need two or three damage control parties in different ship locations...
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Could be arranged.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
The same 20 Dt bridge on a 199 Dt ship, a 200 Dt ship, and a 201 Dt ship, but very different crews.
There is obviously no rational reason other than the rules† says so...
† The traveller rules, Imperial regs, Union contracts, take your pick...
It wasn't "small hulls," it was "hulls with specifically-constrained drive bays".
It's in the first edition of LBB TWO? I thought the first appearance was in first edition LBB Five.
I note this in a subsequent paragraph. In LBB2, a RAW-compliant 100Td ship can have 15Td drives at most, and that's probably what they were thinking about (it's rounding down after dividing by 35). Even in the case of a RAW-compliant 199Td ship with the largest possible drives (J4/4G/Pn=4), a total of 45Td of drives. It's reasonable to guess (yeah, common sense here) they weren't expecting the rule to cover more than that when they wrote it.
It's a 1000Td ship, of which 900Td is exceedingly fragile and full of liquid hydrogen.
No, it would increase the engineering requirement to include "...a knowledgeable chief engineer, a second engineer, and several petty officers" (LBB5'81, p.32). Maybe a very small engineer with multiple personality disorder?
Here's the distinction I make: Some "house rules" are consistent with the underlying formulae or principles of the game, and some are not.
A Jump Drive "A-and-a-half" that's 12.5Td, MCr15, and yields J3 in a 100Td hull is consistent with the rules -- it follows all the formulae underpinning the Drive Potential and Drives and Power Plants tables on LBB2'81, p.22. There may be perfectly good reasons why such a drive may not be available in-universe, but there's no reason to assume the rules declare that it can't exist.
On the other hand, a Jump Drive that's 10Td, MCr10, and yields J3 in a 100Td hull is not consistent with LBB2, and probably shouldn't be allowed in CT -- it's a Size A. (It's also not consistent with LBB5, although I think you can get there in T5 with its TL Stage Effects.)
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It's a useful handwave that I also use.
In practice, I view it as risk-tolerance within a regulatory framework. Bigger ships with more passengers and larger crews warrant more regulations.
As for the penny-ante 100-199Td ships... "They bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash!"
Shrug, gotta be a cutoff somewhere.
I think of it more as 20% of the 100 ton ship vs. 10% of the 200 ton ship, same exact engineering plant if it’s Type S vs. Type A. That’s 10 tons of extra bridge doing… something.
Arguably you could say that’s the scout sensors ala CT scout/military sensors, but then you’ve just quantified advanced sensors as being 10 tons 5 MCr.
I say it’s automation. If we look at that 5MCr and compare this value to top end robots, you could have quite a bit of genius operation and engineering bots.
I’m thinking it’s less bot and more control hardware with specialized hardwired logic doing the same functions at lower tech levels and computing power.
