Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Gazelles are iconic, much like Azhantis.
Vote Your Canon #3: The Gazelle (consensus: yes, but problems noted)
- Thread starter robject
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Maybe broken designs, but official.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Not necessarily, if it's meant for a specific mission or purpose.
There probably are other Gazelle subclasses.
There probably are other Gazelle subclasses.
Yeah, wouldn't vessels built in different times and places have different weapon fits to suit the missions required in those disparate environments? If it can be done for contemporary wet-navy vessels, I'm sure we could see several different Gazelle fit-outs.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
The Gazelle was first laid down in 1084 and had its first flight in 1086, it is a relatively new ship considering the 1105 campaign start date.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
As designed, the Gazelle class has only 2 types of consumables that are expended ... fuel and life support.
The ships feature no expendable ordnance (missiles, sandcasters) since they are armed only with energy weapons (lasers, particle accelerators).
My presumption is that the all energy weaponry layout was done as a gesture towards making the Gazelles relatively independent of supply line logistics (aside from the need to restock life support consumables) while out on patrols. Fuel, of course, could be skimmed from gas giants, in which case the ships would be relatively self-sufficient (aside from life support demands).
The ships feature no expendable ordnance (missiles, sandcasters) since they are armed only with energy weapons (lasers, particle accelerators).
My presumption is that the all energy weaponry layout was done as a gesture towards making the Gazelles relatively independent of supply line logistics (aside from the need to restock life support consumables) while out on patrols. Fuel, of course, could be skimmed from gas giants, in which case the ships would be relatively self-sufficient (aside from life support demands).
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Fiery subclass seem more suited to independent operations, being streamlined.
So is the Type-S with its purification plant.
Not broken, just an explicit exception to the dirty-fuel penalty (one that also includes the Patrol Cruiser and maybe the Mercenary Cruiser).
But why can't you have other "exceptions"?
It was one of the first core beefs when we first started with the game. It's like at the time the Type-S was described that it had some proto-type technology that allowed it to operate with dirty fuel. New in our group kept asking me about it, and all I could do was shrug my shoulders.
From this standpoint I think the "wing it" clashes with the hard starship construction rules in the basic books. This is why I passively lobby for the proto / "gee-whiz" version of the game where the OTU is optional, because then too so is the purification plant restriction, and so too is the 100dT jump capable ship rule and a host of other stuff. I've got a laundry list of "hard rule" issues, and have vented a good number of them, but the Gazelle doesn't bother me so much as the Type-S.
Is it time for a new thread for the Type-S and its purification plant?
It was one of the first core beefs when we first started with the game. It's like at the time the Type-S was described that it had some proto-type technology that allowed it to operate with dirty fuel. New in our group kept asking me about it, and all I could do was shrug my shoulders.
From this standpoint I think the "wing it" clashes with the hard starship construction rules in the basic books. This is why I passively lobby for the proto / "gee-whiz" version of the game where the OTU is optional, because then too so is the purification plant restriction, and so too is the 100dT jump capable ship rule and a host of other stuff. I've got a laundry list of "hard rule" issues, and have vented a good number of them, but the Gazelle doesn't bother me so much as the Type-S.
Is it time for a new thread for the Type-S and its purification plant?
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
It's not just the Type S, it's ALL scout and military ships:
The Type T and Type C are presumably just as capable of handling unrefined fuel.
(LBB2'77 is brutal: 28% risk of misjump with unrefined fuel...)
Well, it says scout ships, not Scout Service ships. At least that's my reading of it, and even if it means all IISS ships, then why is the restriction in there in the first place? Civvies (merchies of all sorts) would benefit from small purification plants.
Oh no...
Because it's a quick stab at trying to distinguish military hardware and civilian hardware. Unrealized potential to be sure, but there you are.
I guess I should have just encapsulated my responses, and stated that the rules were written as guidelines and suggestions. So it is that the Gazelle class doesn't bother me much--it at all. As such I don't really have a beef with the type-S ... nor even "jump torpedoes".
The books state that these should be treated as guidelines.
And I understand the attempt to define mil-IISS stuff verse civilian tech, but you have to ask yourself that within the rules when do things like PPs become small enough or portable enough and at what TL to be installed on a ... I don't know ... a ship's gig or boat ... heck, what about an air raft?
I think you have to take the book for its own caveats; guidelines and suggestions, if a rule doesn't work, break it and rewrite it.
The books state that these should be treated as guidelines.
And I understand the attempt to define mil-IISS stuff verse civilian tech, but you have to ask yourself that within the rules when do things like PPs become small enough or portable enough and at what TL to be installed on a ... I don't know ... a ship's gig or boat ... heck, what about an air raft?
I think you have to take the book for its own caveats; guidelines and suggestions, if a rule doesn't work, break it and rewrite it.
You can't because it's a game mechanic. Scouts need the exception to go where there aren't any starports, military needs it for when they can't fight their way into and occupy starports. Civilian ships are meant (by the game) to be corralled into travel only between starports (hopping over the fence into the wilds can be risky).
The other reason is that if it's something that can be bought (rather than allowed by referee or rulebook fiat), it will be bought and there goes the corral keeping your players on the main starlanes. And then you need to detail a whole lot of worlds right now that you could have waited months to write up.
Makes a lot less sense when you've got supplements and now the Wiki so it's not a problem to have players jumping all over the map willy-nilly.
Well, I don't agree with that entirely. I understand that that was probably the thinking behind the rules as written way back in the late 70s, but then there's also the "map your own subsector" mini-campaign suggestion towards the end of the starship travel section. Which, to me at least, trumps the whole idea of exceptions, and needs to open up the possibility to regular Joes in their type-Rs or Beowulfs to "jump the fence" and visit systems that are off the beaten path. That, I think, was actually part of the intent of the game in first place.
But that's ok, the chance of misjump due to lousy fuel is just adds a little bit of danger to that process to cope with. Sure it's potentially very lethal, but that's where that referee thumb on the scale comes from. But, risking misjump for a few jumps is different from doing it routinely as a business to save a buck. Different issues entirely.
I disagree. I think the whole point was to get players to risk it with any ship, but that the scout was for "noobs" who were first playing and ran the risk of mis-jumping. At least that's how I read it. The Gazelle, on the other hand, is like the Chameleon in terms of a design the authors wanted to add. And I think that's all there is to it. It may not be an intentional example of how to break the rules and design your own ship regardless of what the rules say, but that's kind of what it and the Type-S are. At least in the proto-Traveller universe you ran the potential of discovering a new system that was say ... I don't know ... TL 20 or something, where they had purification plants as off the shelf parts ready to install into your Beowulf or Type-R. I think that that was the thinking behind some of these oddities. The game's background and other addons hadn't been fully realized, and so all of these odd ducks were created as just stuff for players to toy with.
The basic premise was a bit siloed. Exploration campaigns used Scout/Couriers to start with, and probably didn't need to upgrade.
"Space Police" campaigns might use the Type T Patrol Cruiser.
Mercenary campaigns, well, there's the Type M for that. Maybe it can handle dirty fuel, maybe not, but it doesn't much matter since travel is incidental to the campaign -- all the fun shooty stuff happens on the ground and you can handwave the rest.
Commerce campaigns started with a Type A using jump tapes, then Generate. The next step up was to the Type R, and if things went well, that ship could be upgraded to J2/2G. After that, the Type M Liner provided Jump-3. By then, the ref should have built up a decent stock of interesting worlds to visit so the training wheels could come off.
And all of this was built within the '77 rules where you couldn't jump two times without carrying a double load of fuel (for example, a Type S couldn't do J-1 out, then J-1 back again without refueling).
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