Mecha in Traveller?

Alexandre Pedneault said:

> I'm a new Traveller player/gamemaster and I intend to do a campaign which
>will include some mechas. ( Yeah, like the Mobile Suits in the Gundam
>series) Did any of you had that idea before? If you did, please share
>your results with me.

Get hold of the "Maximum Metal" supplement for Cyberpunk 2020.  It has pretty
good design rules for powered suits and I had no trouble integrating them
into my Traveller campaign.

Just be careful about what you let your players get their hands on:  The
armour that my Imperial Marines wander around in shrugs off most ammo under
20mm, and has built in a 7.62 minigun, a 30mm rifle, and an auto grenade
launcher ( among other goodies ).  And if they need more firepower they can
always carry a FGMP ( except of course that since the armour gives them
about 10x strength it can be rather larger that the average FGMP :-)

Shane

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Shane N Thomas                      Internet:  [email removed]

Alexandre Pedneault writes:

>  I'm a new Traveller player/gamemaster and I intend to do a campaign which
> will include some mechas. ( Yeah, like the Mobile Suits in the Gundam
> series) Did any of you had that idea before? If you did, please share
> your results with me.

I've had that idea myself. The Neubayern army is a heavy user of small mecha,
which were inspired by designs from the Bubblegum Crisis series. I posted the
two most common types to the TML a while back, in fact. However, these aren't
anywhere near the size of the mobile suits. To be believable, big mecha have
to have some reason to exist, be it Minovsky Particles, Zentraedi, or
whatever, and no such reason exists on Neubayern.

I'd recommend that you design your mecha using GURPS and then convert them to
TNE. That's what I did with the small mecha, and it worked quite nicely. FF&S
is a good product, but it was simply never meant for mecha design. I also
recommend getting a copy of Guns! Guns! Guns! (3rd edition) to help convert
from one system to the other.

                        Kenneth G. Hagler
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