I'm sorry it took me so long to answer this message, but I wanted to take the
time to be thorough before I replied.
> Date: Fri, 05 Apr 91 10:05:13 CST
> From: [email removed]
> Subject: (2259) Alot of TidBYTES...
> Fellow Travellers,
> I am in need of your thought provoking input on a number of MT ques-
> tions. Let me state that I am using the first edition/printing of the
> MT rules, thus some of these "problems" may be solved and I don't know
> about them. Now, where to begin...
> 1) Personal Combat - I've recently started running a Traveller cam-
> paign and this is the first time that I have used the new MT rules.
> I've worked through all the changes that have occurred and thought I
> was ready to move into the new age of Traveller, then I had to deal
> with personal combat. Traveller was kind to PC with the combat system
> before, But NOW... I can't kill anybody without High Energy
> Weapons...
Okay. There is definitely a problem in Traveller with the effective-
ness of armor (it's too good). This includes the vehicle design
system, too, since it is very easy to design an APC that will stop a
40mm armor piercing round, and run for three days on a tank of gas,
and have a cross country speed of 70mph. Mike Metlay, our resident
historian and general all around Traveller theorist has commented on
this problem before. Hopefully, he'll jump in and discuss it this
time, too.
> I try to keep the military related gear out of my players hands...
> that gear is for the active duty types. They went along with that
> fine, so everyone got cloth armor ship's jumpsuits...No problem, until
> the first firefight. Since I keep the lid on military gear, most
> opponents have lower level stuff too... That was when we found out
> that SMGs, Shotguns and Advance Combat Rifles CANNOT penetrate even
> "lowly" Cloth armor. I was stunned. Topping that feat is the TL14
> Vacc suit which will stop anything short of a Gauss Rifle, ARL or LAG
> AP rounds... Even when you hit with these, most damage will be dissi-
> pated... I can see the headlines now... MAN IN VACC SUIT TAKES
> ROCKET TO THE CHEST AND LAUGHS. Now I can live with all the hand
> waving and scientific slips that occur for game's sake, but NO DAMAGE
> without Penetration... I know the 10% rule, but that's for uncovered
> areas only... a vacc suit covers all...
I shouldn't have to say this, because a game that I pay thirty dollars
for should work without tinkering, but I'd increase the penetration of
the weapons or decrease the armor protection until rifle bullets did
penetrate cloth...or I'd arm all security personnel with laser weap-
ons. However, I've laid out a little chart showing how things work
out now, using as an example an average character with Dex 7 and
Weapon-2 skill, firing a rifle at a stationary man sized target at
medium range, a difficult task, with a +1 for dex and a +2 for skill.
2d6 roll Chance Type of Damage Points (0 armor) Points (5)
2-7 21/36 miss 0 0
8 5/36 marginal success 1.5=2 .15=0
9 4/36 norm. success 3 .3=0
10-11 5/36 excep. success 6 .6=1 (1 min)
12 1/36 +4 exceptional 12 1.2=1 (2 min)
The standard opponent (7/7/7) has hit points of 3/5. In the case of
the cloth armor (expected value of damage 0.2 per shot) it will take
15 bullets to knock him unconscious on the average, and 40 bullets to
kill him. On the microscale this is too many--one aimed shot should
probably have the possibility of killing. On the macro scale it isn't
too bad. In real wars thousands of bullets are expended per casualty.
By the way, a trained sniper (Wpn-4, Dex 10, +6 to hit, with 2 levels
of tactics skill for a roving DM of +2) could use the pinpoint fire
rule, and therefore get to count a normal penetration (as opposed to
no penetration) with exceptional success damage modifers as follows
2d6 roll Chance Type of Damage Points (5)
2 1/36 miss 0
3 2/36 marginal .75=1
4 3/36 normal success 1.5=2
5-6 9/36 exc success 3
7-10 18/36 +4 Exceptional 12
11-12 3/36 +8 Exceptional 24
That is, 21/36 (58%) chance of a one shot kill, and a 25% chance of a
one shot knockout, for a total of 83% chance of removing the opponent
from the combat per shot. Maybe that isn't so bad.
> Slug throwers are and will be one of the most widely used weapons.
> Kinetic energy is the easiest way to convey killing power. Defensive
> technology will keep pace. This all equates to a police nightmare.
> Thank god my players are not all running around in combat armor or
> battle dress.
What can I say? Even a few policemen with laser rifles will keep the
characters acting cautiously, without modifying the rules at all.
> 2) Personal hit locations - If we start to consider partial armor
> covering, as the 10% rule seems to, why not use a hit location chart
> ala Aftermath? I'm interested in your opinions on this, if you use a
> system and how you work it out.
Too much trouble, and *I* don't want a combat heavy game in the play-
ing. All the GDW role playing games (except maybe Twilight:2000
because of its combat emphasis) spend too much effort covering combat
in relation to how often it ought to occur. (IMHO)
> 3) Rates of Fire - Did they forget about this all together? Sure there
> is the rapid fire rules, but you empty your clip and the auto fire
> rules cover only fully automatic fire. I'm sorry... I may not be a
> marksman but I have fired both pistols and long guns before. With a
> 9mm Beretta (a Traveller autopistol) I can aim and fire off 2-3 rounds
> in a 6 second period of time accurately. At this rate it would take
> 30 seconds to empty my clip, but I am firing at multiple targets also.
> A submachine gun only firing 1,3 or 30 rounds in a combat round... I
> don't understand. With this system an antique Blunderbuss (one player
> has one), a revolver, an autopistol, a SMG, an ACR and a VRF Gauss Gun
> all fire ONE round every 6 seconds. What was Marc Miller thinking
> about here...
I won't defend the combat system extensively. It does look like there
ought to be some sort of ROF rule for hand held weapons. I tend to
run games that don't involve a lot of shooting. (You might look at Jo
Jaquinta's excellent and amusing scenario from GaelCon'89 if you'd
like to see how something like that might work--it's in the Sunbane
archives.) However, there is a reloading rule on the blunderbuss--in
the Imperial Encyclopedia rather than in the combat rules where it
ought to be. See page 73. A flintlock musket requires 18 seconds
(three combat rounds) to reload. The VRF Gauss gun damage and pene-
tration numbers apparently factor in the rate of fire.
> 4) Starship Hijacking - with the new rules about ship computers, this
> option becomes almost impossible. No real criticism, but I would like
> to hear how you pull this caper off.
Oddly enough, since the players have always had their own ship (of
some description) in every game I've run, this has never come up.
I've never felt that it was all that necessary to try hijacking the
players' ship, so it hasn't come up on the other side of the fence,
either. If I really wanted to take away the players' ship without any
chance of their responding, I'd just haul out a 20,000ton navy-type
cruiser and demand that they surrender or be meson-gunned. One shot
will annihilate any player class vessel.
> 5) Starship combat rounds - 20 minutes... ummmmm... I'm sure that
> a lot could be occurring in that time. I realize that the distance
> can be so great, but modern naval combat takes place at much longer
> ranges than that of WW2 combat and things move faster now. I use 1
> minute rounds and throw the movement scales out the window. I'd like
> to know what you do.
Remembering that Traveller was once intended as the realistic entry in
the SF games category, this sort of thing really doesn't bother me.
If you run through a few basic physics class calculations, you will
see that if you want a 20 minute combat turn, and a 1-G acceleration
to produce a 1 hex/turn velocity change, that this corresponds to a
hex dimension of 14,112km. If you were to go with the 25,000km hexes
described in the Referee's manual, the physically correct time scale
would be 26.6 minutes per turn. 50,000km hexes would give you a 37.6
minute turn. At 14,112km per hex, the moon and the earth would be
placed about 28 hexes apart on the map. I don't worry about the fact
that my lasers could be firing for the entire 20 minutes of the turn,
because I think that it may take them that long firing in the general
vicinity of a ship to hit it, because of the speed of light lag in
targetting and the possibility of extremely small angular errors in
the firing angle to result in a miss. In addition, as I'll show, even
a hit may not do much good. For ease of calculation, I'll go through
what happens when a ship intersects a laser beam fired from a 250MW
beam laser turret. The turret will be assumed to be stationary,
firing without turning. This means we can treat the beam as a
straight line in space. For sake of argument, let's say it is fo-
cussed into a beam with a cross section of one square centimeter.
Let's also say that it is 50% efficient--current lasers are less
efficient, so let's say it's a TL9 laser so that the rest will be
reasonable. This means that a 250MW input to the laser will result in
a 125MW output beam.
Now for the ship. Let's say it is steel, rather than some more
advanced (and hopefully more resistant) material. Besides, steel is
basically iron thermodynamically, and I was able to look up heat
capacities and heats of fusion (melting) for iron. Crossreferencing
to Striker from memory, a minimum spacecraft hull of armor 40 is 33cm
thick. To poke a hole in it with our one square centimeter beam will
require that we heat the metal to the melting point and then add the
additional heat required to fuse it in the time that the beam is on
the ship. Ignore beam travel and heat sink effects of the rest of the
hull for a moment. Assume that the ship is painted with an 80% re-
flectant coating. Only 20% of the incident energy will be transferred
to the hull, the rest being reflected back into space. I calculated
that each puncture would require 248,000 joules (watt-seconds) (and
that was figuring that the ship started out with a hull temeprature of
20 degrees C, a nice equilibrium with the comfortable interior temper-
ature. An insulated ship would have a lower starting temperature, and
therefore take even more energy to heat up). Figuring the reflectance
and the efficiency of the laser, that works out to 2.4MW-sec. Now,
our 250MW nominal laser would thus need to be focused on this hypo-
thetical iron column for about 0.01 seconds to melt a hole in it.
Suppose our ship, however, is travelling at a rate of six hexes per 20
minute combat round, and furthermore, that it is 50m long. At the
speed of 70560m/sec, it will cross the beam in 0.0007 seconds--
1/1400th of the time needed to make a hole. AND THE ENERGY SUPPLIED BY
THE BEAM WILL NOT EVEN BE CONCENTRATED ON A ONE SQUARE CENTIMETER
PATCH OF THE SHIP!. This translates to no damage from a single hit.
Let's look at the angular problem for a moment. Without even
considering movement, a laser firing at a 50m long ship at a range of
50,000km must keep its fire within an arc covering 0.0000573 degrees.
Let's say we had a 10m laser tube pivoting at the bottom. That corre-
sponds to moving the muzzle 0.001 centimeters (4/10000 of an
inch...which is a high precision tolerance in machining.) The longer
the baseline of your weapon, the more accurately you will be able to
aim it, but...
If the ship is moving at a constant velocity, the situation
becomes worse. Using the 6 hex/turn example above, we find that to
stay on target with our stationary laser requires us to track the ship
at a rate of 0.08 +/- .0000573 degrees of arc per second. Even assum-
ing that we could move our gun at that rate, if our tolerance on
firing angle was one percent of the movement, our chance of a hit has
fallen to just over seven percent (per second). Now, remembering that
the ship will cross the beam in 1/1400 of the time needed to make a
hole, and that a 50m by 20m ship has 10 million square centimeters of
surface, I get the impression that I should multiply all of this
together to get the answer that we will put a hole in a ship once
every 2E14 seconds (once every 3 billion years). Okay, so if combat
works at all, it's a little better than that. But it gets worse again
fast if both ships are altering acceleration randomly, even over a
small range, and the range is longer--lasers are permitted to fire at
up to ten times the range I used for this example. All of this goes to
support the thesis I advance once before--lasers and other beam weap-
ons work by saturating the general vicinity of the target ship's
predicted position rather than by precision aiming, making the 20
minute combat turn not only plausible, but generous favoring the
attacker.
So, what do I do in the game, you ask? Well, it hasn't really come
up, but I'd use the given combat system with the inertial movement
rules (and probably the boards and counters, too) from Mayday, the old
Traveller ship-to-ship combat game.
> 6) High Tech Gear - I've got a number of players reading GURPS Ultra
> tech and asking for conversions. I agree with most of the stuff, but
> some things that make sense just don't work. For example, construc-
> tion cement. I figure that by TL 15 there would be some form of quick
> drying polymer that would be used as material for roads, walls, etc.
> that is as strong, if not stronger, than concrete. Now my players
> want to use this stuff as bulkheads in their ship. If the get boarded
> by bad guys (good guys to me), they just start pouring this stuff down
> the halls to the bridge and engineering, thus sealing out the enemy.
> How do you deal with logical technical advances that could throw the
> system out of whack? It's the Traveller equivalent of the +5 Holy
> avenger/rune blade/sword of sharpness. .. HHEEELLLLPPPPP.... See
> reference to question 4
To pick on your specific example, I'd start shooting the idea down
like this. First off, the stuff is likely to be no stronger that the
current bulkheads, which means that the boarders can slice right
through it with explosives or lasers or whatever. Second, unless it
is a foamed material, it will require a bag of the stuff as big as a
hallway to make a wall--if your players are using all their cargo
space to haul Plastiwall bags, where do they put the paying cargo?
Thirdly, how are they going to get it into the hallway under fire?
You can always tell them that the special distribution tubes they have
in mind won't work because the stuff will harden before it gets out of
the tube, and you could always add a warning or two about the flamma-
ble vapors produced, or the toxic byproducts necessitating extremely
good ventilation. Also, as Adrian said yesterday, there is the prob-
lem of getting the goop back out when the battle is over...
I've looked through GURPS ultratech in the store, but didn't think it
looked worth buying. The maximum Imperial tech level seems to be
about equal to GURPS tech 10 or 11 at most, so that may clear up some
problems. Just tell them it's not available.
> 7) Imperial Law Level - As I have stated, I keep the military gear in
> the hands of the military when and where ever possible. I know that
> there are law levels for the member worlds, but what if any, law level
> do you apply to Imperial space? I know that every Imperial marine
> force commander has nightmares about garrisoning a starport that
> allows civilian merchants to arm their security men with battle dress
> and FGMP-15s. And should civilian ships be allowed to mount
> meson/spinal mount weapons?
Civilian merchants who spend half a megacredit equipping each of their
security guards are going to go broke, so don't even worry about it.
If they players insist, start reducing their cargo yields until they
are going broke. Civilian ships may definitely not have spinal
mounts! (The Oberlindes Emissary aside...) Besides, if the players
have the money to buy the stuff outright, it's time to start over. A
meson gun-J (the small TL-15 standard one--think of it as an 8" cruis-
er gun in WWII) costs 400MCr outright, not to mention the 12500kl
fusion plant needed to power it, at an additional 2500MCr. 2900MCr
will buy you about 78 200 ton Free Traders.
> 8) True Speculative Cargo - The trade and commerce section deals with
> speculators buying and selling cargo, but the cargo bought is only
> supposed to go to the world where the ship is going. With this in
> mind, the minimum resale price any good merchant captain will get is
> 90% of its selling price (2 on dice+4 Broker +any Bribery). What
> happened to the "What do you mean, you don't want 10,000 snow cone
> machines... this is a desert planet you idiot". I've got players
> wanting to buy TL15 household items, with replacement parts, to sell
> on any given TL11-14 world. How do you deal with this problem?
I haven't rolled too many merchant captains with Broker-4, but let's
say that 90% is still correct. That's 90% of the selling price, not
the buying price. I'll admit that TL15 industrial world goods can be
sold at a profit almost everywhere--take the example of Glisten and
Overnale in the Spinward Marches. Glisten goods base buying price is
Cr1500/ton. On Overnale (Ag, NI, Starport B) they sell for a base of
Cr9600/ton. We'll make a bundle on every trip! That's where the
referee needs to be a little creative. Say, Overnale is developing
its own industry and has imposed a protective tariff of Cr10000 per
ton on goods from Glisten that must be paid before you can even at-
tempt to sell them. Smuggling is, of course, illegal and not without
hazard. Let's also say that after you've paid your tariff, you real-
ize that an unbalanced exchange situation like this will have drained
all the Imperial currency from Overnale long ago, so you can either
accept payment in local currency (with an inflation rate of 150% per
month) or in barter. Of course, the local goods are only worth about
a quarter of what the Glisten goods are worth per ton, so you have the
choice of leaving three quarters of your barter behind (hope it's not
perishable foodstuffs...) or accepting 3/4 of the price in rapidly
depreciating ducheks. Might as well send the crew on a spree in the
starport to get of the ducheks since they'll only be worth half as
much next run...of course, drunken merchants have a tendency to get
into trouble in strange foreign towns. Do you see what I'm driving
at? If there is a problem with a particular portion of the rules,
invent some sort of explanation for why things won't work the way the
players had hoped, and STICK TO IT.
> I must state that my campaign is running in 1113 pre-Rebellion. I
> would like to see TDR replies. Enough rambling...
> Mike Finn
> [email removed]
Hope some of this is of use to you. Hopefully some others will be
inspired to comment, especially on checking my math in the laser
combat example. When all else fails, think in terms of analogies and
remember that Traveller is supposed to be realistic.
Rob Dean
[email removed]