Rumor Central
Perhaps this is old news to everyone here; if so, I apologise for the wasted
bandwidth. However, it was news to me ...
Yesterday (Tuesday the 29th) I called GDW, and in the course of my conversation
with their phone-answering person (whose name I did not have the presence of
mind to ask for), he mentioned that I ought to submit a written proposal, but
he didn't know to whose attention it should be marked, because "Marc Miller
handles that now, but he will be leaving us soon, and I don't know who is going
to take over". I *DID* have the presence of mind to ask where Marc was going;
the answer was "He will be starting his own company". When I asked what he
will be doing, I was told "I really shouldn't say, but it is not game-related.
It is not a game company". So, I wonder what this means to Traveller, and what
Marc will be doing at his new company ...
More Rumors
Recently, someone asked what was going on at DGP. In a conversation with the
sales clerk at Dream Wizards (one of the local gaming stores; good selection,
list prices or a little higher), I asked if the Solomani/Aslan module was out
yet. There was a pause while he asked Tom Peters (yes, the same Tom Peters
that is a Technical Editor for DGP), who also happens to work at Dream Wizards.
There was maniacal laughter. And no idea when it would be on the shelves (its
been in the "Real Soon Now" stage for a couple of months now).
About a month ago, I sent them a big envelope with a bunch of things in it.
There was a request for the current MegaTraveller Errata (so that I could
compare it to the GDW MegaTraveller Errata; yes, the two differ). I also asked
for a copy of the updated Domain of Deneb stats, and provided a *HUGE* envelope
with *LOTS* of postage, clearly labelled "Errata and DoD Stats". I also sent a
rather long letter in which I described what I wanted and asked a rather large
lot of questions and pointed out some suspected errata. I also enclosed a
small envelope with a more reasonable amount of postage on it, labelled
"Answers to Questions", in case anyone at DGP felt like scrawling brief
answers on my letter and sending it back to me.
I got back two copies of the MegaTraveller Errata, one in the large envelope,
and one in the small envelope. On the back of the small envelope was a hastily
scribbled message from Patty Fugate, wondering if I was the same long-lost Guy
Garnett that she had once met at Origins (yes, I am). At least I know that
someone read some part of what I sent ...
CARP and the LIBRARY Program
I FTP'd Jo Jaquinta's LIBRARY program and have had a chance to play with it for
a few hours. It does quite a few very impressive things (well done, Jo!)
Although I haven't tried it in a gaming session (I can't find anyone in the
Washington DC area who wants to play Traveller) I have some doubts as to its
utility as an on-line referee's aid. Please note (especially Jo!) that these
items reflect my own predjudices at least as much as anything else.
First off, there seems to be no easy way to edit or alter the details that the
program generates for you; as a referee, I would want to be able to do this in
order to tailor a world to my universe or the current plotline. I've been
known to vary the published UWP stats for the Spinward Marches by up to +/- 2
points. (Oh, Crumbs! He changed the Law Level. Be quiet, Penfold!)
More minor quibbles include the terse sector and sub-sector displays; picking
the subsector or world that I was interested in became quite a challenge at
times (especially at that stage where I had only half of the subsectors named).
A better way to do this one would be to make a way to "walk" the subsector map
and display the mainworld stats. Pressing <ENTER> on the subsector display
would then call up the system stats display. Trying to figure out system names
from the first four letters, and then typing in the hex location, is for the
birds! (Right, DM? Good Grief, Yes!)
Those Frigates
Ameer is right; I neglected to compute agility reductions for the Black Globe.
However, I did include the globe's protection in calculating damage to the
target craft.
Personally, I've never thought much of Traveller's treatment of Globe Screens.
If the globe can be flickered, it should be possible to synchronize it with the
firing of the spinal mount. I doubt it would be feasable to synchronize the
flicker to the firing of all the mounts on the ship, though. On the other
hand, it should be possible to arrange the firing of pulse lasers and plasma
and fusion guns to coincide with flicker (in other words, synch some of the
weapons to the globe, rather than synch the globe to the weapons).
One change which should be made to the frigates is to re-organize the laser
batteries. If you use the standard rules, batteries cannot be reconfigured
except by overhauling the ship. Therefore, the batteries should be organized
for maximum UCP factor; change the UCP rating of the lasers to "xx9" and divide
the number of batteries and batteries bearing by 10 (round fractions up). If
whoever collects such things would like a corrected UCP, I would be happy to
send them out; otherwise I won't waste the bandwidth (I waste enough as it is).
I didn't manage to install a factor-9 meson screen on a sub-10,000-ton ship and
still manage to install jump drives, maneuver drives, a spinal weapon of at
least mid-size, agility-6, and at least 15 days endurance. If you have such a
design, I would like to see it; there is still a good chance that there are
bugs in my spreadsheet.
Designing battleriders or system-defense montors (in both cases, they are
non-starships; typically large craft) is another matter entirely. Without the
expense of a jump drive (and the volume of its required fuel), the ship can be
smaller and more cost-effective.
The battleships-vs-battleriders debate can be an interesting subject; which one
is superior depends a lot more on long-range tactical and strategic concerns
than anything else. The best possible tactics a battleship can use when faced
with battleriders is to disengage by jumping. If this is not possible,
threaten the carrier and do as much damage as possible before they get you.
For riders agains a battleship, try to inflict as much damage as possible
before they jump out, and keep as much distance as possible between the enemy
and your carriers (its a long way to walk home ...).
The Attraction of Odd Tech Levels
Tech Levels 13 and 15 are very attractive for starship designs because the
break points for fusion power plants fall at these tech levels. The size and
fuel consumption of the power plant being one of the driving factors in many
ship designs. In addition, turreted laser and missile systems have a break
point at TL 13. Other factors have breakpoints at other tech levels (for
example, hulls at TLs 12 and 14) but these are typically of less impact on the
final design of the ship.
>From a cost-efficency standpoint, it is usually more effective to design a ship
to the lowest TL where the required equipment can be had. This is mostly due
to the (rather silly, in my opinion) way in which the Control Points are
calculated (CP = MCrPrice * 10 * TL). Higher tech items have higher control
requirements, and therefore require bigger computers, more control panels, and
more crew.
Porting Programs
When porting programs to MsDOS, my company has occasionally had a problem with
a memory allocation routine in either Microsoft C or inherent in MsDOS (I am
not really sure which, because I don't work on that project). The problem
manifests itself as an inability to allocate a relatively large memory block,
even though there *SHOULD* be enough free memory to satisfy the request. In
our case, the problem turned out to be fragmentation; enough free memory was
available, but no piece was big enough to satisfy the request. Somewhere, the
memory manager was neglecting to join together adjacent pieces of free memory
as they were being freed. The work-around was to either 1) allocate all of the
required memory all at once, in the beginning of the program, or 2) play some
kind of tricks on the memory management system, to force it to join the free
blocks together (which I am not very clear on; the technique had something to
do with allocating a small block and then extending it to the required size).
My vehicle design system is based on a Quattro Pro spreadsheet (which can also
be saved in a variety of other formats; I used a least-common-denominator
approach) and will run on just about any platform that will run Quattro Pro.
It has been successfully tested in QPro and Lotus on a 2-Mb AT, and has also
worked on a 640k PC-XT (very slow, and with lots of disk I/O, but it worked).
If anybody wants it, I could always ZIP it up, and upload it to Sunbane. There
is no documentation (yet), but you can always try to figure things out.
A Destroyer to go with the Frigates
This is an escort ship to accompany the frigate designs posted earlier. The
ships were designed by the same naval architect, and have been designed with
maximum commonality in mind. Both vessels use identical computer, sensor, and
communications suites, and have an extrordinarily flexable data-link package.
Many minor parts, from lighting panels to circuit junction boxes and even crew
quaters modules are also identical. This commonality helps to ease
maintainance and supply problems. As always, comments and critizism are
appreciated (and may even be heeded); pay special attention for evidence of
errors in the design - I still don't trust the spreadsheet.
CraftID: Destroyer, Type=DD, TL=15, MCr=14,177.992.
Hull: 8550/21375, Disp=9,500, Config=1SL, Armor=58G (ArmorDM=-6).
UnloadedMass=217,003 tons, LoadedMass=220,645 tons.
Power: 2295/4590, Fusion=619,600Mw, NominalDuration=30/90.
Locomotion: 1454/2908, Thrusters=6, Agility=6.
257/514, Jump=2.
NOE=190kph, Cruise=750kph, Max=1,000kph.
Communications: MesonComm=3xSystem, RadioComm=3xSystem, LaserComm=3xSystem,
MaserComm=3xSystem, RadioJam=3xSystem.
Sensors: Densitometer=3xHighPen-1km, Neutrino=3x10kw,
ActiveEMS=3xSystem, PassiveEMS=3xInterstellar,
EMSJam=3xSystem.
ActObjScan=Simple, ActObjPin=Simple, PassObjScan=Routine,
PassObjPin=Routine, PassEngScan=Routine, PassEngPin=Routine.
Offense: Missile=xx7, BLaser=xx9
Battery 1 8
Bearing 1 8
Defense: DefDM=-15, NucDamper=9, MesonScreen=9, BlackGlobe=4.
SandCaster=xx7
Batteries 1
Bearing 1
Control: BasicEnv, BasicLS, ExtLS, AirLocks=9, Gravity, InertialComp.
Computer=3xMod-9/fib, Panel=38xHoloDynamic,
Special=11xLargeHolo, HUD=4xHoloHUD.
Accomodations: Sections=10, Crew=123, (13xBridge, 28xEngineer, 17xCommand,
7xMaintainance, 3xSteward, 54xGunner, 1xMedical).
Bunks=96, SmallStateroom=18, Stateroom=9, SubCraft=None.
Other: Cargo=216kl, Fuel=48,949kl, Scoops, Purifier=24 hours.
ObjSize=Large, EMLevel=Moderate (E-M Masking).
Magazine=(Missile=60 bty-rounds, SandCaster=30 bty-rounds).
Endurance: 30 days Cruise (MDrive=1, Agility=0, Consumption=11.429 kl/hr);
3 more days at full combat power (Consumption=298.371 kl/hr),
and 1 Jump-2 (Consumption=19,237.5kl for Jump-2).
One hour at Full Thrust uses 5.36 hours of Cruise duration.
One hour of Combat Power uses 26.11 hours of Cruise duration.
Notes: Cost is for Prototype, and includes architect's fees.
Production cost would be MCr 11,230.093.
T R A V E L L E R
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Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future
"This is IISS 4736, request permission to taxi to the blast pad, over."
"Ahh ... IISS 4736 ... that you, BJ?"
"Was when I got up this mornin'. You still talkin' to starships, Slim?
"Yuhuh. Well, buddy, we got a lil problem here. Pad 3 is closed for a while."
"What hapened?"
"Oberlindes 43 had a lil drive trouble on final; ruined his whole day."
Wildstar ------------- (aka Guy Garnett) ------------- [email removed]