I've been saving my comments on TNE itself until I calm down from the
fit of apoplexy that I had after I bought it.
The space combat system seemed to be the one bright spot except for its
treatment of missiles, so when _Brilliant_Lances_ came out, I decided to
give it a chance.
Overall, I'd rate the game a near miss. Much of what is new about BL
is what I had hoped the old Megatraveller system would be like instead
of the unsightly cross-breeding of High Guard and the MT vehicle rules
that it turned out to be. Unfortunately, the new system has several
serious problems:
* Detonation lasers as the only form of missile armament don't make sense
at all, especially given the Imperial Rules of War. They made sense in
2300 because a ship under stutterwarp will appear sequentially in a
finite number of relatively predictable locations; the best chance of
achieving a hit is to fire at every place where the target might be.
But if you don't need to do that, why pay for such a sophisticated and
expensive warhead when something as simple as a cloud of shrapnel
fragments will strike the target with enormous levels of kinetic energy
when accelerated to speeds meaningful on the map? Or if you're going
to use a nuclear warhead to generate most of the energy, why waste most
of it on a weapon as inefficient as a detonation laser when you can
simply have the warhead itself strike the target?
Furthermore, nobody (in the Imperium) outside the Imperial Navy should
even have these gadgets; the Imperial Rules of War absolutely prohibit
the use or even possession of nuclear weapons of any sort! It is simply
not believable for them to suddenly be not only available but universal.
Furthermore, from a roleplaying standpoint, the missiles are a GM's
worst nightmare: if 500 kt nuclear weapons are available for use in
space, they are just as available for use against targets on the ground,
and there is no believable way to keep the players from using them.
(Cheap and universally available nuclear dampers might mitigate the
problem, but in that case, there is no believable way to have the sorts
of planetary bombardments that the background clearly indicates were
common during the Rebellion.) While BL is in many ways an advance
over previous Traveller ship combat systems, this problem alone more
than outweighs the advantages of the new system.
To summarize: I can see a role for detonation lasers in the hands of
the military (only), but they shouldn't be the only sort of missile, nor
should they be the default.
(And yes, I realize that the Imperial Rules of War are meaningless
unless you're playing in the Imperium, but the offending missiles are
present in scenarios supposedly set there and then.)
* Detonation laser ranges are far too short. If you don't have to put
lots of beams in lots of places to try to hit a ship under stutterwarp,
the remaining reason to use a nuclear warhead as a detonation laser
rather than in an attempt to directly vaporize the target is so that
you can detonate it outside the range of the target's active defenses.
If a laser powered by the ship's power plant can hit targets ten hexes
away with full penetration, a detonation laser powered by a nuclear
explosion should be able to reach at least that far. Even after allowing
for simpler avionics in a missile guidance system than in a MFD, warheads
should still be able to hit from outside nuclear damper range, at least
at later tech levels.
* While we're on the subject of missiles, command guidance is a poor choice
for the default missile guidance system. Fire control is represented as
a hard problem; given that a range of five hexes produces a round-trip
time delay of one second due to the speed of light, a missile in the same
hex as the target has a much better idea of where to aim than an operator
several hexes away can possibly have, even with relatively stupid data
processing equipment. Furthermore, manual command guidance restricts
ties up the operator for the missile's entire flight time and reduces
the rate of fire; ideally, you want as many missiles in flight as
possible.
This seems to be another idea lifted from Star Cruiser that doesn't really
work, and didn't in Star Cruiser, either, where each hex of range yields
a delay of four seconds. Without FTL communication (which would almost
completely ruin the Traveller universe), remote object control the way
that the rules present it is completely impractical. Furthermore, once
you get past TL 8 or so, electronics technology should be sophisticated
enough to obviate the need for launcher-guided missles altoghether,
except perhaps in a few special cases where special tactical effects are
desired.
* The map scale is too large. Turns are too long, and hexes are so large
that gravity, which should be an important consideration, has almost no
effect. 1000 s turns with 10 Mm hexes (or 20 min turns with 12000 km
hexes) would have preserved the correct time scale, allowed hexes small
enough to reflect the gravitational effects of nearby terrain features,
and neatly gotten rid of half hexes of acceleration.
* The implementation of vectored movement is very clunky. There is no
reason why a ship's heading needs to be rounded off to 30 degrees; any
arbitrary vector on the hex map may be represented as the sum of at
most two vectors along hex rows. With a scale such that one G-turn
changes one's heading vector by one hex, less record keeping would be
required per ship to get movement exactly right than is needed with the
present system. (In other words, something like _Mayday_, with two sets
of vector counters on the ship control sheet rather than the "future"
counter on the board.)
* Armor is too effective. While it is possible to produce a "mission kill"
on a heavily armored ship by destroying most of its systems on the
surface as the game is written, non-meson weapons ought to be able to
vaporize even the most heavily-armored ships, given a sufficiently heavy
bombardment. (Either that, or most of the space combat artwork published
is wildly inaccurate.) Furthermore, a ship can be made that heavily
armored too easily.
* Crew sizes are too large. A type-S scout/courier should be capable of
being permanently operated singlehandedly. A _Gazelle_ should have a
crew of exactly a dozen: four officers and eight enlisted men. Free
traders shouldn't require more than four permanent crew. Changing facts
like these breaks existing campaign materials (quite badly, in the case
of my _Gazelle_-based campaign).
It is unclear whether the crew sizes produced by the ship construction
system are intended for pre- or post-virus settings; presumably, the
(hideously unbelievable) "sneakernet" workaround to the virus would
require larger crews and larger control modifiers; lowering the control
modifier would bring down crew sizes a bit. More usefully, providing
some sort of system for positions to be combined (or reduced in the case
of non-military vessels) and for maintenance duties to be relegated to
base personnel could also bring crew sizes back in line.
* Where have PA turrets and energy weapons gone? I can live without pulse
lasers, and I miss energy weapons only because they logically scale up
from what tanks are normally armed with, but _Gazelle_ and _Kinunir_ both
rely on accelerator turrets and barbettes for their main armament. (BTW,
whatever happened to _Kinunir_'s black globe? Or the grav APC?)
* Maneuver drive endurance has gone from far too long (under MegaTraveller)
to far too short. One of the basic assumptions about how ships work has
always been that maneuver drives provide constant thrust for many weeks,
making them actually useful for in-system travel. Changing this reduces
the value of fast maneuver drives for in-system travel (trip time is a
function of the number of G-turns that you burn, not your maneuver drive
rating) and drastically alters the way that system defense units operate.
Finally, two gripes about the game components themselves:
* The page layout is too busy; the graphics at the top and bottom detract
rather than add, and the typeface is such that the eye slides right off.
* The game components are physically too large. Because the hex maps
provided are so large (for the benefit of those who go in for miniatures),
the available playing area in hexes is too small relative to ships'
weapon and sensor ranges. Star Cruiser had the same problem, but
provided ship counters small enough to be used on 25mm maps, allowing
the problem to be fixed. Unfortunately, the counters provided in BL
are too large to be of any use on a map with hexes that are small enough.
- --
Palmer T. Davis ___ UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of
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