More like 90%, while the hex and range band hit that 95% or slightly more.
Vent-Rant MegaTraveller what I hate about it.
- Thread starter Murph
- Start date
More like 90%, while the hex and range band hit that 95% or slightly more.
Ok, but none of those issues were adressed three. Even with the table changes and armor wearing down produced by the disintegrators, they are quite inferior to MG (that are one hit killers), while being quite higher TL and price.
As per gunnery skill use (or any skill use in space combat, for what's worth), there's no change in versión 2.21 of the errata...
They are all there, and specific posts pointed in my former one...
A true shame it never saw light...
This is why I decided to not only apply the x10 rule, but also divide the ship weapons damage by 10.
This still allows the weakest ship weapon (Beam Laser-8, Pen 73/7, Damage 50, Range 1250 km) to outrank the most powerful vehicle weapon (RPZ-16, Pen 79/5, Damage 30, Range 30 km).
Remembering of course, that the Damage is in d6 rolled: 50 = 50d6 damage.
Aside:
Wil and I disagree on this, BTW. I think he's in the same camp as TNE, where the assumption is that shipboard weapons MUST be an order of magnitude greater than any ground-based weaponry. This is where a ship's laser uses a metre-wide mirror rather than a 10-cm one.
This is certainly a reasonable argument from "reality". I make no claim to that; my argument comes about purely from "playability". If it hits, a 500d6 TL 8 beam laser would totally fry an adventurer-sized ship; but that's not necessarily the outcome even under High Guard rules.
And that's even if it's damage was reduced to 250d6 (due to Pen 73 vs Target Armour 40).
So my approach is aimed at producing the equivalent effect of HG damage rules using the MT hit-points-versus-armour damage rules.
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See, this is where that reasoning breaks down in light of Book 4 commentary on the evolution of armored vehicles.
If one starts to break down the source material one quickly has to to come to the conclusion that the "works with traveller" portions of Striker were ad hoc numbers that "Looked right". And as such they were pretty piss-poor as the technical foundation of MT.
I really wish they had put a little more effort in looking at the numbers and what they meant instead of rotely copying and adding they way they did when writing those aspects of MT.
Honestly if I were going to rewrite MT combat I would figure out my damage scales 1st. Remembering that most small vehicles are vulnerable to Small Arms fire.
Is this the "grav tanks merge with small craft" sort of thing?
Yes.
Weirdly though parts of the idea are already wired into MT, look at the Armor limits by Tech Level...
Well, the Belion shows how a "tank", at 75 disp. tons, could also be redefined as a "pocket SDB"...
http://members.tip.net.au/~davidjw/tavspecs/trendi/belion.htm
Only problem is, it's also an extremely high-value target...
You have to appreciate the problem space. A ship board laser is designed to effective over 10's of thousands of kilometers. A ground based one, less than 100.
Since a space based laser need to be effective across 10's of thousands of kilometers, a space based ship needs to be able to DEFEND against a laser designed to be fired and effective over 10's of thousands of kilometers. (If the enemy has a laser good for 100,000km, what happens when I'm at 10,000km? or even less?) The weapons and armor drive each other.
A ground based AFV is designed to defend against ground based weapons. A large laser with a meter+ mirror and associated hardware is unwieldy in ground combat where stuff happens at a much faster rate. A space based laser is designed for the long, 20m turns of space combat vs the several second turns of ground combat.
Well, see, that's the beauty of TNEs Striker inspired combat system. You know exactly what a "500d6 TL 8" laser will do to a space ship. Or a brick wall, family sedan, Grav AFV, or a small mouse.
If you want to shoot your gauss rifle at the ship, you can find out what it will do (likely not much).
There's nothing stopping you from mounting an auto cannon, or rapid fire plasma gun in a pintle mount on the bow of your Free Trader to more readily handle pesky land craft. You can even use it to tear in to the ship parked next to you on the tarmac, and find out what kind of damage it will do (I haven't the slightest idea). But the damage model will let you send high velocity 20mm DPU shells from your auto cannon in to the Free Trader 300 yards away, and, potentially damage it. Not very useful in space, but hey since it's right next door, may as well unload with the auto cannon AND the laser.
You don't even have to make anything up.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
And you find yourself moving into TNE FF&S territory...
(I guess you mean RFZ-16, not RPZ, as it does not exist)
Let's see...
The RFZ-16 uses 123.4 Mw. IIRC, the combat round is 15 seconds, so it means 1851 Mj. As it has a ROF of 40, each shoot delivers about 46.25 Mw power, equivalent to pen 79/5 and 30 dmg...
As the Blaser it assumed to be firing the whole turn, and so the power delivered would be dependent on the time it hits, I'll use the Plaser instead:
The Plaser-8 uses 250 MW and has no ROF listed (so we'll asume 1 shoot per round). So, as it delivers about 3750 Mj it is about 80 times more power than the RFZ-16. As Pen is similar, the damage should be about 240 if we assume energy delivered to be an indicator...
Of course, this may also be affected by the dispersión (shown in danger space), that would reduce the energy delivered by the Plaser, so the 60 hits it would deliver with your rules may well be correct...
BTW, you say the Blaser has a range of 1250 km. Where do you take this number from? in the table in page 80 of the PM it is listed as Far Orbit range (so about 0.5 Mkm).
WW-II, Battle off Samar, one of the few encounters in which battleships had an opportunity to use their main batteries. American destroyers survived multiple hits from Japanese battleships and heavy cruisers before succumbing to heavy fire, primarily because the powerful armor-piercing rounds used at the outset passed straight through the unarmored destroyers and out the other side without exploding, doing some damage but not nearly as much as the warheads were capable of.
Perhaps we need something like that, a maximum damage level beyond which the laser is considered to have burned straight through and out the other side, thereby inflicting only a fraction of its full power. A penetration of 48 takes a weapon through both sides of a ship with an armor value of 40. Don't know what energy would be spent inside, depends on what it's hitting, but it's still more or less burning a hole from one side to the other and out. One can make an argument for capping damage for lasers, at least.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
I don't recall lasers having an explosive effect, as compared to meson or fusion guns.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Oddly enough the lack of damage to German ships at the Battle of Jutland was attributed to RN shells exploding on contact with armour rather than penetrating then exploding (the RN changed the explosives in its shells post Jutland).
I don't think any Navy ever came up with a dual purpose warhead for its big guns, or even carried different types of warhead.
T4 has a rule for damage capping...
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mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Back to vent-rant:
if I were in charge of the MT revision (and I mean what DGP did not the current clean up project)
no expanded character generation;
jump fuel formula stays at 10% per parsec, power plants are what need to change;
ship combat as previously discussed.
if I were in charge of the MT revision (and I mean what DGP did not the current clean up project)
no expanded character generation;
jump fuel formula stays at 10% per parsec, power plants are what need to change;
ship combat as previously discussed.
Especially when you're the guy who told Strephon about the Empress Wave. ;-) ;-) ;-)
Oh, I absolutely appreciate the problem space, which is why I put in my disclaimer about "reality" versus "playability".
Your argument is the same as the one put forward in TNE (as you pointed out later). This is one reason I play MT instead. ;-)
BTW, maybe I should point out that the "TNE explanation" is an in-game one: "the lasers need to be much bigger to function at all, so therefore the laser becomes way more powerful in comparison the ground-based lasers" is, when you think about it, just a handwave to explain allowing larger, more "realistic" weaponry in the rules.
I mean, it's a good handwave, but it's really still a handwave (since lasers of that size and power do not exist). It's an in-game reason; the meta game reason was to try and imagine the capabilities of such a laser, should it ever exist, and work out the consequences.
Thus it becomes a simulation, rather than a game. It's not about playability; it's more about plausibility.
Here's an example where playability was trampled on in a ruleset. I briefly played in a game run under Rifts rules (well, it *was* 30 years ago, I *think* it was Rifts). Anyway, they used a system where different pieces of hardware were simply on different orders of magnitude. If a mid-class weapon shot a mid-class target, you rolled damage normally. If a mega-class weapon shot a mid-class target, damage was increased by a factor of 100 (from memory): the mid-class target usually ceased to exist. Similarly, a mid-class weapon wuld not event scratch the paint of a mega-class target.
To me, this wasn't "fun": having to constantly select the correct damage exponent, for one thing; but mostly by the stonewall effect of the referee rocking up with a mega-class target that we couldn't touch. The game system may as well have labelled them, "Untouchable Referee MacGuffin Here".
To me, that shouldn't be necessary. "There are not many problems that cannot be solved by the suitable application of high explosives", as my Taglines say. If the players are sufficiently inventive, they ought to be able to blow anything up, in other words.
Or, in metagame terms, you shouldn't have to stonewall the PCs with mega-equipment. It's amateurish, like dropping an iron golem in front of 3rd level PCs in order to stop them going somewhere.
Exactly! And you don't want to go there. Or, if you do, then go there and play TNE. (That's fine to do, BTW. Those rules are perfectly fine and valid, and I've even stolen things from them for my house rules: e.g. Contacts in chargen, Hiver Guns which I've calculated but yet to put into my MT Weapons Tables, etc. etc.).
But in this thread we're talking MT, not TNE. ;-)
And I do.
And I do... :-D
You are correct. I was calling it the Rapid Pulse Z-Gun, since the MT notations are... redundant. If it's A, B, or C, it's automatically a plasma weapon; if it's X, Y, or Z it's a fusion gun. The addition of the middle "P" (e.g. RPA-14) or "F" (RFZ-16) is not really necessary; like "ATM machine".
So this assumes the weapons fire continually for the entire 15 seconds. Not sure how reasonable that is. ;-)
BTW, MT combat rounds are 6 seconds long, not 15 (Player's Handbook, p 67). So it's 40 shots in 6 seconds. The ships laser can fire once during the same time period (although I can't remember where that's from; maybe Striker).
Well at least that's something. ;-)
My point of view is more from the other side: the play balance side. The side which asks: do you really WANT to have to increase the effect of your ship's armour, or increase its Damage Points so that the potential damage resulting from a 500d6 hit resembles what would have occurred under High Guard, rather than total overkill? Because by increasing armour or Hull Damage points, you also prevent PCs from blasting out the windows in the Annic Nova to effect entry, or other "interesting" effects of weapons aboard in space.
That's the range in atmosphere. Can't remember where that's from, either - maybe Striker again. Guess I'll have to go look it up. ;-)
I still think you are thinking "TNE", not MegaTraveller. ;-)
I'll have to look that up. MT has them with a DS of 45 m (Player's, p 80), but this may be an errata (erratum?) since it is the SAME as for plasma & fusion guns(!); in my Weapons Tables, lasers have a DS of 9 m.
Will have to go back and check.
