I've seen some hard sci-fi shows and enjoyed them quite a bit. I want to know what you guys think of Traveller. It has been around a while but I've never played it. Are there others that might do a better job? If so, give me some names. :)
Quote from: ChrisGunter;854637I've seen some hard sci-fi shows and enjoyed them quite a bit. I want to know what you guys think of Traveller. It has been around a while but I've never played it. Are there others that might do a better job? If so, give me some names. :)
It has a very narrow focus: You play middle-aged military vets in a relatively low-tech (Think
Firefly) galactic empire. When I was younger I saw this tight focus as a flaw, but now that I'm older I find it's specificity and groundedness sorta refreshing. It's about what it's about, and it does that one thing beautifully.
The 2d6-based system is exquisite in it's simplicity.
Even moreso than D&D it really shines when used for "Here's the map... now what do you want to do?"-style open-ended sandbox games.
EDIT: I should note that I'm talking about old-school Traveller. I'm only vaguely familiar with the more recent editions.
Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;854641It has a very narrow focus: You play middle-aged military vets in a relatively low-tech (Think Firefly) galactic empire.
Military veterans aren't the only career. Merchant is available and very popular since you can start play with a ship which is larger than the small scoutship that you may get as an ex-Scout.
I concur with the rest of your comments.
Quote from: Bren;854645Military veterans aren't the only career. Merchant is available .
LOL forgot about merchants. Around these parts back in the day it was all scouts and marines, scouts and marines... nobody ever played anything else unless they were drafted.
And who needs blasters or lightsabers? Double-barreled sawed-off shotguns and cutlasses were the weapons of our future. Good times, good times.
Back when I was in high school Classic Traveller was our got generic system for everything. It is a very flexible set of rules.
Computers and energy weapons stand out as being clunky and low tech feeling.
It is a great game.
Merchants are actually one of the best careers with a low 5+ survival roll and 4+ commission, promotions are 10+, the navy is 10+ commission, and 8+ promotion. Since commissions and promotions provide additional skills the merchants are a great way to build a mature character with lots of skill levels.
Scouts are 7+ just to survive but they always get two skills per term. Army is relatively safe at 5+ and good or promotions 6+ and commissions 5+.
Really, Navy and Marines might provide a few more combat skills but fewer skills in general.
Quote from: ChrisGunter;854637I've seen some hard sci-fi shows and enjoyed them quite a bit. I want to know what you guys think of Traveller. It has been around a while but I've never played it. Are there others that might do a better job? If so, give me some names. :)
What is hard sci-fi?
Hard sci-fi is usually sci-fi where the technology itself is both part of the subject matter used to express the theme of a story as well as accurate or plausible science. The tech and it's implications matter. Softer sci-fi often has the tech just be a trapping or flavour or it matters, but is far less central. People have started to strangely apply the hard scifi label to any sci-fi that is either militaristic or has comparatively familiar technology (as it is at least more likely that the science that's familiar to us will be more accurate) even if it's not a concern in a given piece of fiction, so people may also just mean that. Usually a good test is whether or not the tech and its implications are central and accurate (hard) or secondary and relaxed (soft).
Quote from: NathanIW;854683Hard sci-fi is usually sci-fi where the technology itself is part of the subject matter used to express the theme of a story. The tech and it's implications matter. Softer sci-fi often has the tech just be a trapping or flavour or it matters, but is far less central. People have started to strangely apply the label to any sci-fi that is either militaristic or has comparatively familiar technology, so people may also mean that.
So which shows would have hard sci-fi?
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;854684So which shows would have hard sci-fi?
I'm not a big TV watcher. I'd go with recommending the novel Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson if someone is looking for a real exemplar of hard sci-fi.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;854684So which shows would have hard' sci-fi?
Not many. Most are space opera (Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica), or have truly nonsensical science (Dr. Who, Stargate, Quantum Leap).
Firefly probably counts, although some might say that the tech is kinda window-dressing. Space: Above and Beyond would count. The Aliens movie franchise might, if you just accept that FTL travel is acceptably plausible.
Traveller: there have been 5 or 6 editions of traveller, not counting ports to GURPS, Hero System, and D20 (T20 in this case). Classic Traveller and Mongoose Traveller are as close as 1st and 2nd edition AD&D (which is to say the specifics might be different, but the game plays out in much the same way). There is a new edition, T5, competing with Mongoose as a ''current" edition. It still looks like it could eventually be revised into a truly good system in a couple of years, if anyone is still interested in it at that point. Too bad, Marc Miller is one of the few old school designers who is still supporting a still widely played game he invented in the 70s.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;854684So which shows would have hard sci-fi?
None come to mind.
For books: Add Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Larry Niven as three older authors. CJ Cherryh's Downbelow Station and the other Alliance-Union and Chanur stories, and James Hogan a bit less old. And Davin Brin somewhat more recent.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;854684So which shows would have hard sci-fi?
Moon, The Martian, Gravity, Contact, 2001, 2010, some of the Cyberpunk stuff like Johnny Memmonic but not Total Recall (as long as we assume Arnold isn't just trapped in the machine for the whole movie) or Minority report (which has psychics and prescience).
Quote from: Bren;854693None come to mind.
For books: Add Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Larry Niven as three older authors. CJ Cherryh's Downbelow Station and the other Alliance-Union and Chanur stories, and James Hogan a bit less old. And Davin Brin somewhat more recent.
Brin gets softer as he goes along. It gets touch and go with older authors as psionics were still getting some serious research back when they were writing. The "fiction" in "science fiction" does permit us to experiment with impossible concepts, but you quickly get into edge case territory if you don't have a very good reason. For instance you could use telepathy as a catalyst for a story exploring sociological concepts of privacy if the story was mainly about the sociological concepts and not about how cool telepathy makes everything. It's a fuzzy line but, in the end, at least with modern works, psionics are a disproven pseudo science that don't have a place in hard science fiction.
But a device that can scan and decrypt brainwaves at a distance and transmit them into the user's mind is probably hard science fiction. And it might be possible to genetically engineer an organism with that capacity. So even that line is pretty fuzzy.
Quote from: Willie the Duck;854692The Aliens movie franchise might, if you just accept that FTL travel is acceptably plausible.
The FTL drive in Alien/s is pretty slow. It still takes months or years to get anywhere. Aside from that it is mostly hard sci-fi if you stop before things start drifing into magic cloning and predators with viable FTL and the like.
For other hard SF shows you tend to need to get away from standard hollywood fare.
Really distance becomes irrelevant with FTL as you go back in time as you go FTL. In one of my settings the FTL actually includes an engineered time loop that causes the ship to sit in extradimensional stasis until it catches.
It depends on how high a bar you set on "accurate science as we can predict the future really will look" for the show/fiction. Obviously, few shows are going to show rotating-spin gravity emulation spaceships unless it fits the esthetic of the show (such as Babylon 5, which was a space opera in all other regards), or being 99% fuel (or in the case of 2001, was moving very slowly, inside a single system), but we tend to accept that because reality is very boring.
Traveller is considered "hard science" despite having FTL drives, artificial gravity (both pulling you to the deck plate and for levitating "Luke's landspeeder"-esque craft. Mostly because those things are convenience conventions that don't change the basics of the universe. You still fly ships between stars at a slow pace that uses lots of fuel, and usually send down a landing craft, as opposed to the whole interstellar spaceship. You have to worry about stocking fuel and spare parts. Communication is with "radio" (meson radios, but in the 70s that seemed like something that would realistically eventually evolve) which can be detected and/or jammed. There aren't "space storms" and weird temporal anomalies every other week. Space combat involves huge distances, extended accelleration times, and balancing slow-to-catch-up missiles that can be shot down with sandcasters and energy weapons which decrease in energy at the square of the distance. Sure there are psionics, and the alien races are conveniently all using the same chirality of molecules as us and can exist in our atmosphere, but most of the ones that aren't Earth-originated are non-bipeds.
An alternative to Traveller is GURPS Space and related books, though if you don't already know GURPS, or feel like doing your own campaign design, or like details, then it's probably not for you. If those things _do_ sound appealing though, it's good at what it offers.
And if you want a super hard-core hard sci fi tactical space battle system, the extreme end of the scale might be to use the 3D wargame Attack Vector: Tactical (http://www.adastragames.com/attack-vector-tactical/) for your space combat system. (grin (http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5470f0aae4b08efc8c773f95/t/547e088de4b0debe97ca20ea/1417545869237/vms_vs_dv.pdf)) The publisher also offers a system for doing Traveller space combat (http://www.adastragames.com/traveller/).
(https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1648182.jpg)
Star Frontiers was actually fairly hard SF. There is no FTL, (ships hit a specific speed and drop into some sort of hyperspace) no anti gravity (ships are towers). There are laser guns, and a few other exotic weapons. (But they stay fairly within plausible limits.) No psionics.
Then the so-called "fans" started fucking it up more than Zebs Guide did.
Albedo is even more hard SF. No FTL (An incredibly dangerous hyperspace), no anti-gravity, no lasers.
Quote from: NathanIW;854683Hard sci-fi is usually sci-fi where the technology itself is both part of the subject matter used to express the theme of a story as well as accurate or plausible science. The tech and it's implications matter. Softer sci-fi often has the tech just be a trapping or flavour or it matters, but is far less central. People have started to strangely apply the hard scifi label to any sci-fi that is either militaristic or has comparatively familiar technology (as it is at least more likely that the science that's familiar to us will be more accurate) even if it's not a concern in a given piece of fiction, so people may also just mean that. Usually a good test is whether or not the tech and its implications are central and accurate (hard) or secondary and relaxed (soft).
This^^^. I want a we have to deal with hydroponics issues and thrust fuel ratios and space walking to repair something feeling.
I have never played it, and don't know much about it. But, one RPG advertises itself as "the ultimate in hard-science SF role-playing" - "Stellar Wind," which you can find here (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112165/Stellar-Wind-2nd-Edition). Sadly, there is no print edition.
Quote from: ChrisGunter;854811This^^^. I want a we have to deal with hydroponics issues and thrust fuel ratios and space walking to repair something feeling.
Remove the aliens (or make them more alien) and maybe remove the lasers and other energy weapons and Star Frontiers about covers it. Spacewalks to repair damage. Fuel issues, etc. There was even an article that added solar sail ships.
2300AD is fairly hard sci fi.
The one gap (for me) in Traveller as hard Sci-Fi is space movement. Movement should be in 3 dimensions, and to be appropriately hard science, you should need the Pythagorean formula to correctly compute movement in normal space.
Classic Traveller is one of my favorite RPGs ever. Its my go-to RPG for science fiction and my fav genre is space horror which is where I focus my games.
I've played Trav for 35 years with many different GMs. You can get very hard science if you want, and you can get cinematic if you like.
Trav is my default system for running Aliens campaigns. It's fast and deadly, which forces players to play smart or die easily. Guns, especially automatic weapons, are unforgiving.
BTW, if you are interested in sci-fi RPGs, I highly recommend checking out Stars Without Number which is free.
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/86467/Stars-Without-Number-Free-Edition
SWN is a mosh of D&D and Traveller rules.
Quote from: Willie the Duck;854692Firefly probably counts, although some might say that the tech is kinda window-dressing.
I wouldn't count the creation of a fellow who said -- in reference to the series -- that "science makes my head hurt."
Quote from: Bren;854863to be appropriately hard science, you should need the Pythagorean formula to correctly compute movement
I use whooshing sounds instead. :)
Quote from: Spinachcat;854870I use whooshing sounds instead. :)
I do to. For Star Wars. ;) But SW is space opera. You can tell by William's leitmotifs.
Traveller, always and forever. My favorite game probably of all time.
One GURPS setting book I love, that you can probably find on eBay or something, was Terradyne - hard SF in the Solar System prior to FTL. I think it did a good job with "advanced but not super-advanced" space and all it's attendant challenges, without all that "transhuman" nonsense.
Quote from: Bren;854863The one gap (for me) in Traveller as hard Sci-Fi is space movement. Movement should be in 3 dimensions, and to be appropriately hard science, you should need the Pythagorean formula to correctly compute movement in normal space.
I was pretty sure Traveller did have a 3d system in there? Star Frontiers has some 3d rules as does Universe. Loved Universe's 3d star map.
If not you could probably plug in SPI's Delta-Vee system or any other 3d ones from board games.
Personally I dont see 3d combat as being much of a additive unless you are using fighters or the ships have defined weap tops and bottoms you want to get above or below. Like Star Blazers for example where positioning was important but at some of the massive ranges employed it became moot.
But I like having it in a game for those who want it and those times it becomes crucial.
The sector maps were 2D. I honestly don't recall what localized movement was like, but the smaller maps I recall seeing for Traveller were also 2D.
3D space movement is really only relevant if you have more than three ships or other bodies involved. Three or fewer will always have a definable plane connecting them. Two bodies are always connected by a line segment.
It is a changing plane relative to absolute space, but it is always a plane.
Classic Traveller did have vectored movement for ships. IIRC this was changed to range bands in the fleet level supplement. The Mayday boxed game used hexes.
Quote from: DavetheLost;8549703D space movement is really only relevant if you have more than three ships or other bodies involved. Three or fewer will always have a definable plane connecting them. Two bodies are always connected by a line segment.
It is a changing plane relative to absolute space, but it is always a plane.
Classic Traveller did have vectored movement for ships. IIRC this was changed to range bands in the fleet level supplement. The Mayday boxed game used hexes.
If your game has facing, inertia, and/or seeking weapons or other objects (debris, shuttles, spacewalkers...) with their own vectors, then you get more than 3 relevant points even in situations with only 2 ships...
Quote from: Omega;854804Star Frontiers was actually fairly hard SF. There is no FTL, (ships hit a specific speed and drop into some sort of hyperspace) no anti gravity (ships are towers). There are laser guns, and a few other exotic weapons. (But they stay fairly within plausible limits.) No psionics.
Then the so-called "fans" started fucking it up more than Zebs Guide did.
Albedo is even more hard SF. No FTL (An incredibly dangerous hyperspace), no anti-gravity, no lasers.
I don't think I've ever heard someone call hyperspace either hard science or 'not ftl.' Interesting.
Well, I think it's a good game, possibly a great one, including mechanically. The lifepaths are, I admit, my favourite part of it, as they help in actually creating characters and are a happy medium between point-buy and random rolling, with the added benefit of the final characters already being tied to the setting:).
The ease of doing sandbox games is just icing on the cake for me;).
Quote from: Willie the Duck;855076I don't think I've ever heard someone call hyperspace either hard science or 'not ftl.' Interesting.
Current science is leaning to some sort of hyperspace or other state as about the only way to get from point A to B without taking a few generations. Albedo's jump drive was incredibly dangerous to use. A hard jump could leave the crew with radiation poisoning, or dead.
Quote from: AsenRG;855078Well, I think it's a good game, possibly a great one, including mechanically. The lifepaths are, I admit, my favourite part of it, as they help in actually creating characters and are a happy medium between point-buy and random rolling, with the added benefit of the final characters already being tied to the setting:).
The ease of doing sandbox games is just icing on the cake for me;).
Traveller hit a-lot of the right buttons and it was effectively the first to try things like the life path concept. Combined with its semi-hard fiction setting and you have something that just clicks for some players.
Whereas Megatraveller seems to have hit a few of the wrong buttons.
Quote from: Skarg;855057If your game has facing, inertia, and/or seeking weapons or other objects (debris, shuttles, spacewalkers...) with their own vectors, then you get more than 3 relevant points even in situations with only 2 ships...
I specifically said three or more bodies require more than three points. Three or fewer will define a plane, more than three will not. Facing and inertia do not change the fact that any three objects will define a plane. The plane may change (relative to a fixed arbitrary X,Y,Z axis system), but its existance will not.
So seeking weapons, shuttles, spacewalkers, debris, et al. are covered in my original post.
I still remain unconvinced that tracking 3D motion is worth the extra work for game play. And, yes, I have played table top miniatures games with several systems of 3 dimensional movement.
Honestly I think, if they'd put a bit more of Survival Margin into Megatraveller. If we'd seen the human side of the faction leaders as the metaplot rolled along, it would have softened things. A little cleaner technical material would have also helped. But most of all: better covers, those things sucked.
Quote from: DavetheLost;854970The Mayday boxed game used hexes.
I remember one of the earliest iterations of Mayday suggested using blacking scratch-art paper (white paper with wax blacking) to track vectors of ships, missiles, etc.
I was 10 or so at the time, so it's fairly vague, but I recall never trying it for lack of players.
Better covers? The Classic Traveller black covers were masterpieces of minimalist design. The most instantly recognizable RPG line ever.
Now the interior art and some of the colour covers for later editions... MegaTraveller, well, let's just not go there, it was better than T4, but not as good as Classic.
Yeah, the Megatraveller covers are the ones I meant. Though it would also have been nice if advanced character creation was simply forgotten.
Quote from: Bren;854908The sector maps were 2D. I honestly don't recall what localized movement was like, but the smaller maps I recall seeing for Traveller were also 2D.
You mean you never stacked Traveller maps? I'd just stack them and add z-axis jump routes to create 3d space.
Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;854641It has a very narrow focus: You play middle-aged military vets in a relatively low-tech...
Huh? Not sure what game you are playing, but Traveller has much much more than that. We simply added our own classes... In my current Traveller game you can play the standard CT core classes and the add-on Navy, Scout, and Merchant prince Classes.
The Other class was just kind of a vague mismash where all the other classes were given a generic pool of skills and abilities and you could play what you want with the emphasis on roleplaying.
We still made up our own classes though. In my Traveller games you can play;
A detective
A cop or police officer
A scientist
A construction worker
Member of a religious order
Emergency service technician
An engineer
An architect
A servant
An entertainer
An artist
a paid companion
A professional athlete
A media personality or broadcaster
A member of the underworld
just to name a few...
Here's just a small sample of additional homebrewed character classes;
http://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/rules/chargen/index.html
Quote from: GameDaddy;855194Huh? Not sure what game you are playing, but Traveller has much much more than that. We simply added our own classes...
Traveller is not like something because you homebrewed from it? I'm confused.
I'm pretty sure his point was, because of the character creation process, most characters started the game in the 35-45 year old range. Most of the original careers were military (other than straight up merchants, which makes sense for a sci-fi alagory to age of sail fortune-seekers).
Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium added around half a dozen more careers. Barbarian, Hunter, Scientist, Bureaucrat, Diplomat, Noble, Belter, am I missing any?
Anyhow, T5's character creation has some pretty broad careers with lots of options. It's really neat but I miss the simple flow through chart sometimes. I think that's part of why T4 will always be my favorite, despite its many issues, it had the cleanest character creation with the best range of skills and careers + schools. T5 may be the ultimate manifestation of Traveller but it's got every dial turned to 11 and the distortion is distracting.
Quote from: DavetheLost;855097I specifically said three or more bodies require more than three points. Three or fewer will define a plane, more than three will not. Facing and inertia do not change the fact that any three objects will define a plane. The plane may change (relative to a fixed arbitrary X,Y,Z axis system), but its existance will not.
But facing tells you whether the object in the plane with you is also in the 3D arc of your weapon or whether you are properly lined up with the docking bay on the ventral surface of the carrier ship or with the weapon hardpoints on the dorsal surface. Simplifying so that none of that matters does make 2D movement less unrealistic (by virtue of making other things more unrealistic).
QuoteI still remain unconvinced that tracking 3D motion is worth the extra work for game play. And, yes, I have played table top miniatures games with several systems of 3 dimensional movement.
OK. I don't need to convince you. I prefer 3D movement. And in my experience it is extremely rare to have space combat with only 2 or 3 objects involved. But whatever floats your grav-boat.
Quote from: GameDaddy;855193You mean you never stacked Traveller maps? I'd just stack them and add z-axis jump routes to create 3d space.
Nope. Never did that. How did you deal with jump routes from higher to lower maps?
One of the things I really liked about Space Quest (https://rpggeek.com/rpg/1967/space-quest) (and otherwise pretty goofy D&D inspired space opera game) was the 3D star maps you created. 2D sectors and jump routes just don't work well for me. It always makes me think we are playing Wooden Ships and Iron Men or something. For hex maps, I liked the spiral up and down system from the board game Godsfire (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2503/godsfire). Movement wasn't % accurate (but neither is hex movement) but it was more accurate while still being simple.
Traveller was my first RPG love in 1977. Unfortunately she never loved me back, and eventually I moved on. She still has a tender place in my heart - I can't stand to toss all those little black books, and they still take up space on my shelf - but like Pygmalion, I sculpted my own vision and fell in love with it. Skimmed the LBBs for about an hour a few years back, but I am not much of one for nostalgia, and there is nothing for me there now.
-clash
Quote from: Omega;855086Traveller hit a-lot of the right buttons and it was effectively the first to try things like the life path concept. Combined with its semi-hard fiction setting and you have something that just clicks for some players.
Whereas Megatraveller seems to have hit a few of the wrong buttons.
TNE came with more wrong buttons.
T4 had even more.
T5 was covered with wrong buttons.
Quote from: DavetheLost;855097I still remain unconvinced that tracking 3D motion is worth the extra work for game play. And, yes, I have played table top miniatures games with several systems of 3 dimensional movement.
Adding the third dimension seems like the way to do but actually isn't. Because in reality what matter in space combat is delta-vee.
Delta-vee is the total change in velocity at space can do before running out of fuel. It can also be looked as a change in velocity over time which is important for when your total is effectively unlimited.
Every maneuver in space require X delta-vee in Y time for it to happen. If the craft can't do that it can't do the maneuver. This particularly important when you near a significant gravitational source. For example you have two opposing starships in orbit around a planet.
If the orbit of the two starship are co-planar then that determines a list of viable manuevuers they can use against each other. If their orbits are out of plane with each then they are limited to another set of manuevuers. It is similar to the idea of energy management in dog fighting aircraft.
What does this mean for gaming? Well it can make for a much less involved form of starship combat. With the players tracking just a few numbers of a delta-vee budget. It especially works well with RPG starship combat where the focus is on on PC starship versus NPC enemy starships.
For me I do most of it in my help with the starship stats as a guide. This is because my other hobby is writing historically accurate spacecraft for space simulators (like this this list http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/). I flew hundreds of mission in testing out my add-ons. If you want exact number I will have to the math. But ballparkwise I know how thing work under circumstances in space.
For example if the two starships are out of plane while orbit around a planet it is very difficult for one to get a shot or approach the other craft. This is because it takes a lot of energy over a short time to shift the plane of your orbit and if you are not co-planar you will be approaching each other at a very high rate of speed without any effective way of meaningfully slowing down relative to each other.
However if you are close to the orbital plane of your enemy then it is possible to approach him at whatever speed you think best. The maneuvering will be mostly about fighting for the right time to take the best shop by raising and lowering the orbit so that the two crafts intersect in such a way that is best for the shot.
Quote from: Bren;855238But facing tells you whether the object in the plane with you is also in the 3D arc of your weapon or whether you are properly lined up with the docking bay on the ventral surface of the carrier ship or with the weapon hardpoints on the dorsal surface. Simplifying so that none of that matters does make 2D movement less unrealistic (by virtue of making other things more unrealistic).
What important especially around a planet is the path of your orbit. For example if your orbit is not close to the plane of your target orbit there no way for even most fictional spacecraft to slow down fast enough to approach without going too fast. Even if you time your orbit right for an interception.
Facing is not that important as most spacecraft can be built to rotate quickly around their center of mass. It not like aircraft where they have to point forward in order to remain airborne.
Quote from: estar;855282Facing is not that important as most spacecraft can be built to rotate quickly around their center of mass. It not like aircraft where they have to point forward in order to remain airborne.
Like pretty much everything, that depends. Rotating quickly around your center of mass is a problem if it turns the crew's brains to jelly in their seat, tosses them around the ship like broken straws because no one was strapped in, or stresses the ship's frame.
Quote from: estar;855282What important especially around a planet is the path of your orbit. For example if your orbit is not close to the plane of your target orbit there no way for even most fictional spacecraft to slow down fast enough to approach without going too fast. Even if you time your orbit right for an interception.
Facing is not that important as most spacecraft can be built to rotate quickly around their center of mass. It not like aircraft where they have to point forward in order to remain airborne.
Exactly. Spacecraft are essentially big turrets.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;855268TNE came with more wrong buttons.
T4 had even more.
T5 was covered with wrong buttons.
For me it's just that too many of the buttons still put out the wrong results when they're pushed. I love it in principle but it still gives odd results. They're all things that can be fixed but then they're house ruled and unofficial.
For instance if you assume the Heavy class makes vehicle mounts twice as large as the ones listed in Vehicle Maker then you can make a tank with a gun that can penetrate another tank's armor. As written you can't. Not only that but the weapon mounts on an ultra light flier have the exact same limitations as the tank.
If I had to guess it'd be a case of I just write them I don't user or play them.
Quote from: flyingmice;855285Exactly. Spacecraft are essentially big turrets.
They can be pretty slow tracking turrets, especially with large ships. But Traveller has always assumed that ships rotate to bring guns to bear. It's also favoured abstract combat over mapped combat.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;855268TNE came with more wrong buttons.
T4 had even more.
T5 was covered with wrong buttons.
They might be the wrong buttons for you, but they're the right buttons for me.
One thing I think hasn't been really touched on in this thread is the "Feel" of traveller.
I'd call it "Medium Sci-Fi" as opposed to hard or soft sci-fi. The official 3rd Imperium setting that is. It's inspired buy Golden Age Science Fiction. It's Imperial/Colonial in theme. Is definitely pre "New-Wave" Sci-Fi. And to me always felt like the year 1850 (pre-telegraph) in space. The Age of the Great Empires is very much alive, travel to the far flung parts of the empire is slow and arduous. There is no faster than light travel or communications.
I was just writing up on my own by chance, a list of things that make "Traveller" Sci-Fi feel different than other Sci-Fi settings. I'll paste below what I have so far.
Books that heavily inspired the original authors
E.C. Tubb - The Dumarest of Terra novels (The Winds of Gath)
H. Beam Piper - Space Viking, Uller Uprising, Terro-Human
Books that almost for sure inspired the original authors
Bertram Chandler - John Grimes series (Scout service, then Merchant, then Pirate)
Bertram Chandler - Rim World series
Issac Asimov - Foundation series
Poul Anderson - Polysotechnic/Technic League, Flandry novels, Van Rijn novels
Heinlein - Rocket Ship Calileo, Space Cadet
Niven & Pournell - Mote in Gods Eye, CoDominion series
Jerry Pournelle - Falkenburgs Legion, War World, Jannisaries series
Jerry Pournelle - King Davids Spaceship (3rd empire re-expansion period)
Larry Niven - Ringworld stories, Neutron Star, Tales of Known space stories.
David Drake - Hammers Slammers (though more 2300AD leaning)
Traveller 3rd Imperium tropes
Imperial Science Fiction
More Golden Age Sci-Fi though with some advances.
Hard’ish Sci-Fi.
Definitely not Science Fantasy like Star Wars
Not at all New Wave Sci-Fi. (No psychodelia)
More Noir and shades of grey then Black & White morality of Star Wars
Hard Boiled sentiments, criminal activity and easy violence
Space version of the Great Age of Empires (1850’s to 1914)
Space 1889 themes and feels are common. Just not the steam tech feel.
Feudal, Imperial, Colonial governments as travel/com times are so long
1945-65 (Pre-Star Wars) view of what future tech would be like
Libertarian themes (Sword Worlds)
No faster than light travel or communications
No Mechs
Artificial Gravity exists, but only at higher tech levels
Floating Cities, Grav cars, Grav tanks at higher tech levels
Varying Tech levels across worlds. Some stone age, some pre-industrial, some almost at the level of the Ancients.
Robots may be common but AI is not
Asimov’s I-Robot though would fit in the setting
Computers can be powerful but are always large by todays standards.
VR might exist? but not the focus of the game.
Holograms exist but are not the focus of the game.
Small tablets exist but must be slaved to static computer.
No smart phones, instead Dick Tracy watches.
No internet, but sort of with the Library Data databases. 1000’s of planetary DB’s
Not focused on Bionics but does exist. No Cyborg Commandoes.
Not focused on Genetic Engineering but it does exist. No Juicers.
Cyberpunk is anathema to the setting. Not what it’s about.
Not Transhumanisim. Galactic Imperial Sci-Fi.
Many Sapient Aliens, some very bizarre, but few with space empires of their own.
Varying tech levels across space.
Psionics exist though are very rare and are more subtle than Marvel Comics powers.
Characters are Conquistadores, Mercenaries, Freebooters, Explorers, Merchants, Salvagers, Entrepreneurs, Adventurers, Rogues, Troubleshooters, Spies, Archeologists, Smugglers, Criminals, Scientists, Contractors for Hire.
Often the players will be doing criminal acts, be it for their own purposes or as Robin-hoods.
Action and Adventure more than High Concept or Morality plays
Patrons are the adventure givers, hiring the players for some task.
Mega Corporations more powerful than small stellar states exist.
Modelled after the British East India company or the Hudson's Bay company.
Mega Corps are the Government, Police, Army, Medical services in many systems.
The “Ancients” seeded the nearby galactic arm with uplifted sonphonts.
Several varieties of Human exist because of this.
Vargr and Aslan also exist as a result of this.
Quote from: Bren;855283Like pretty much everything, that depends. Rotating quickly around your center of mass is a problem if it turns the crew's brains to jelly in their seat, tosses them around the ship like broken straws because no one was strapped in, or stresses the ship's frame.
Yes but what are talking about here in terms of time scales? Most starship combats games the turns are in terms of units like 15 minutes, 1 hours, etc. Not seconds like melee combat.
Traveller ship to ship combat has always been pretty slow paced and long ranged. 100 000s of kilometers, Gs of acceleration, hours of nail biting while trying to pick the enemy ship out of the background radiation. Yes I know, infrared cameras totally invalidate that. Be very very quiet, I'm hunting submarines.
Quote from: Gwarh;855302One thing I think hasn't been really touched on in this thread is the "Feel" of traveller.
I'd call it "Medium Sci-Fi" as opposed to hard or soft sci-fi. The official 3rd Imperium setting that is. It's inspired buy Golden Age Science Fiction. It's Imperial/Colonial in theme. Is definitely pre "New-Wave" Sci-Fi. And to me always felt like the year 1850 (pre-telegraph) in space. The Age of the Great Empires is very much alive, travel to the far flung parts of the empire is slow and arduous. There is no faster than light travel or communications.
...
Books that heavily inspired the original authors
E.C. Tubb - The Dumarest of Terra novels (The Winds of Gath)
H. Beam Piper - Space Viking, Uller Uprising, Terro-Human
Books that almost for sure inspired the original authors
Bertram Chandler - John Grimes series (Scout service, then Merchant, then Pirate)
Bertram Chandler - Rim World series
Issac Asimov - Foundation series
Poul Anderson - Polysotechnic/Technic League, Flandry novels, Van Rijn novels
Heinlein - Rocket Ship Calileo, Space Cadet
Niven & Pournell - Mote in Gods Eye, CoDominion series
Jerry Pournelle - Falkenburgs Legion, War World, Jannisaries series
Jerry Pournelle - King Davids Spaceship (3rd empire re-expansion period)
Larry Niven - Ringworld stories, Neutron Star, Tales of Known space stories.
David Drake - Hammers Slammers (though more 2300AD leaning)
That's interesting, becuase I have always thought of Traveller as more
Hard Sci-Fi, rather than
Golden Age Sci-Fi.
Lots of these were inspirational for my earlier games, but so was plenty of hard Sci-Fi stories and artwork from
Analog magazine and
Isaac Asimov magazine as well as
Terran Trade Authority illustrated starship books.
Also a few great sci-fi authors overlooked here...
Andre Norton - the
Witchworld series (An inspiration for my early pre 1980's D&D/Traveller crossover game).
Fred Saberhagen's
Beserker series...
Anything by
Poul Anderson is still very hard SF. Everyone mentions
David Falkayn and
Nichlos van Rijn. No one remembers the Turing AI's. Almost no one remembers the Puppeteers with their Indestructible starship hulls... Well almost Indestructible. Louis Wu figured out that the tidal forces of a Neutron Star or Black hole are capable of reaching through a puppeteer starship hull to kill everything inside the hull and warped it. All of this. Total hard science. and added to my Traveller campaigns.
Arthur C Clarke - Rendezvous with RamaJoe Haldeman - The Forever War (Also a war where Nuclear weapons were routinely issued to infantry platoons)
Greg Bear - Blood Music (A later sci-fi entry but good nonetheless)
Hal Clement - Mission of Gravity
Frederik Pohl - Gateway
The Blue World - Jack Vance
Starship Troopers - Robert A. Heinlein
Dune - Frank Herbert
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
Slan - A.E. van Vogt
The Rediscovery of Man - Cordwainer Smith
The Space Merchants - Frederik Pohl
Little Fuzzy - H Beam Piper
Triplanetary - E.E. Smith
Stand on Zanzibar - John Brunner
Babel-17 by Samuel R. DelanyThis last is one of my personal favorites...
During an interstellar war one side develops a language, Babel-17, that can be used as a weapon. Learning it turns one into an unwilling traitor as it alters perception and thought. The change is made more dangerous by the language's seductive enhancement of other abilities. This is discovered by the beautiful starship captain, linguist, poet, and telepath Rydra Wong. She is recruited by her government to discover how the enemy are infiltrating and sabotaging strategic sites. Initially Babel-17 is thought to be a code used by enemy agents. Rydra Wong realizes it is a language, and finds herself becoming a traitor as she learns it. She is rescued by her dedicated crew, figures out the danger, and neutralizes its effects.
The novel deals with several issues related to the peculiarities of language, how conditions of life shape the formation of words and meaning, and how the words themselves can shape the actions of people.These are all hard science Sci-Fi books from the Classical Sci-Fi age 1940-1965 that completely fit in with
Traveller, and from which
Traveller was built.
You damn kids don't get off my lawn. Instead lay around on my lawn, and read some of the real sci-fi classics, and get truly inspired while I fire up the Barbecue grill for a right and proper outdoor party!
Dumarest was fun. People would get frozen for space travel or took drugs to slow down their metabolism. Just be careful holding that glass of wine! You are holding it for three months now!
One of the first posts mentions Traveller being very narrow in focus. You were a soldier, a scout or a merchant. Doesn't this make it very broad in focus?
Babel-17 is one of the best. If you can run a Traveller game like that, you got it made.
Quote from: ChrisGunter;854811This^^^. I want a we have to deal with hydroponics issues and thrust fuel ratios and space walking to repair something feeling.
Comparing the 1970s versions I know, Traveller is like D&D: a starting-point framework for exploration of a wide range of situations, reflecting the flavor of a body of literary inspirations. Neither is very detailed even in most of the areas specifically treated.
Some examples of inspirational referents were the interstellar-adventure series of Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Gordon Dickson, Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert, Keith Laumer, Larry Niven, Andre Norton and H. Beam Piper. Those are generally concerned with larger, social-scale matters rather than quotidian aspects of space travel (which in most stories is hand-waved with space warps and artificial gravity and cheap power from nuclear reactions).
Quote from: Bren;854908The sector maps were 2D. I honestly don't recall what localized movement was like, but the smaller maps I recall seeing for Traveller were also 2D.
Yes, and the Solomani Rim necessarily squashes in some stars compared with a real map of local space. Leaving out the majority (whatever nominal depth we assume) is pretty natural if you're dealing with any great volume, else the few of interest vanish in clutter.
Quote from: DavetheLost;855097I specifically said three or more bodies require more than three points. Three or fewer will define a plane, more than three will not. Facing and inertia do not change the fact that any three objects will define a plane. The plane may change (relative to a fixed arbitrary X,Y,Z axis system), but its existance will not.
So seeking weapons, shuttles, spacewalkers, debris, et al. are covered in my original post.
I still remain unconvinced that tracking 3D motion is worth the extra work for game play. And, yes, I have played table top miniatures games with several systems of 3 dimensional movement.
For most situations -- especially the usual "player-characters in one ship, foes in one or two" -- I find 3D is not worth the extra work.
Quote from: Phillip;855416For most situations -- especially the usual "player-characters in one ship, foes in one or two" -- I find 3D is not worth the extra work.
Given that facing doesn't matter, I'm not convinced two dimensions are even necessary. The only factor that matters is range, after all.
Quote from: Bren;855238Nope. Never did that. How did you deal with jump routes from higher to lower maps?
If you mean drawing them on maps, I'll say that's something I never got into even without the 3rd dimension. What lines are selling tickets to where is something I'll note in world write-ups if anywhere.
FTL 2448 had a supplement that gave stacked-layer hex coordinates for a sphere of 50 LY or so around Sol derived from the Gliese catalog.
Tracking relative vectors and delta-v, as Estar suggests, was the basis for a very simple interception system in GDW's Dark Conspiracy rules set.
Quote from: Brad J. Murray;855417Given that facing doesn't matter, I'm not convinced two dimensions are even necessary. The only factor that matters is range, after all.
Which is the only factor treated in Book 5
High Guard for Classic Traveller. The vector system from
Triplanetary was put into Book 2 not from any "necessity" but rather because it's fun.
Quote from: estar;855317Yes but what are talking about here in terms of time scales? Most starship combats games the turns are in terms of units like 15 minutes, 1 hours, etc. Not seconds like melee combat.
As I said, it depends.
I can't speak about most games. But Space Quest used seconds. WEG Star Wars used seconds. Certainly one can treat the ships as point sources for all weapons. It simplifies things and makes the location of weapon systems or the presence of turrets irrelevant. Which then raises the question why games like Traveller included turrets and located weapon systems as dorsal, ventral, etc.
I have played games that treated ships as point sources for all weapons, assuming that a ship would change roll, pitch, and yaw sufficiently during a turn to bring all weapons to bear.
Traveller ships seem to have dorsal/ventral weapons mostly for role playing. Turrets seem to matter a bit more in terms of firing arcs.
Brilliant Lances, the Traveller The New Era ship to ship duel game (as opposed to Battle Rider, the fleet action game) actually dealt with such matters in detail. I think it even included a 3d option.
The big issue is that you can only rotate around your short axis when firing the engines at full thrust. Turrets can track multiple targets and have a shorter axis and thus a faster tracking rate and are much better at the crucial role of antimissile fire.
It does bear consideration that Traveller's capital ships are all built around massive spinal particle accelerators. But then, Traveller fleet actions have been described, somewhat uncharitably as big games of Irish Knockdown. The ships line up and pound each other till one line falls apart, then the reserve steps up and tries to hold the line. Thus it was in High Guard and thus it ever shall be.
Incidentally, the folks at AdAstra Games are working on a Traveller based Attack Vector Tactical variant. For solidly hard physics and three dimensional combat.
Quote from: GameDaddy;855338That's interesting, becuase I have always thought of Traveller as more Hard Sci-Fi, rather than Golden Age Sci-Fi.
Lots of these were inspirational for my earlier games, but so was plenty of hard Sci-Fi stories and artwork from Analog magazine and Isaac Asimov magazine as well as Terran Trade Authority illustrated starship books.
The meaning of "hard" in Hard SF has changed in the last thirty years. None of these books would be considered Hard SF now. At best (Hal Clement for example) they would be considered "firm". Using this term has been the source of a shitload of on-line arguments, along with another phrase what has radically changed meaning several times - "Space Opera". Two people using the same word or phrase with different meanings makes communication a mite difficult.
I'm not saying anyone is wrong, mind you, but please be wary, and understand the difference.
Re: Traveller as strictly "hard sci-fi"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the 1st edition of LBBs had stats for "lightswords" and even Darth Vader et.al. unless I'm very much mistaken. That's just the 1st 3 LBBs, with no inherent setting. I think they were removed, of course, for obvious reasons.
I don't recall that.
While I could be wrong given that I came in around 82, I'm pretty sure the structure of the weapon tables makes laser swords very unlikely.
Swords and Broad Swords and Laser Rifles that need a backpack to power them. Darth Vadar and Luke Skywalker are stated in Supplement Four but Vadar just has Broadsword skill. No laser swords.
It's the common antigravity, reactionless thrusters, and jump drives that are soft, but they exist mainly to provide a universe where private star ship ownership is fairly common and travel amongst the stars as easy as getting on a tramp freighter.
Quote from: Werekoala;855546Re: Traveller as strictly "hard sci-fi"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the 1st edition of LBBs had stats for "lightswords" and even Darth Vader et.al. unless I'm very much mistaken. That's just the 1st 3 LBBs, with no inherent setting. I think they were removed, of course, for obvious reasons.
You're wrong, although a "Star Wars" character or two (but no light saber) did appear in "guess the character" lineups in the back of supplements such as Citizens of the Imperium.
The first edition was published the same year the SW movie appeared, having (like the movie) been in development for some years prior.
Way back when everyone I knew assumed light sabers were powered by the force. So, in our Star Wars campaigns, they were in Traveller as a special force (renamed psionics) talent, with a handmade hilt as a focus, like the one Luke was given by Obi-wan. My main 1977 copy still has Light Saber penicled in at the bottom of the weapon tables. You can not over estimate the insane popularity of Star Wars back then.
It's easy to add stuff. An editorial in JTAS replied to complaints of no laser pistols by showing how easy it was.
For sure Phillip. The other one penciled in from that time was Blaster, pretty much Han's handgun. ha Good times
I wonder how much more popular Traveller would have been with a laser sword and a blaster on the tables.
Space Patrol had the Star Wars weapons. Definitely glad the three Traveller books were free of a setting, emphasizing using it for whatever. We did Star Trek and a bunch of other published fictional worlds, as well as mostly our own fictional worlds.
I preferred Traveller to Gamma World because the selection of what was presented, and the way it was presented, made me feel more at home as more a fan of real SF than of fantasy. I could do Hiero's Journey or Hot House with Traveller, too.
I reckon there's a bigger market, though, for Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica style fantasy with SF trappings.
If 'hard' means a lot of number crunching as in FGU's Other Suns rules set, then I think you lose even more of the audience.
A few examples of games I'd say have a relatively "hard SF" attitude in terms of themes and subjects:
Chaosium's Ringworld, Tri Tac's FTL 2048 and Fringeworthy, GDW's 2300 AD, Talsorian's Cyberpunk Hardwired (by Walter Jon Williams himself) and Near Orbit, and Biohazard's Blue Planet.
To my mind, it's really a matter of how you approach scenarios. Is the central challenge just another whack-the-monsters affair, or does it involve the kind of problem solving that 'science' suggests? Are far-out things just arbitrarily tossed in for color, or are the ramifications dealt with consistently? (Present data derived from science may in the speculative fiction turn out to be an incomplete picture, as it repeatedly has in real life.)
GURPS Space covers the gamut, including fairly realistic treatments of things such as radiation and rocketry. It's one of my all-time favorite game sourcebooks, even though I don't use the GURPS game system.
I would say that in the current context Hard sf is plausible in terms of our current understanding of the universe. So yes, there will be times when you need to crunch the numbers. Hard sf doesn't travel at the speed of plot. There's some limited room for things like anti gravity or ftl if you engage with the issues around them intelligently.
But I personally like Issac Asimov's take on it. Science fiction isn't mere futurism it's fiction about science and by extension scientists. It engages with scientific principles and applies them in story and can, as a result, teach about science in an entertaining way. The fiction in science fiction gives us some wiggle room to tell interesting stories but the goal should be to educate.
Let me tell you, Traveller Book II starship combat was a great preparation for the vector physics unit in tenth grade.
Quote from: Phillip;855596You're wrong, although a "Star Wars" character or two (but no light saber) did appear in "guess the character" lineups in the back of supplements such as Citizens of the Imperium.
Ok, that's what I was remembering. It's been awhile.
Quote from: ChrisGunter;854637I've seen some hard sci-fi shows and enjoyed them quite a bit. I want to know what you guys think of Traveller. It has been around a while but I've never played it. Are there others that might do a better job? If so, give me some names. :)
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/58279/Book-0-Introduction-to-Traveller?term=book+0
This is a link to a free download of Book 0: An Introduction to Traveller. Traveller is the game that inspired Joss Whedon to create the series Firefly and the movie Serenity.
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/153065/Introduction-to-Clement-Sector?src=newest&filters=0_0_10134_0_0&manufacturers_id=3565
This is a link to a free download of a sample setting for Traveller, the Clement Sector.
I would say that no other TTRPG system has been created with the elegance of rules to allow you to dial the realism from soft to hard. I have done everything from
Planetes (Hard, anime) to Official Traveller Universe (Medium) to
Doctor Who (Soft) with the system. A hard setting to look at is
Orbital, a third party product for Mongoose Traveller.
Currently, there is a playtest ongoing for MgT2, which will not be out for a few months yet. We are still watching the changes, some major and some minor.
Some of my favorite games, as a teenager, were Traveller sessions. The game was hardly perfect, but the character generation system was great and the focus of the setting made it pretty obvious what you wanted to be doing. In a lot of ways, it was Firefly before it's time.
Quote from: Votan;855690Some of my favorite games, as a teenager, were Traveller sessions. The game was hardly perfect, but the character generation system was great and the focus of the setting made it pretty obvious what you wanted to be doing. In a lot of ways, it was Firefly before it's time.
Considering that Joss Whedon used to play Traveller in college, yeah it was indeed Firefly/Serenity before its time.
Quote from: flyingmice;855541The meaning of "hard" in Hard SF has changed in the last thirty years. None of these books would be considered Hard SF now. At best (Hal Clement for example) they would be considered "firm". Using this term has been the source of a shitload of on-line arguments, along with another phrase what has radically changed meaning several times - "Space Opera". Two people using the same word or phrase with different meanings makes communication a mite difficult.
I'm not saying anyone is wrong, mind you, but please be wary, and understand the difference.
The term "role-play" means something different to everyone, too. So it's a long hard slog from the start, communicating about it.
Quote from: Kuroth;855598Way back when everyone I knew assumed light sabers were powered by the force. So, in our Star Wars campaigns, they were in Traveller as a special force (renamed psionics) talent, with a handmade hilt as a focus, like the one Luke was given by Obi-wan. My main 1977 copy still has Light Saber penicled in at the bottom of the weapon tables. You can not over estimate the insane popularity of Star Wars back then.
Ha! There were no Star Wars reverse engineers yet back then. I remember hearing what was said about how the swords worked. I'd forgotten that, because Starlog and Cinefex educated everyone rather quickly.
Quote from: Kuroth;855598Way back when everyone I knew assumed light sabers were powered by the force. So, in our Star Wars campaigns, they were in Traveller as a special force (renamed psionics) talent, with a handmade hilt as a focus, like the one Luke was given by Obi-wan. My main 1977 copy still has Light Saber penicled in at the bottom of the weapon tables. You can not over estimate the insane popularity of Star Wars back then.
Ha! There were no Star Wars reverse engineers yet back then. I remember hearing what was said about how the swords worked. I'd forgotten that, because Starlog and Cinefex educated everyone rather quickly.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;855724The term "role-play" means something different to everyone, too. So it's a long hard slog from the start, communicating about it.
Bullshit you fucking wanker. Try starting with how the word is used in common usage and work from there.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;855724Ha! There were no Star Wars reverse engineers yet back then. I remember hearing what was said about how the swords worked. I'd forgotten that, because Starlog and Cinefex educated everyone rather quickly.
You are fucked in the head. There were articles in both
The Space Gamer and
White Dwarf dealing with laser swords.
Quote from: GameDaddy;855338That's interesting, becuase I have always thought of Traveller as more Hard Sci-Fi, rather than Golden Age Sci-Fi.
It is not hard sci-fi, but it plays out like hard sci-fi (and for some people, that means it is hard sci fi). There is FTL transit, but it takes weeks, you have to account for the fuel spent, and trying to engage in ftl while being attacked is a recipe for disaster, so you can't just warp away from an attacker. Pull-you-to-the-deckplate artificial gravity, reactionless thrusters, and contragravity exist, but mostly for asthetic or convenience reasons (few people want spacships that look like the stanford taurus design, even if your rockets use fuel, you don't want to have to figure out different thrusts in and out of atmosphere, etc.), not to give writers/GMs license to break all physical laws just to make the story work.
That is the one thing Star Frontiers has over Traveller. No anti gravity.
That was one of the major things I hated about the so-called fans. Their incessant need to add damn antigravity to the ships with whatever excuse they could cop up.
Star Frontiers had much that struck me as silly back in the day, but I liked that there was no artificial gravity in the spaceships.
As for reverse engineering Star Wars, role players in my neck of the woods started demanding lightsabres for their characters about teh first time we saw them.
There was also a lot of discussion and speculation about how they worked, what they would or would not cut through, etc.
Space Quest, which was published in 1977, included blasters and luxblades. (Apparently someone was afraid calling them lightsabers might be a problem.) Old style Traveller had a six guns in space (oh, sorry, slug throwers in space) feel from the get go.
Quote from: Bren;855799Space Quest, which was published in 1977, included blasters and luxblades. (Apparently someone was afraid calling them lightsabers might be a problem.) Old style Traveller had a six guns in space (oh, sorry, slug throwers in space) feel from the get go.
Considering Lucas was suing people left and right right out the gate. That was a valid worry.
Quote from: Omega;855849Considering Lucas was suing people left and right right out the gate. That was a valid worry.
Could be. But "luxblade" is up there with "slugthrowers" for dumbest names ever for a sci-fi weapon.
Slugthrower works in a PA setting, not in a SF setting unless its a translation of an alien term for a gun. Laser swords were around before Star Wars. Though really the light sabers are just glowing vorpal swords.
Quote from: Kalimero;855914Also,a re you copy/pasting your posts from somewhere else? It's in a weird font, and is dark text on a black background, making it very hard to read.
1. The referent for the pronoun "you" in this sentence is highly ambiguous.
2. On my screen none of the posts have a weird font or a black background. Nor have I heard that complaint before from anyone else. The problem may be on your end. Perhaps you have chosen a style that makes your screen appear that way?
There is a drop down arrow in the lower right portion of the window that allows you to change the style.
3. Welcome to the forum.
Quote from: Bren;855865But "luxblade" is up there with "slugthrowers" for dumbest names ever for a sci-fi weapon.
What are the best names?
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;855917What are the best names?
Lightsaber and forceblade are good. Lasersword is marginally better than luxblade.
Guns and Ammo probably has a few names one could use instead of slugthrower. Gun was good enough for Harry Harrison and H. Beam Piper and it's not like Traveller used some obscure or made up name for knife or cutlass. Why does "gun" need special treatment?
E.E. "Doc" Smith used made up manufacturer and model names like Lewiston or Standish for his weapons (most of which were some kind of energy weapon) similar to the way we might refer to a particular gun as a Beretta, Browning, Colt, Kalishnikov, Smith & Wesson, Walther, Webley, or Winchester.
I make up brand/franchise names for stuff. Sometimes, I use a real name. If it's in the far future, the name will have a different meaning from the original sometimes. Like how Kleenex and Dixie and Xerox and Colgate saw use. Just depends on the planet where the name is used.
Not sure where all this "Traveller had "slug throwers"" is coming from. Looking at my Book One (copyright 1977), the relevant weapon skills are: Body Pistol, Automatic Pistol, Revolver, Carbine, Rifle, Automatic Rifle, Submachine Gun, and Shotgun. No "slug throwers" listed. None in the equipment table either.
Also, in Citizens of the Imperium it does in fact have stats for "Lord Darth Vader" in the back - I only mention it because it's funny that he (and Star Wars) are credited as being created by "Gene Lucas". :)
Part of the problem with later editions of Traveller is that the core of the original is so damn good.
It's really hard to match its presentation and clarity. You start trying to merge in stuff from supplements or whatever and it just keeps getting more cludgy.
What I loved about T4 was the attempt to keep it clean and simple while integrating things. The half dice were always a weird choice and weapons couldn't really penetrate armour as written, armour absorbing damage dice sucks out the random potential for penetration, but I think the dull setting was a bigger problem.
T5, is amazing in its own right but desperately needs restatement in a more approachable format.
I've always liked Traveller, specifically the setting-agnostic game presented in the original LBBs.
For some reason though, maybe just luck of the draw, I've found there is a certain species of oddball that seems attracted to the game... I'm not sure how to describe them... OCD military fantasists, maybe? Way too many guys telling me they were in Special Forces and waving guns around (literally)... most of whom seem to have ONLY played Traveller and eschew fantasy RPGs.
Games that break down into discussions of real world military practices and how tech works.
Not always, of course, but enough that I'm a bit wary when joining Traveller groups these days.
Quote from: Werekoala;855925Not sure where all this "Traveller had "slug throwers"" is coming from. Looking at my Book One (copyright 1977), the relevant weapon skills are: Body Pistol, Automatic Pistol, Revolver, Carbine, Rifle, Automatic Rifle, Submachine Gun, and Shotgun. No "slug throwers" listed. None in the equipment table either.
Mercenary Book 4
Page 36
Equipment: Small Arms
Slug ThrowersSlug Throwers are also listed extensively in the Striker Rules... GDWs 15mm Miniatures game for Traveller and Mercenary.
Quote from: Werekoala;855925Not sure where all this "Traveller had "slug throwers"" is coming from. Looking at my Book One (copyright 1977), the relevant weapon skills are: Body Pistol, Automatic Pistol, Revolver, Carbine, Rifle, Automatic Rifle, Submachine Gun, and Shotgun. No "slug throwers" listed. None in the equipment table either.
All the weapons you just listed are slug throwers, no? It's just a generic term for a gun that uses a physical projectile, whether a body pistol, gauss rifle, or accelerator rifle.
Now that I try, I can't remember where I first heard the term, but it was certainly in use by the time of my first Traveller game.
Tyranid Bioweapons?
Quote from: Natty Bodak;856019All the weapons you just listed are slug throwers, no? It's just a generic term for a gun that uses a physical projectile, whether a body pistol, gauss rifle, or accelerator rifle.
Now that I try, I can't remember where I first heard the term, but it was certainly in use by the time of my first Traveller game.
Yes, its a generic term for a firearm, but the impression I got was that someone thought the game itself only had "slug throwers" as a weapon, as the only weapon, and not simply as a category heading for firearms of various types. Yes, it is a silly name. (to BD) didn't know about the Book 4 calling firearms "Slug Throwers", which is not used generically in the book (upon review), but as a header for the section on firearms.
Firearms in space is far from silly unless you posit some huge leap in power generation/storage miniaturization. Traveller has Laser Rifles etc. but they generally require heavy backpacks and have limited shots, which is more "realistic".
Quote from: Simlasa;855967I've always liked Traveller, specifically the setting-agnostic game presented in the original LBBs.
For some reason though, maybe just luck of the draw, I've found there is a certain species of oddball that seems attracted to the game... I'm not sure how to describe them... OCD military fantasists, maybe? Way too many guys telling me they were in Special Forces and waving guns around (literally)... most of whom seem to have ONLY played Traveller and eschew fantasy RPGs.
Games that break down into discussions of real world military practices and how tech works.
Not always, of course, but enough that I'm a bit wary when joining Traveller groups these days.
If it was on the Citizens of the Imperium official Traveller forum, and it was one specific guy, I think I know who you might be talking about (extremely obsessed with realism, dropped tangentially relevant factoids about real world/historical ships and battles?). He's considered an oddball there too.
Quote from: Werekoala;856041Yes, its a generic term for a firearm, but the impression I got was that someone thought the game itself only had "slug throwers" as a weapon, as the only weapon, and not simply as a category heading for firearms of various types. Yes, it is a silly name. (to BD) didn't know about the Book 4 calling firearms "Slug Throwers", which is not used generically in the book (upon review), but as a header for the section on firearms.
Firearms in space is far from silly unless you posit some huge leap in power generation/storage miniaturization. Traveller has Laser Rifles etc. but they generally require heavy backpacks and have limited shots, which is more "realistic".
It's a state of mind.
No one wants firearms aboard a starship. The problem with high velocity rounds is that they blow holes into walls, bulkheads, and other important things like maybe the ships skin, jump drives, maneuver drives, fuel tanks. Stuff like that. Explosive decompression is just about the worst thing a starship crew can experience, as they get unceremoniously sucked into a very small hole, or completely through, and then out into the void of open space. That's no place to be if your ship is doing 3G of acceleration, and is also making high speed evasive maneuvers to dodge fire and missiles from other nearby (relatively speaking) starships.
If you have a vacc suit on, you just might survive long enough to be picked up by the victors of the current battle, whoever that may be. If you have a vacc suit with a jetpack, you might even be able to make it back to your ship. The odds are against you.
That is firearms in space. So instead we have slugthrowers.
To ensure safe travel aboard star ships, the slug throwers were introduced. While they are standard firearms that are being issued, they feature much less recoil than regular wepaons, and ammunition rounds with much less powder, or other combustibles. The result is a very slow moving rounds that will knock you into a wall, and do stun damage, but that will not breach a wall, bulkhead, fuel tank or sensitive electronics bay.
Slug throwers.
Available on any TL8 and above world.
High velocity armour piercing firearms rounds on a starship traveling through vacuum, using hydrogen as fuel, said fuel stored between teh inner and outer skin of the vessel, what could possibly go wrong?
We usually decompressed the ship and fought space combat in van-suits to avoid explosive decompression. It also had the advantage of not providing an oxygen atmosphere for leaking hydrogen fuel to explosively interact with.
Shotgun full of rock salt is a nice round against unarmoured personel on a starship. Shreds meat, won't blow the bulkhead.
Did have a fellow fire a fusion gun at boarders once. Once. ;) Saddly they were in the central corridor, between him and the bridge...
Quote from: Willie the Duck;856066If it was on the Citizens of the Imperium official Traveller forum, and it was one specific guy, I think I know who you might be talking about (extremely obsessed with realism, dropped tangentially relevant factoids about real world/historical ships and battles?). He's considered an oddball there too.
It wasn't one guy. This class of gamer was more common back in the day though. When I got into gaming in the early '80s, you had two major factions: the mostly school-age nerd who got into the hobby by way of fantasy and sci-fi and the older grognards* who played mostly miniature and wargames. Traveller and Star Fleet Battle were the limit of fantastical games for them. They mostly viewed RPGs with the same attitude my generation would view CCGs a decade later. Maybe they played them, but they were sullying the purity of their hobby.
It's no coincidence that Traveller came from a company that also made a lot minature and wargames.
It's the main reason none of us kids ever touched Traveller back then despite our science-fiction obsession. It belonged to those cranky assholes who were always rude to us when they weren't busy yelling at each other while waving three-ring binders containing 500 pages of rules. How could we guessed those guys actually played an RPG that was clean and simple?
Ironically, I did end up getting T:2000, which ended up being exactly like what we though an RPG these guys would play would look like.
*I've never been quite able to take seriously calling old school D&D players "grognards". I remember the real grognards playing their Napoleanic games and the contempt they had for D&D. "D&D-playing grognard" was an oxymoron back then.
Well, the hull and tanks are "bonded superdense" material so , I'm not hugely concerned about anything other than the light fixtures and control panels.
Still, the snub pistols from Mercenary were Traveller's solution to a low gee weapon. A low velocity high caliber weapon firing a variety of rounds including high explosive armor piercing ones.
Not that you can successfully board a ship with a functional power plant and grav plates in the floor. They'll just keep the crew to a few rooms and gravpong the hell out of the borders. Most boarding happens under the threat of destruction by superior firepower.
I'd be concerned about the computers. Given the tonage requirements those things must run on vacuum tubes and paper punch tape. ;)
As for the hydrogen fuel, without oxygen or something else to react with it isn't all that dangerous. But it can be a fun thing to threten players with...
A low velocity high caliber weapon is still going to have problems in zero-G. Inertia is inertia. A gyroget is a good zero-G weapon though.
Flipping the grav plates on and off is a great way to deal with unwanted guests on a starship, as is turning the gravity up, way up...
We didn't have an issue with wargames grognards where I lived, so the geeky high schoolers felt free to play Traveller, and then modify it to play high fantasy with Traveller. It actually was more fun than playing high fantasy with D&D. We did career paths and the works.
Traveller was GURPS for our group before there was a GURPS.
Grav plate pong sounds fun - if you have grav plates in the ceiling as well.
Also, one of the requirements of boarding would preferably be that the power plant be taken out first (in High Guard, "ability to maneuver" is one of the prerequisites), which would de-power things like drives and, one would think, grav plates.
As to the bullets holing the hull or vital components - typically, if weapons were used on a ship they were shotguns and body pistols. Admittedly that wouldn't apply to pirates or something, but I guess that is part of the risk they would take in trying to storm a ship - damaging it. Most likely, they'd be after the cargo anyway, and whatever they could salvage after the ship-to-ship and boarding actions.
Not sure energy weapons would be safer in that regard, but whatever. Guess that's why there are stats for cutlasses and other melee weapons. :)
Quote from: DavetheLost;855097I specifically said three or more bodies require more than three points. Three or fewer will define a plane, more than three will not. Facing and inertia do not change the fact that any three objects will define a plane. The plane may change (relative to a fixed arbitrary X,Y,Z axis system), but its existence will not.
So seeking weapons, shuttles, spacewalkers, debris, et al. are covered in my original post.
I still remain unconvinced that tracking 3D motion is worth the extra work for game play. And, yes, I have played table top miniatures games with several systems of 3 dimensional movement.
I'm not trying to convince you that 3D motion is worth the extra work for game play.
But I do maintain that, for those players who do care about modelling a situation, that something of potential tactical significance is being omitted by leaving out the third dimension, even with only two ships. This is because an actual ship has more spatial information than just its location, unless the game system omits those. So even though yes, any three points can be reduced to a triangle on the plane between them, an actual ship can't be described as just a point unless you're leaving out some information. An actual ship has not just a location in space, but also an inertial vector which involves a direction (and so, another point, unless it's unmoving or uses fantasy inertial propulsion), and a facing, and a rotation about the facing axis - that's actually four pieces of spatial information per ship. Now, your movement and combat systems may ignore the effects of some or all of those, but then you're leaving something out, which is what I was trying to say.
Quote from: Baulderstone;856074*I've never been quite able to take seriously calling old school D&D players "grognards". I remember the real grognards playing their Napoleanic games and the contempt they had for D&D. "D&D-playing grognard" was an oxymoron back then.
No one living at any point when you were living gets to claim original meaning to that term so now it just means "the old guard" regardless of what group they are the old guard of. :)
I believe "grognard" is French for "old grumbler" and was popularized by Napoleon's Old Guard. I hope none of us are *that* old.
I liked CT spaceship combat for having vectored movement. I disliked ship attitude, rotation, etc not really being much of a factor. High Guard was nice for big fleets, or playing in small spaces.
We had a couple of long space battles where ships aquired vectors measuring several meters of floor. Made us realize just how big space is... Also caused us to rethink the rationale behind space battles. We ultimately decided that most would take place near planets, space stations and other must visit locations. It was just too easy to avoid contact anywhere else in a system.
Ships jumping into systems also raised the question of traffic control. Space is mostly empty, but jumping in too close to something could be a disaster. Do systems have standard in and out jump locations? Or is it just avoid the gravity well and hope for the best?
Quote from: Willie the Duck;856115No one living at any point when you were living gets to claim original meaning to that term so now it just means "the old guard" regardless of what group they are the old guard of. :)
The bothersome Traveller players I mentioned weren't necessarily the guys I'd call 'grognards'... just guys who seemed like they would rather sit around and argue about technicalities of physics/computers/military rather than actually play the game. It can end up feeling less like an RPG and more like a bunch of guys trying to assemble furniture using different instruction manuals.
Something I seldom if ever run into with pure fantasy games... but anything attempting historical, modern or futuristic and out come the bean counters.
It's one of the reasons I won't run anything 'harder' than 40K-ish scifi... though I'm happily playing in a Traveller game (and yeah, there's one of 'those guys' in it).
Quote from: DavetheLost;856076I'd be concerned about the computers. Given the tonage requirements those things must run on vacuum tubes and paper punch tape. ;)
You seem not to know what you're talking about.
The hand computer in the original equipment list is close enough in mass to an Apple iPhone.
Small craft computers are so negligible in volume that it's treated as zero.
The volume requirements for most starship systems are pretty much accounted for by human interface demands: your techs and users having places to sit, keyboards and monitors and room for caffeinated beverages and snacks.
Larger installations are hardly out of line by modern standards, even before considering that in outer space nobody can hear your server farm's fans scream: the only way to dump waste heat is by radiation.
Maybe they have upgraded them in more recent edition, but in CT, even in the early 80s computers seemed overly large for a sic-fi game. Even accounting for workstations etc.
Horses for courses though. If they don't seem overly large to you, that's fine. Many Traveller players disagree.
Quote from: Bren;855865Could be. But "luxblade" is up there with "slugthrowers" for dumbest names ever for a sci-fi weapon.
There's nothing sci-fi about it.
The name for the sixguns, actually, was 'revolvers', which is hardly exotic.
Slug throwers is a broad descriptive category for weapons that hurl missiles typified by pieces of lead, commonly known as 'slugs'.
Quote from: Simlasa;855967I've always liked Traveller, specifically the setting-agnostic game presented in the original LBBs.
For some reason though, maybe just luck of the draw, I've found there is a certain species of oddball that seems attracted to the game... I'm not sure how to describe them... OCD military fantasists, maybe? Way too many guys telling me they were in Special Forces and waving guns around (literally)... most of whom seem to have ONLY played Traveller and eschew fantasy RPGs.
Games that break down into discussions of real world military practices and how tech works.
Not always, of course, but enough that I'm a bit wary when joining Traveller groups these days.
I only once encountered someone like that. He was a GM at another table reciting the "antique equivalents" weapons text. That was at exactly the same moment that, at another table, I was having my only encounter with a "killer DM" in D&D.
A sense of perspective can spare one a lot.
I have discovered that in Mongoose Traveller "computers" do not have a seperate tonnage requirement but are included as part of the "bridge". This makes sense. More sense than the way Classic Traveller did them.
And yes, "slug thrower" is a perfectly reasonable and descriptive name for any firearm that throws a "slug". Needlers. energy weapons, etc would not be "slug throwers".
Quote from: DavetheLost;856162Maybe they have upgraded them in more recent edition, but in CT, even in the early 80s computers seemed overly large for a sic-fi game. Even accounting for workstations etc.
Horses for courses though. If they don't seem overly large to you, that's fine. Many Traveller players disagree.
I'm talking about the original books.
It's only later that there's any quantified basis -- stipulated Wattage, bytes, etc. -- for such notions.
In the early '80s, people could think the fusion power plants overly inefficient, because they had no notion of what's entailed and expected to have clean nuclear power "too cheap to meter" for their weekend jaunts to Mars well before now.
Quote from: DavetheLost;856073We usually decompressed the ship and fought space combat in van-suits to avoid explosive decompression. It also had the advantage of not providing an oxygen atmosphere for leaking hydrogen fuel to explosively interact with.
Shotgun full of rock salt is a nice round against unarmoured personel on a starship. Shreds meat, won't blow the bulkhead.
That's battle drill. Time to get into your vacc suit as the ships hull is decompressed for battle. Still didn't want to use high velocity , high explosive or armor piercing rounds. We saved that ammo for planetary surface battles.
In space, lasers were popular, shotguns and large caliber weapons using flechette, or stun rounds, as well as general melee weapons. Clubs. Swords, Hammers and thrown bladed weapons for close combat. Like that.
Quote from: David Johansen;856075Not that you can successfully board a ship with a functional power plant and grav plates in the floor. They'll just keep the crew to a few rooms and gravpong the hell out of the borders. Most boarding happens under the threat of destruction by superior firepower.
We always shot up the power plants of ships we would board, and carried spare parts and mechanics who could usually patch up a ship well enough to get it to a starport or space station where repairs could be effective.
No grav pong. Target ship usually needed power, some serious hull patching, and life support in order to even be be operational after a boarding attempt.
A couple times we had to tow shattered hulls in by welding and bolting them them to our starship, and letting the shot up captured hull piggyback becuase we couldn't fix it without facilities that are present at type A or B starports. We just reconfigured our operational jump drives to jump less with more mass, and took the slow way home with our prize.
Quote from: Phillip;856166There's nothing sci-fi about it.
Other than being used in a couple of Sci-Fi RPGs you mean?
QuoteSlug throwers is a broad descriptive category for weapons that hurl missiles typified by pieces of lead, commonly known as 'slugs'.
I know what they are. I don't like what they are called.
The computers have gotten a lot of jaw for as long as I've been playing Traveller. It does appear to be a disconnect between the designers thinking mainframes and most gamers not. It can easily be explained away by thinking of all the extra effort and redundancy for a mission-critical system that must also be capable of working every time (can't scrub a re-entry because you're updating your software) in variable gravity, vacuum or atmosphere, heavy radiation, etc. Heck, doesn't the international space station have 10 year out of date computers because it takes so long to make them space-ready (I know the shuttles had that problem)?
Judging by the GDW deckplans we had access to, our group came to the conclusion that computers were large, bulky, solid objects, burried in the hull.
The workstations, operator chairs, etc were not included in computer tonnage, nor did they appear to be any sort of distributed network.
If it had been clearly stated and/or shown on deckplans that "computers" included in their displacement the operator stations, etc then they would not see so overly large.
The vast amounts of memory slots consumed by teh programs has never bothered me. I remember the days before hard drives in personal computers, and even then programs grew to fill the space available to them. And in Traveller the "cloud" is not going to help a starship. The light speed limit on communications is still in place, with the possible exception of X-boats.
None of this gets in the way of Traveller continuing to hold down a spot in my all time top three RPGs.
Also about Traveller, by way of edition wars, I have the itch to play some Traveller now, and am wondering Classic Traveller or plunk down the twenty bucks to check out the new Mongoose Traveller beta?
Classic Traveller is my favourite of the ones I've seen. I liked the setting updates in MegaTraveller, but didn't really like the system, and T3(?) with Virus Fleets and all that didn't really feel like Traveller. I haven't seen T5, and don't remember T4.
I tend to prefer less rules crunch. Especially since I have to both GM and teach the rules.
So which Traveller would you recommend?
They were thinking of the computers on naval vessels. But yeah, space worthy computers with multiple redundancies and shielding from radiation are probably pretty bulky. Also, the hand computer was a wrist mounted device that was as powerful as a model 1 computer. So, there was a distinct and deliberated separation.
Quote from: David Johansen;856288They were thinking of the computers on naval vessels. But yeah, space worthy computers with multiple redundancies and shielding from radiation are probably pretty bulky. Also, the hand computer was a wrist mounted device that was as powerful as a model 1 computer. So, there was a distinct and deliberated separation.
Since I design similar things for a living I prefer to think of the
Traveller computer as the sum of the ship's automation including redundancies and safety interlockings. If anything I would say that the tonnage is low.
Quote from: DavetheLost;856263Also about Traveller, by way of edition wars, I have the itch to play some Traveller now, and am wondering Classic Traveller or plunk down the twenty bucks to check out the new Mongoose Traveller beta?
Classic Traveller is my favourite of the ones I've seen. I liked the setting updates in MegaTraveller, but didn't really like the system, and T3(?) with Virus Fleets and all that didn't really feel like Traveller. I haven't seen T5, and don't remember T4.
I tend to prefer less rules crunch. Especially since I have to both GM and teach the rules.
So which Traveller would you recommend?
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/58279/Book-0-Introduction-to-Traveller?term=book+0
This is a link to a free download of Book 0: An Introduction to Traveller. Traveller is the game that inspired Joss Whedon to create the series Firefly and the movie Serenity.
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/153065/Introduction-to-Clement-Sector?src=newest&filters=0_0_10134_0_0&manufacturers_id=3565
This is a link to a free download of a sample setting for Traveller, the Clement Sector.
Give the Mongoose version a try before you buy.
Quote from: DavetheLost;856263Also about Traveller, by way of edition wars, I have the itch to play some Traveller now, and am wondering Classic Traveller or plunk down the twenty bucks to check out the new Mongoose Traveller beta?
Classic Traveller is my favourite of the ones I've seen. I liked the setting updates in MegaTraveller, but didn't really like the system, and T3(?) with Virus Fleets and all that didn't really feel like Traveller. I haven't seen T5, and don't remember T4.
I tend to prefer less rules crunch. Especially since I have to both GM and teach the rules.
So which Traveller would you recommend?
addressing the T3(?): It's called Traveller: the New Era. If you have the books, Classic Traveller is still immenently playable. You can also purchase a CD of all the main books (something like books 1-12) for $20 on the main Traveller site.
Mongoose Traveller 1e is (using D&D terminology) the Mentzer version of the same basic gameplay. It does a lot of standardization--all stats give the same +/-s at the same level, I can't remember if that was true in CT, but that's the kind of stuff that it does). There are specific differences and reasons to like one over the other, but the game really does play very much the same. I don't know much about MgT 2 beta. Given that we don't even have book 1 for it out yet, only go for that if you're taking the long term view.
Really don't go in for T5 unless you are taking the long term view. There's some good stuff in there, but it is still (even in the revised edition, 5.09) buried in a wholey unweildy form inside a ginormous, poorly referenced book. There's some interesting material there, but it's a long way from what I would call a game system. Also, it's kinda neat, but it's not realy Traveller as you played it.
The interesting thing with T5 is that instead of building a simple core game and layering on special case rules, Marc has built a moderately complex game that does just about everything. It's almost always overkill but it's an interesting approach. Personally I hate the endless special case rules that most games have these days. I also like that the design system is integrated from the start, so there shouldn't be stuff that's unworkable or incompatible down the line.
But take Automatic Rifles. I designed a few last night, for about an hour.
You have very light, light, medium, heavy, and very heavy versions of Prototype, Early, Basic, Standard, Improved, Alternate, Modified, Advanced, and Ultimate Battle Rifles, each with their own stats, advantages, and disadvantages. There's also carbines. So that's 80 battle rifle and carbine variants without taking into account different species and various add-ons. They range from one dice of damage for a light prototype to ten for a very heavy ultimate weapon. Never mind that there are just as many variants for normal rifles, assault rifles, and combat rifles.
Personally it's a bit much and more like a compression routine than an actual design sequence. There's issues I have with results it produces, missiles of a similar tech level do less damage than firearms for example. And you can't build a tank gun that will penetrate the armour of a heavy tank of equal tech level.
Still in game terms it's Traveller V - 8 Quality +2, Ease of Use -2 Bulk +3, Reliability = Flux, Safety +4
The more I hear about T5 the more insane it sounds. I am picking it up... eventually.
Quote from: Bren;856214Other than being used in a couple of Sci-Fi RPGs you mean?
Yes, just like thousands of other common English words.
I prefer Traveller 5.09 over Classic Traveller any day. I was never a fan of Marc Miller's Mojo Jojo writing style, which is found all over Classic Traveller. Loren Wiseman helped with editing some of his other books. T5.09 has most of the Mojo Jojo removed from the text. It's so much easier to read than T5.
Classic Traveller had some "roll under" mechanics in it. T5.09 takes those mechanics, beefs them up, and makes them the core mechanic.
MgT2 Beta chose to use "roll over", but with a floating target number now instead of a static TN of 8+. I like its skill check mechanic the most out of all the Traveller editions.
The whinging that "the computers are too big" is ludicrous since the computers are so trivially plausible compared with the fantastic whoppers the same people typically accept without a peep.
It's an SF adventure game, not a textbook. The point is to have fun. When our
descendants actually travel to the stars, it's not likely to be just like anything we imagine today. The adventure is really about us, our hopes and fears and even our romantic dreams of bygone eras, lost frontiers.
The spaceship design deal anyhow is one of many "games within the game" that Traveller offers, which are not essential to the role-playing game.
A good description in terms of what the characters perceive is worth more than reams of abstract stats.
The defaults are just a starting point you can change for your own milieu.
Maybe computers really have got bigger than they need to be, but nobody notices. AT&T kept answering machine technology from the public because they reckoned some of their profit came from people using telephones to make crank calls or conduct illegal transactions. If computers are strangely large, what purpose is it they're big enough to serve? An imaginative rationale could be a starting point for a really science-fictional adventure.
If almost everything's made of plastic, but there's no known source of appropriate polymers such as petrochemicals in the sector, where does it come from?
If technology X seems obviously to lead to application Y, why does nobody do it?
The future is never what it used to be.
(http://quoteinvestigator.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/futurefrance01.jpg)
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;856475I was never a fan of Marc Miller's Mojo Jojo writing style, which is found all over Classic Traveller.
What does that mean? Mojo Jojo... you mean he sounds like the uplifted ape on Powerpuff Girls?
We are dealing with the Third Imperium and a distant future in the default setting, not to mention a long distance from Earth for most of it. I could be convinced that there is some in universe reason why computers are the way they are. Something that is not readily appearing from a late Twentieth Century Earth view point.
Jump drive and grav technology don't really make a lot of sense either.
In all honesty, I didn't spend a lot of time drawing deck plans so tonnage was really just abstract "stuff points" anyway when it came to starship design. So many points for engines, so many points for fuel, so many points for computers, etc.
I love it when people pull out the "technology/science is so outdated in Traveller" complaint because then I know that they are a fucking idiot and I can quit listening to them.
Quote from: jeff37923;856489I love it when people pull out the "technology/science is so outdated in Traveller" complaint because then I know that they are a fucking idiot and I can quit listening to them.
You got ships that are flying gas tanks...and jump drives.
You got boarding cutlasses...and Battle Dress with shoulder mounted PGMPs.
Tech levels all over the place is half the fun, it's why Traveller is the original Firefly RPG.
The computers though...you can't tell me it's not related to the whole CD-ROM thing. :D
I think Mark Miller visited Cape Canaveral during the I Dream of Jeannie days and never got over it. ;)
Quote from: CRKrueger;856510You got ships that are flying gas tanks...and jump drives.
You got boarding cutlasses...and Battle Dress with shoulder mounted PGMPs.
Tech levels all over the place is half the fun, it's why Traveller is the original Firefly RPG.
The computers though...you can't tell me it's not related to the whole CD-ROM thing. :D
All that "fuel" would make sense if the maneuver drives were reaction drives. The weird part is that the jump drive needs it and *not* the maneuver drives.
Quote from: Brad J. Murray;856511All that "fuel" would make sense if the maneuver drives were reaction drives. The weird part is that the jump drive needs it and *not* the maneuver drives.
I'm just trolling Jeff, but yeah it's a little odd, plus fucks up the ship maps kind of.
BTW, I don't think anyone who's ever seen those Terran Trade Authority books can get them out of their head.
Quote from: Phillip;856474Yes, just like thousands of other common English words.
Well I haven't seen
luxblade used anywhere other than in a Sci-Fi game, but feel free to correct me. Otherwise I really don't see what you are going on about.
Quote from: Phillip;856483The whinging that "the computers are too big" is ludicrous since the computers are so trivially plausible compared with the fantastic whoppers the same people typically accept without a peep.
Yes it is nearly as bad as the string of whinging about the whinging posts. The computer sizes in Traveller were silly within a few years of publication at best. So were boarding cutlasses*. Lots of other things in Traveller are also silly.
* At least the David Drake made his cutlasses "cutting bars" so they have a high-tech gloss to wrap around the Sea Rovers vs. Conquistadors boarding actions that he wanted to include.
Quote from: Phillip;856483The whinging that "the computers are too big" is ludicrous since the computers are so trivially plausible compared with the fantastic whoppers the same people typically accept without a peep.
I just remind players that Traveller is not our future, the times that we do use the Traveller setting.
(http://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/KUBRICK_ARCHIVE_2001_Dress-rehearsals_spaceship_crew-2.jpg)
A couple of points
Original Traveller (1977) did have this on page 17 of Worlds and Adventure
QuoteQuoteHand Calculator
(7) CrlO. Provides basic mathematical calculations. Weighs .I kg.
QuoteHand Computer
(1 1) Cr1000. Provides services of a small computer, plus serves as a computer terminal when linked (by its integral radio, or by other circuit) to a computer. Weighs 0.5 kg.
.5 kg or 1.1 lbs is not bad sci-fi wise although they did have it pegged for Tech Level 11. But hey the hand calculator was TL 7.
As for the starships I personally never had an issue because I was involved with manufacturing computer control metal cutting machines. Yeah the computer part is small but when you talk about all the electronic stuff it amounts to a small chunk of real estate in your machine.
I realize the most common perception was the 'Big Iron" boxes with spinning tape driver. And that what Marc Miller had in mind only sleeker. But in the end the fact you are talking 2% (100 tons Jump 2) of your vessel's volume explicitly devoted to the computer i.e. electronic control it doesn't sound that unreasonable.
Quote from: estar;856556.5 kg or 1.1 lbs is not bad sci-fi wise although they did have it pegged for Tech Level 11. But hey the hand calculator was TL 7.
It wasn't actually science fiction though since both Hewlett Packard and Texas Instruments had hand calculators years before Traveller was published. I owned one in 1976.
Someone has missed the point of Traveller if they're worrying about what is or isn't sci-fi.
Quote from: Bren;856591It wasn't actually science fiction though since both Hewlett Packard and Texas Instruments had hand calculators years before Traveller was published. I owned one in 1976.
Hence TL 7
Quote from: Bren;856532Well I haven't seen luxblade used anywhere other than in a Sci-Fi game, but feel free to correct me. Otherwise I really don't see what you are going on about.
By common sense, what YOU were going on about: slug throwers.
Quote from: Bren;856532The computer sizes in Traveller were silly within a few years of publication at best.
(http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/EME-1.jpg)
This is the "computer" for a modern destroyer; it's 35 feet long, 8 feet high, and 12 feet wide.
And this "computer" doesn't have to be hardened against cosmic radiation, and doesn't have to calculate hyperspace jumps.
That's about 6.8 tons in Traveller terms all by itself.
Quote from: DavetheLost;856162Maybe they have upgraded them in more recent edition, but in CT, even in the early 80s computers seemed overly large for a sic-fi game. Even accounting for workstations etc.
Horses for courses though. If they don't seem overly large to you, that's fine. Many Traveller players disagree.
Dont the Traveller computers though handle alot more computing power than even modern standards? Especially shipboard ones. Does the computer size take into account shielding from electromagnetics, weapons, and natural phenomena?
When have you seen anything go from one point to another at hundreds of times the speed of light?
Accelerate at 1 gee or more for days on end?
Never mind the WAY too big payload ratio, that comes from magically hand-waving conservation of momentum out of existence.
Lasers focusing on distant targets without huge lenses? Oh, that's just the artificial gravity and anti-gravity magically hand-waved into existence.
These are vastly more fantastic than unicorns and dragons. Conan's Hyborian Age adventures are 'realistic' by comparison.
I think that everyone has forgotten one very important thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyborg_Commando#/media/File:CyborgCommandoCover.jpg).
Quote from: Phillip;856812By common sense, what YOU were going on about: slug throwers.
You seem to be confused about the point I made, which was that I dislike the term. First you decided to explain what a slug thrower is - maybe you thought someone in this thread didn't know the meaning, why you would think that I have no idea. Next you decided that it was important to you to point out that slug thrower wasn't a term invented solely for science fiction. Again, not something I've seen anyone in the thread be confused about and again utterly irrelevant to the reasons I dislike the term, which really come down to aesthetic reasons.
The designer could have called it a "rod" or a "gat" and I'd dislike the usage. Unless instead of a sci-fi game we were playing a game with gumshoes, gangsters. or hoodlums that was set in the mid twentieth century USA. My dislike in that case again would have nothing to do with the definition nor with the fact that the words are part of the English language.
If your point was "slug thrower" is a word. Well OK. Why yes, yes it is a word.
Ah, so there should be no pistols or rifles (or swords or spears) in the game because those are real things. Well, so are planets, even when they're called 'worlds', and stars, and grazer herbivores and navies and marine corps and merchants and oligarchies and computers and corporations ...
Does "vacc suit" pass muster because of the extra 'c', or must it be a cziltang brone oscillating framizam?
I dislike the term lightsaber.
Quote from: Phillip;856847Ah, so there should be no pistols or rifles (or swords or spears) in the game because those are real things. Well, so are planets, even when they're called 'worlds', and stars, and grazer herbivores and navies and marine corps and merchants and oligarchies and computers and corporations ...
Does "vacc suit" pass muster because of the extra 'c', or must it be a cziltang brone oscillating framizam?
You're mis-representing his position. He just finds the phrase clumsy and artificial. I find that hard to argue with, myself.
On the few occasions it comes up, go ahead and substitute 'firearms' or whatever rocks your boat. But calling it one of the "dumbest names ever for a sci-fi weapon" is a bit over the top when it's not even a sci-fi weapon in the first place!
I always kinda like the term 'slug thrower'... for whatever reason. It's not objectively good or bad... but I will leave the table if some gun nut freaks out because someone mixes up clip and cartridge and magazine.
Quote from: Phillip;856847Ah, so there should be no pistols or rifles (or swords or spears) in the game because those are real things.
Yes, that is exactly what I meant. I just used words that said something completely different to confuse people. Good thing you, with your amazing internet telepathy, were able to discern what I really meant, but didn't say. :rolleyes:
Quote from: Brad J. Murray;856849You're mis-representing his position. He just finds the phrase clumsy and artificial. I find that hard to argue with, myself.
Give Brad an A for reading ability.
Quote from: Simlasa;856855I always kinda like the term 'slug thrower'... for whatever reason. It's not objectively good or bad... but I will leave the table if some gun nut freaks out because someone mixes up clip and cartridge and magazine.
Its a matter of aesthetics. You get to like it if you want.
RE: clip et al, I agree there is a small subset of gamers who become incredibly tedious about insisting on accuracy in terminology at the table way past the point of anyone else giving a shit.
"Did you not understand that my PC was reloading when I said, "Sgt. Rock slaps another clip/magazine in his tommygun or are you just grinding the game to a halt by being an anal retentive prat?"
Diatribes about how chainmail isn't are equally tedious at the table.
(http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/images/sidearmslug/twogun.jpg)
"Slug throwers are useless against the stark energies of a light machine-gun avatar! It's snail throwers or space axes!"
Seriously, threads like these are why more people don't play Traveller.
Traveller has almost always taken a gamist approach to science fiction much as D&D does to fantasy. It's a big kitchen sink game that focuses more on playability than realism.
It puts faster than light travel, antigravity, and reactionless engines as an accessible and relatively inexpensive technology because it makes mass space travel interesting. There's no ftl radio because it makes murder hobo adventurers possible. Jump, not maneuver uses fuel because it puts a physical limitation on travel without having people jumping up and down about the increasing acceleration as reaction mass is expended formulas that would be required for the alternative.
It's not Star Wars or Dune but both those stories can play out in the Imperium. You could even do a Foundation style game after the collapse set around a surviving Imperial depot or a Star Trek style game of exploration on the Rimward end of Solomani territory.
I've written a few sfrpgs myself over the years but never gone really far in promoting or publishing them because the market is what it is and I don't see the need or desire in the market place. I'm actually playing around with one that will try to do most of what T5 does in under 12 pages. I find people's eyes glaze over if I push rules at them that are much longer than that anyhow.
If you think Traveller is unrealistic you should take a look at Star Wars or Warhammer 40000 both of which are far more popular and far less internally consistent or realistic.
The thing that touches me inappropriately in my pedant place about Slug-Thrower is that it's usually used in Sci-Fi, and then misapplied.
There are Sci-Fi weapons that are slugthrowers. Gauss/Rail weapons for example, where the bullets are literally thrown at you, ie. the gun is the force mechanism.
A guns that fires chemically propelled ammunition isn't throwing anything, it's just the aiming and loading mechanism for ammunition that throws itself. Gyrojets, Bolters and good ol' fashioned guns fall into this category.
I've seen games make the distinction, but a lot of times "slug-thrower" just means "not-energy".
Ok, I got my Sheldon out, continue.
The Imperium is not Traveller. It is just a setting made up by a few people. When I ran Star Wars, it was in the Star Wars universe. Same with any other fiction or something made up. The Imperium setting and Traveller are two separate things. Rarely used the Imperium. It would be like saying Greyhawk is D&D, and D&D is Greyhawk. A lot more to D&D than just that one setting. It is a shame that I find myself saying this yet again on a forum.
Quote from: Kuroth;856865The Imperium is not Traveller. It is just a setting made up by a few people. When I ran Star Wars, it was in the Star Wars universe. Same with any other fiction or something made up. The Imperium setting and Traveller are two separate things. Rarely used the Imperium. It would be like saying Greyhawk is D&D, and D&D is Greyhawk. A lot more to D&D than just that one setting. It is a shame that I find myself saying this yet again on a forum.
That's my own view, but there have long been groups with otherwise very different interests -- different sub-games -- connected only by the Third Imperium framework. That goes back before MegaTraveller jumped on the bandwagon of game lines heavy with setting canon and meta-plot. If you read JTAS, "Traveller News Service" was a regular feature presumably because people liked it.
I have played/ran about every version of Traveller since there has been Traveller. It is pretty much hard sci fi. These days my go to game is Stars without Number. I find it is as hard or not as I need it and I tend toward sandbox gaming anyhow. But that is just me.
Quote from: Kuroth;856865The Imperium is not Traveller. It is just a setting made up by a few people. When I ran Star Wars, it was in the Star Wars universe. Same with any other fiction or something made up. The Imperium setting and Traveller are two separate things. Rarely used the Imperium. It would be like saying Greyhawk is D&D, and D&D is Greyhawk. A lot more to D&D than just that one setting. It is a shame that I find myself saying this yet again on a forum.
Separate paragraphs and a mention of the Imperium by name in the first sentence isn't enough separation for you? Yeesh!
If Greyhawk isn't D&D then why do all the other D&D settings have elves, dwarves, and orcs in them huh? :D
Still, it's all the pet peeves people endlessly harp on that drive people away rather than their presence in the game.
Traveller V is what you get when you try to address everyone's pet issues. It's got alternate drives and alternate tech and endless details but it's less approachable than GURPS Space at this point.
Back in the day we weren't too concerned about whether our Traveller game was set in the Third Imperium or not. We made up planets and subsectors, plotted X-boat routes, and used bits of the Imperium background, but we weren't concerned with following a particular canon.
The Imperium served as a kind of default setting, but not more than that.
Quote from: DavetheLost;856884Back in the day we weren't too concerned about whether our Traveller game was set in the Third Imperium or not. We made up planets and subsectors, plotted X-boat routes, and used bits of the Imperium background, but we weren't concerned with following a particular canon.
The Imperium served as a kind of default setting, but not more than that.
That's better than how most people play Traveller, which is Spaceballs 2.
Quote from: dungeon crawler;856870I have played/ran about every version of Traveller since there has been Traveller. It is pretty much hard sci fi.
No such thing as hard sci-fi.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;856908That's better than how most people play Traveller, which is Spaceballs 2.
And if they are enjoying themselves without bothering anyone, why the fuck should you look down your nose at them you elitist fuckwit?
Quote from: Phillip;856828When have you seen anything go from one point to another at hundreds of times the speed of light?
Accelerate at 1 gee or more for days on end?
Never mind the WAY too big payload ratio, that comes from magically hand-waving conservation of momentum out of existence.
Lasers focusing on distant targets without huge lenses? Oh, that's just the artificial gravity and anti-gravity magically hand-waved into existence.
These are vastly more fantastic than unicorns and dragons. Conan's Hyborian Age adventures are 'realistic' by comparison.
Jumpspace is a very well pointed out violation of known physical laws for the point of playability, because very few people actually want to play a game taking place within a single star system (at least fewer than want to play something else), or deal with relativistic aging.
It's not clear that lasers don't use huge lenses. Either way, if it does state that, it can be readilly replaced with descriptions of lenses without changing the basic game premise.
Conservation of momentum absolutely exists in Traveller. Long range STL travel involves accellerating halfway to an object, turning around, and then decellerating.
Gravatics, while unrealistic, are merely a simplification. The game plays the same if you declare the reactionless thrusters to be highly efficient plasma torch thrusters (the fuel consumption of which is simply outside the scope of the game).
There's a difference between being (semi-) hard science and being 100% realistic. It is fiction, after all. To compare it to unicorns and dragons is reaching.
I've tried to build a 100% conforming-to-science-as-we-know-it RPG. It used GURPS 3e, especially the vehicle building. Probably not too far from their Transhuman Space books, except not quite so optimistic on computer sentience or quite so dark a setting. Found that truly realistic sci-fi loses much of sci-fi's appeal.
Quote from: Shawn DriscollNo such thing as hard sci-fi.
There is because people say there is. Words are social constructs. The definition might be a little nebulous, but the term is used, and therefor it exists.
Quote from: flyingmice;855541The meaning of "hard" in Hard SF has changed in the last thirty years. None of these books would be considered Hard SF now. At best (Hal Clement for example) they would be considered "firm". Using this term has been the source of a shitload of on-line arguments, along with another phrase what has radically changed meaning several times - "Space Opera". Two people using the same word or phrase with different meanings makes communication a mite difficult.
I'm not saying anyone is wrong, mind you, but please be wary, and understand the difference.
Definitely second that.
Back when I was in high school - early 70's - "hard" meant the tech was in the fore-front of the story, whereas "soft" implied psionics or more psychological based focus. "Space opera" was over-the-top swooshing around stories. Most Star Trek episodes were hard; Forbidden Planet was soft, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica were space opera.
What I like about Classic Traveller, or Mongoose Traveller which is really a cleaned up CT with extras, is that the rules are so simple, it is easy to vary them to create a "harder" game or more "space opera". If you don't want artificial gravity, just leave it out and perhaps add a simple mechanic to get rotating ships. You want light-sabres (or flexblades or whatever), cobble them together from existing weapon stats. You want 3D subsector maps or in-system maps, just add layers.
It really isn't that hard to do and I don't design games...
And regarding the computers, I do like a lot about the way they are modelled. In Star Fleet Battles, energy management is a key feature of the game; in Traveller book 2, Computer management is a key feature of the combat and I rather like that.
Now, are there issues? Well, yes. A lot of the way they are presented is based on an outdated view even in the 70's. They are really based on early 60's computers or earlier. A base model mainframe CPU in the mid 70's was about a meter high, meter long, and half a meter wide and cost about $250,000.
Now in a starship, one would need to add storage, a shock-mount, and uninterruptible power supply. And since it would all be rack mounts, you have to leave access space to work on them. So 1 ton for a base model is not out of the question.
My own preference on computers would be:
- Drop the absurd "bis" models
- Change the base Model 1 to have 3 or 4 CPU, and 15 to 20 Storage slots
- Change the base cost to 250,000 Cr
- Scale higher model based on those values, and adjust the costs downward by 15 to 25%
One thought on book II. Big ships always suffered from the damage system where a hit would reduce a drive by one point whether you had a fighter or a cruiser. T5 fixes this by simply reducing the drive letter from the vehicle design system. So the first hit will very likely produce as one point reduction but it will usually take several hits to get the next reduction on larger ships.
Quote from: Willie the Duck;857016Conservation of momentum absolutely exists in Traveller. Long range STL travel involves accellerating halfway to an object, turning around, and then decellerating.
And all that acceleration action is accomplished without any mass-energy
reaction. (Even with
some slipped in, the gaffe is far beyond any stretch by which "the computers are too big".)
Way back in early development, the concept was some sort of gravity drive with the reaction being on planets, but that was inconvenient for deep space.
Of course, it's inconvenient only if one doesn't abracadabra the rapid decrease of field strength over distance. That seems to me a less radical hand-waving, but sometimes the bigger load of baloney is easier for audiences to swallow.
I think you could get some mighty compact spaceships with antimatter drives. Assuming engines tough enough to take necessary increases in heat, the difference for a wide range of missions is not propellant mass but rather so many grams (or micrograms) of antimatter. Hand-wave a mirror for gamma rays, and you've got a "photon drive" that's about as good as rockets can theoretically get.
Traveller never explains how the crew can survive the superheated jumpspace bubble being created in the engine room.
Goes out the fresher vent, it does, silly.
Really, I've always liked jump grids and plates better but I like T5's take where the grids, plates, and bubble co-exist and have different roles. Not so fond of jump occlusion. We had a debate over nuclear damper fields cancelling out one time but a friend who's a roadie for a local band just nodded and discussed speakers cancelling out exactly the same way.
But Traveller's space dynamics exist to justify a game structure rather than mapping physical reality. In general Traveller tries very hard to be gamist rather than simulationist. I don't always agree with the workings of it but it is very functional in play.
I have a similar argument about the Spacemaster Privateers setting. Which is on the surface a terrible sf setting full of furries and reactionless drives and free quantum power and force fields. On the other hand, the furry races are easy to pick up and play archetypes. Their dispersion by unknown ancients (I hate those guys) makes it possible for just about any party composition to infiltrate the evil empire. The drives not requiring fuel or power strips down the record keeping and accounting that many find objectionable in an rpg. Sure most PCs will put planet killer asteroids in their arsenal within a session or two but the bad guys can do it too. And asteroids can be destroyed and redirected pretty easily in such a setting.
hmmmmm...I always have wanted to run another SPAM campaign...
Quote from: Phillip;857939And all that acceleration action is accomplished without any mass-energy reaction. (Even with some slipped in, the gaffe is far beyond any stretch by which "the computers are too big".)
Way back in early development, the concept was some sort of gravity drive with the reaction being on planets, but that was inconvenient for deep space.
Of course, it's inconvenient only if one doesn't abracadabra the rapid decrease of field strength over distance. That seems to me a less radical hand-waving, but sometimes the bigger load of baloney is easier for audiences to swallow.
I think you could get some mighty compact spaceships with antimatter drives. Assuming engines tough enough to take necessary increases in heat, the difference for a wide range of missions is not propellant mass but rather so many grams (or micrograms) of antimatter. Hand-wave a mirror for gamma rays, and you've got a "photon drive" that's about as good as rockets can theoretically get.
Yeah, they are effectively inertialess drives. The justification wobbles to and fro between editions, but for the most part they are. I guess it depends on how you define hard science (and also what you consider important). For me, they are rockets, they use energy (not propellent, but that's clearly a gamist convention, keeping fuel reserved for interstellar transit so that the GM can control which trade routes the PCs can take based on their fuel reserve), and they act like rockets (you accellerate towards your target, turn around, and decellerate). I don't really care that their actual definition is inertialess drive instead of gravity drive or photon drive. I can change that easily enough. What's important is that they
act like rocket engines.
But that's just what works for me.
Quote from: Willie the Duck;858183What's important is that they act like rocket engines.
Well that the thing, the mechanics behind traveller's sub-light travel don't reflect the real world physics of inter system travel. Nor do they reflect Traveller's own technological handwaves. They are not even an abstraction.
Why? Because everything is in orbit. It never a case of pointing at a destination (or even leading it enough) and just go. However even with reactionless drive real-life physics imposes a lot of ifs, buts, and "oh by the ways".
So what is a better abstraction of the situation that still gamable? By using delta-vee. Delta-vee is the total change in velocity that a vessel is capable of. For example your rocket has to be capable of creating a change in velocity from 0 to roughly 9.4 km/sec in about 10 to 15 minutes to make Earth Orbit. If Earth had no air it would be exactly 7.8 km/sec but atmospheric drag and engines inefficiency while in the atmosphere means you need more energy.
The most gamable mechanic for rockets is a delta-vee budget for the different orbits and the time to achieve said orbit. One of your vechicle's states is the total delta-vee contained in your fuel.
For reactionless drive, the only constraint is time. Generally in most settings reactionless drives can put out thrust for weeks or months. So the question becomes how much delta-vee I can add in X time. Too low of a thrust means your craft will eventually be deflected from its destination.
In real life, ion drives come the closest. Currently Ion drives produce too low of a thrust to launch a rocket into orbit. However once a probe is in orbit then it can thrust for months as the ion drive is that efficient for the amount of fuel carried.
This gets into an area of physics where you are plotting orbits involving continuous acceleration which what the original Traveller formulas try to handwave. Unlike delta-vee budgets there is no simple abstraction that really captures what goes into this. Indeed how NASA and most space agencies handle this is to use special simulation software designed to run dozens of permutations to find the right time to launch and to do maneuvers.
What I would do for a gamable mechanic to abstract continous acceleration is for me as the designer to plot out some typical travel times to the same destinations on the delta-vee budget tables at different rates of accelerations.
Then put that in a table and be done with that. Most star system generation place their planets in specific sets of orbits making the setup of the table straight forward.
I would also mention the idea of using launch windows as an option. In the real world the only way to take the fastest way to a in-system destination is at specific times whether you doing with it a rocket or the continuous acceleration of a reactionless drive. Outside of that window, the voyage takes longer sometimes way longer even if the straightline destination makes it seem it should be a lot quicker.
I would mention this because for some campaign it can be a useful complication to challenge the PCs with.
The good news is that you don't really need to do any math to have this in a campaign. Due to how orbital mechanics work it is enough to use a simple set of guidelines and you will be in the ballpark as far as any numbers are concerned. Especially for games centered around reactionless drives like Traveller.
Quote from: David Johansen;857950Really, I've always liked jump grids and plates better but I like T5's take where the grids, plates, and bubble co-exist and have different roles. Not so fond of jump occlusion. We had a debate over nuclear damper fields cancelling out one time but a friend who's a roadie for a local band just nodded and discussed speakers cancelling out exactly the same way.
The way I handled jump in my Traveller campaigns was that it was an extension of the same gravitic technology that produced Grav Plates and Maneuver drives.
What I said a Jump Drive does is use gravity fields to fold a bubble of space around the ships as governed by the jump grid into a Alcubierre Warp. A Alcubierre warp is a way to distort space time so that a ship will move. However the energy needed to make a Star Trek warp drive is beyond even the ancients. But if you fold space in a way that you are in a realspace bubble connected by a microscopic neck to rest of the universe then the energy needed to form a Alcubierre warp around that neck is achieve even by Tech Level 9 technology.
However as it turned out only certain configurations are stable and those happen to be the ones that correspond to the speeds that produces Jump 1 to 6. Those configurations are like a marble rolling and encounters a dip. It it would naturally roll in and settle in the bottom. The other configurations are like the top of hill. The marble could be perched on top but the slightest change would send it rolling down.
Misjumps are a result of the Jump Drive initiating while the marble on top of one of those unstable hills. A ship can't turn or communication because it only connected through a microscopic hole to the universe, and because once the configuration is set it can't be altered in flight because again it "outside" of the bubble that the ship is in.
As it happens a Alclubierre warp configuration will decay in an average of 178 hours causing the ship to emerge in real space.
If that little microscopic warp configuration runs within 100 diameters of another mass it will stop it's motion and when it decays 178 hours later the ship will emerge into real space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw81.html
This is my source for the microscopic folding
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw99.html
Quote from: estar;858202What I would do for a gamable mechanic to abstract continous acceleration is for me as the designer to plot out some typical travel times to the same destinations on the delta-vee budget tables at different rates of accelerations.
Then put that in a table and be done with that. Most star system generation place their planets in specific sets of orbits making the setup of the table straight forward.
.
I'm not entirely clear how, in a purely gamable fashion, this is fundamentally different from Traveller (Mongoose anyway), having a table of rough trip times at various rates of thrust, as rated in G's. Given that my copy also includes text pointing out that this includes acceleration and deceleration phases e.g. ye olde rocket flip.
If I'm following the argument correctly, Traveller positing a means of thrust that translates energy directly into motion, rather than thrust as material ejection, is more of a problem than FTL jump drives for considering Traveller remotely 'Hard'.
Traveller vehicles are all just mumbo jumbo. Don't even try to assign scientificness to them.
So, what game starships do you recommend?
Quote from: Spike;858704So, what game starships do you recommend?
It depends on what you're trying to do with starships in your game. More importantly, what your players are trying to do with them if they have their own setting in mind because they know nothing about Traveller's.
Well, Attack Vector Tactical is the gold standard of realistic three dimensional space combat.
GDW's Triplanetary is actually a pretty good two dimensional in system only game. I've always wanted to run it with Ogre as the ground combat rules.
For Roleplaying, GURPS Vehicles and GURPS Spaceships are by David L. Pulver who really knows his stuff. Sure you can put super reactionless thrusters in your ship but the rules cover other types of engines. Be aware the tolerances are really unforgiving and the performance of realistic engines will always seem uninspiring.
Most sf rpgs try very hard to avoid that level of frustration and disappointment.
I think Cyberpunk had a space supplement, Near Orbit that was supposed to be pretty good.
I lose 1d12 SAN every time I even look at GURPS Vehicles, but then again advanced math was never my strong suit.
I don't mind more "abstract" starship systems, actually. Re: Traveller, we play using GURPS these days and I would never design my own ship using that system (maybe the "modular system, but still). The old LBB Starship system wasn't as baffling, but I guess it's because I was younger and my mind was more flexible.
In the non-RPG realm I always loved "Starfire" and of course "Star Fleet Battles". I mean really, REALLY loved them - Starfire specifically. You could play it in 30 minutes if you wanted, or have huge battles lasting hours. Was fun.
Full Thrust is a space wargame that I've played a lot in the past and there's a Traveller expansion/variant for it called Power Projection that is quite nice... probably what I'd be inclined to use if I were running a Traveller game and wanted to run something more than a quick 1on1 ship battle.
Full thrust has rules for ship design as well as optional vector movement that's similar to Mayday/Triplanetary but doesn't require hexes or multiple positioning markers. No 3D but it doesn't feel like sailing a ship or flying a plane either.
Cool, hadn't heard of that one, looks interesting.
That's one thing I do miss about the early days of my gaming life (late 70's-early 80's) - there were a TON of great wargames/boardgames (and many not-so-great I'm sure, but I was young). There are still at least a dozen that if I ever saw again I'd probably buy them in a heartbeat, just because I always wanted them and couldn't afford them.
(sorry for threadjack)
Starfire needs a relaunch and KS. Truly great game. Discovered it after years of playing SFB and just went wow!
Quote from: Spinachcat;858734Starfire needs a relaunch and KS. Truly great game. Discovered it after years of playing SFB and just went wow!
I always did like the cover art on the Starfire stuff but never played it.
Looking around just now there seems to be a baffling array of versions and supplements for it... some to be had cheaply, some not.
What's the most popular version of it? Did it ever have an RPG the way SFB has Prime Directive?
Quote from: Werekoala;858726I lose 1d12 SAN every time I even look at GURPS Vehicles, but then again advanced math was never my strong suit.
GRUPS is more accounting than advanced math.
QuoteIn the non-RPG realm I always loved "Starfire" and of course "Star Fleet Battles". I mean really, REALLY loved them - Starfire specifically. You could play it in 30 minutes if you wanted, or have huge battles lasting hours. Was fun.
And Starfire let you build your own ships and included technological obsolescence.
Starfire is still around.
http://www.starfiredesign.com/starfire/
There's around half a dozen novels in the universe by David Weber, of Honor Harrington fame, and Steve White.
I love detailed vehicle design so but Star Fire was fun. I have always wanted to run a Starfire New Empires campaign but most of our attempts over the years have fizzled when one player or another wound up in a randomly generated dead end.
Quote from: David Johansen;858799I have always wanted to run a Starfire New Empires campaign but most of our attempts over the years have fizzled when one player or another wound up in a randomly generated dead end.
From a game perspective as well as from a who could realistically interact with whom perspective, dead ends are uninteresting. So why not change the randomization method so that dead end is not a result?
Let's just say, somewhat diplomatically, that, that's the roleplayer in you talking :D
Wargamers see things differently.
GURPS Vehicles is its own work of evil genius, which has a high barrier to entry unless (maybe even if) your brain already works that way, and which has a lot to do with vehicle design and standardized mechanics. Cool if your into that, but otherwise may be mostly unusable.
GURPS Space has its own system which doesn't require going anywhere near GURPS Vehicles.
There's also GURPS Spaceships (http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/spaceships/) which is relatively simple and functional.
And also GURPS Traveller.
Not to mention GURPS Lensman, which does an interesting job of streamlining space opera.
And others... So many options...
Wow, I seem to have started something here.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;858723It depends on what you're trying to do with starships in your game. More importantly, what your players are trying to do with them if they have their own setting in mind because they know nothing about Traveller's.
Honestly? Its never what my players want. I've discovered that they are pretty damn happy stabbing faces or blowing shit up, with a sideline of enjoying the scenery of whatever setting I've cooked up.
So its really what I want from starships in my game. What I want first and foremost is starships that do not exist as abstractions, but as real (yes, yes: Imaginary) objects, where putting in an aquarium isn't a matter of of juggling around abstract and usually non-scalar (I'm looking at you, Rogue Trader!) meta resources like 'space points' but actually takes real resources in terms of volume, mass and power appropriate to its function, where meaningful design sacrifices are then made to create the ship, providing it an internally consistent layout.
Which I mostly (mostly...) get from Traveller, and which is one reason I welcomed the Mongoose Second edition (conditionally), when they talked about adding back in power mechanics. I had hoped to get away from the arbitrary and frankly silly restrictions on Hard Points, allowing more versatility in design between military craft and civilian craft at the default scale of the game, though from what little I saw of the Beta, its a hack job at best.
And so far only Traveller does this. (GURPS Traveller seems to do it MORE, but its GURPS, and I already know my players will never touch GURPS...).
Also: I may have a bad edition of GURPS vehicles. Its as complex and fiddly as everyone talks about, but it really doesn't allow for a wide range of designs unless you are talking about wooden 'age of sail' starships vs GURPS traveller starships. Too many weird options at the low tech end of the scale, not enough options at the theoretical high tech end of the scale, if you catch my drift?
Also: This comment has been brought to you by the Parenthesis.
Quote from: estar;858204The way I handled jump in my Traveller campaigns was that it was an extension of the same gravitic technology that produced Grav Plates and Maneuver drives.
SNIP cool cool stuff
Just for the record I love this, Its the perfect scientific veneer for Traveller's Jump Drive.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;857944Traveller never explains how the crew can survive the superheated jumpspace bubble being created in the engine room.
That is because you pulled this "superheated jumpspace bubble" out of your ass. Please show us where this particular Traveller idea is detailed.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;858698Traveller vehicles are all just mumbo jumbo. Don't even try to assign scientificness to them.
Oh, fuck. You have become onto Constantine Thomas, destroyer of fun. Come back to us after reading
Fire, Fusion, and Steel. Then you may pull this, "Bro do you even science?" bullshit.
Quote from: David Johansen;858822Let's just say, somewhat diplomatically, that, that's the roleplayer in you talking :D
Wargamers see things differently.
Not at all. If the parties aren't connected (as you suggested) then they can't interact. Which means that giving a player an unconnected star system is the wargaming equivalent of playing out the Battle of Waterloo using miniatures and giving someone command of a regiment of Allied Infantry stationed in Spain. There is nothing interesting in the Battle of Waterloo for that regiment to do. So give the guy a regiment that is actually at the battle or could reach the battle and let him run
that regiment not the one sitting on their butts in garrison way the heck across the Pyrenees. That's the wargaming version of what I am saying.
Well, we did reduce it from d1000 for system identity and jump point destinations to d100. But there was a bit of a "them's the breaks" and "suck it up princess" attitudes among the other players. Having a hostile and more advanced culture waiting for you on the other side of your only warp point is just part of the game.
It wasn't a particularly acrimonious end to a game, more of just a, too much work and too little fun fizzle where people just decide to do other things.
I once ran an FTL: 2448 game in which one of the players built a model of the deck plan, in scale to match our miniatures, of Legos.
FGU's Space Opera was altogether infamously cumbersome, but taken by themselves the ship design and combat systems were nifty. The assumptions were in line with Doc Smith's Lensmen, inertia negation and all.
Quote from: David Johansen;858858Well, we did reduce it from d1000 for system identity and jump point destinations to d100. But there was a bit of a "them's the breaks" and "suck it up princess" attitudes among the other players. Having a hostile and more advanced culture waiting for you on the other side of your only warp point is just part of the game.
It wasn't a particularly acrimonious end to a game, more of just a, too much work and too little fun fizzle where people just decide to do other things.
In which case we have a situation similar to the patient who says, "Doctor, Doctor, it hurts every time I hit my head against the wall..." Almost no one enjoys a wargame where they can't really do anything entertaining. The vast majority of wargamers will concede a game long before it is lost because fighting to the bitter end when you know you have little or no chance to succeed isn't entertaining enough to keep playing. Which is sad when
you are the one who is winning because you don't get the fun of pounding your opponent into the dust. But them's the breaks.
Quote from: Spike;858832Also: This comment has been brought to you by the Parenthesis.
(https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/lisp_cycles.png)
Quote from: Werekoala;858726In the non-RPG realm I always loved "Starfire" and of course "Star Fleet Battles". I mean really, REALLY loved them - Starfire specifically. You could play it in 30 minutes if you wanted, or have huge battles lasting hours. Was fun.
Starfire rocked! I wish I still had that.
And SPI's
Outreach, and ... < sigh >
Quote from: Bren;858869In which case we have a situation similar to the patient who says, "Doctor, Doctor, it hurts every time I hit my head against the wall..." Almost no one enjoys a wargame where they can't really do anything entertaining. The vast majority of wargamers will concede a game long before it is lost because fighting to the bitter end when you know you have little or no chance to succeed isn't entertaining enough to keep playing. Which is sad when you are the one who is winning because you don't get the fun of pounding your opponent into the dust. But them's the breaks.
Personally the player who got stuck needed to read Niven and Pounelle's The Mote In God's Eye. Said so at the time for that matter.
I've also seen suggestions of using Battlestations! to run ship combat and boarding actions... which I thought might be cool. Battlestations! gives everyone something to do during ship combat.
Quote from: Spike;858695If I'm following the argument correctly, Traveller positing a means of thrust that translates energy directly into motion, rather than thrust as material ejection, is more of a problem than FTL jump drives for considering Traveller remotely 'Hard'.
The problem is that while Travellerhas reactionless maneuver drives. It also Traveller also has orbital mechanics still apply. So if you want to be realistic using Traveller's premise a Time, Distance, Acceleration formula for straight line travel doesn't get it.
It is not that hard to learn the tricks to incorporate the effects of orbital mechanics into a game. For example if you are in orbit around a planet and you are trying to catch a target. What you do is slow down.
Slow Down? Yup! By slowing down you drop to a lower orbit which makes you move faster relative to the target higher than you. When you reach the right angle offset you speed up and you will wind intercepting the target.
Now for a game you don't need to go as far to computer the right angle offset or the how low of an orbit you need in order to catch in the desired time. It is enough that they make their navigation rolls. If the actual time is important then just look at what was the initial offset and decide how many orbits it would take to catch up. In general with the reactionless drives you can do between one and four orbits.
To be fair it wasn't exactly easy to find out how to describe space navigation in layman terms. For me it came about because of the hours i put into developing add-on simulating the Mercury Spacecraft and the Gemini Spacecraft for the Orbiter Space Simulator.
Most books and text on Space go so far and stop leaving only the math heavy academic books. When Orbiter Space Simulator came out in the early 00s and the Kerbal Space Program a lot more recently there is now a wealth of how-tos explaining how it work and how people can do it themselves without learning calculus and the like.
And because these program are moddable you can program in Traveller style reactionless drives with Traveller ship performing and see how they do.
And as it turns out, you are still have some of the issues with reaction rockets as you can only change your delta-vee by so much in a given time.
Quote from: 5 Stone Games;858836Just for the record I love this, Its the perfect scientific veneer for Traveller's Jump Drive.
Thanks, I like it because it explains everything written about Traveller Jump Drives without having some magical hyperspace. And reduces the handwave down to the fact the Traveller Universe has gravity control.
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;857944Traveller never explains how the crew can survive the superheated jumpspace bubble being created in the engine room.
That may be because Traveller never posits the creation of a superheated jumpspace bubble in the engine room.
Before you set out to argue the science of the game, you should at least know the game.
As it happens I've seen attempts to put orbital mechanics into games. I'll be damned if I can remember where, but I do remember that it seemed shockingly fiddly.
Of course, given my eclectic memory, I could have just been reading about orbital mechanics in a theoretical space combat scenario and simply ported game mechanic ideas onto the physics.
I'm not really sure, however, that Traveller needs orbital combat. I always got the impression that most space fights would happen farther out from planets, and I'm not sure Solar scale orbits really apply. I mean, you've got that hundred diameters thing going on, and people powering out to scoop fuel from gas giants or dig rocks. Given that most traveller games are operating well under the Naval/High Guard scale, who wants to pick a space fight near the space station (Capital Scale object, surely!), where all the system defense assets (boats, picket patrols, police cutters, etc) are likely to be?
I have trouble rationalizing space fights anywhere too far from the resource points of a system or the most efficient routes between them. Space, even just interplanetary space is just too big for combat to be likely unless both sides want it otherwise.
Even trying to patrol the space around a single gas giant is a tall order.
Jump drive raises the question of where the incoming ships exit jump space. There is afik no way to accurately predict either when or where an in-jumping ship will appear. No FTL communication so no way to know when or from where someone is coming, and no requirement that ships exit jump space at something like Starfire's "warp points".
Warp points or jump gates when they exist form a great chokepoint to base syetem defense around. They are the one point in a system that all interstellar traffic must pass through. Set a watch there and you will get at least one shot at them.
Otherwise ships are tiny and space is big. A situation not unlike trying to hunt down that one mosquito in your bedroom at night.
I like the ruleset of Traveller, but I never liked the background or the setting. This might sound strange coming from the guy with the catgirl avatar, but the fact that almost all of Traveller's default races are variations of "funny animal people." In my opinion, you're allowed to do that ONCE any more is just overdoing it. The fact that almost all of the default Traveller races fall into this category is just too Saturday Morning for my taste.
The Aslan I liked because they remind me of the Kilrathi, and anything that reminds me of Wing Commander is awesome by default. The Vargyr and the K'Kree on the other hand I can do without.
The other thing that killed the game for me was the the vast majority of human ship designs were just hideous.
I've tried a few times to create my own campaign setting, but it never got anywhere.
2300 AD looks promising, however.
Quote from: DavetheLost;858985I have trouble rationalizing space fights anywhere too far from the resource points of a system or the most efficient routes between them. Space, even just interplanetary space is just too big for combat to be likely unless both sides want it otherwise.
Even trying to patrol the space around a single gas giant is a tall order.
Jump drive raises the question of where the incoming ships exit jump space. There is afik no way to accurately predict either when or where an in-jumping ship will appear. No FTL communication so no way to know when or from where someone is coming, and no requirement that ships exit jump space at something like Starfire's "warp points".
Otherwise ships are tiny and space is big. A situation not unlike trying to hunt down that one mosquito in your bedroom at night.
In MongTrav, the vague default method of piracy is 'jumpcussing', which is to hit them just as they hit the 100 diameter limit and get ready to jump. I don't know if it was new to MongTrav, but they also had special missiles that were designed to delay or prevent jump calculations long enough to do some damage/steal some cargo, and they discuss getting the pirate ship within 100 diameters (its own) and staying there will also prevent jump.
Of course, I understand that the existence of space piracy is a big flame topic among Traveller grognards. Of course, if you look at the age of sail, your ability to see another ship was limited to the horizon, a mere three miles or so, with no sensors at all, and 'The Sea' is pretty damn big compared to 'a ship' too, so it still seems feasible. You hang out near high traffic areas, try to get advanced information from dock-side spies, and get the job done before the military can respond.
The orbital mechanics / delta vee thing refers most significantly to interplanetary travel. However, when you've got at least 1G constant (plus the contragravity or whatever that allows a mere 1G ship to take off from a planet like Earth), I'm expecting fairly 'straight' courses. Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere as far as delta-vee goes. Energy-conserving paths are beside the point when you have an effectively unlimited supply.
Quote from: Torque2100;858989This might sound strange coming from the guy with the catgirl avatar, but the fact that almost all of Traveller's default races are variations of "funny animal people." In my opinion, you're allowed to do that ONCE any more is just overdoing it. The fact that almost all of the default Traveller races fall into this category is just too Saturday Morning for my taste.
Furries tend to see anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities and characteristics.
Quote from: Bren;854885I do to. For Star Wars. ;) But SW is space opera. You can tell by William's leitmotifs.
Oh, Force, yes. Hell, "Revenge of the Sith" is constructed like a Bel Canto opera for the same reason; everybody already knows the plot.
Lucas' reach fell short of his grasp on that one and it's too bad; if he'd partnered with a better writer and a really good editor, people would be frothing at the mouth and shitting themselves over that movie. The basic concept is breathtakingly brilliant.
Yeah, it came close to it. You can almost see it at times through the bad bits. I think people need to learn to love Star Wars as a whole rather than in parts. for those who can't there's always Traveller.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859002Oh, Force, yes. Hell, "Revenge of the Sith" is constructed like a Bel Canto opera for the same reason; everybody already knows the plot.
Lucas' reach fell short of his grasp on that one and it's too bad; if he'd partnered with a better writer and a really good editor, people would be frothing at the mouth and shitting themselves over that movie. The basic concept is breathtakingly brilliant.
A better casting director would have helped. The wooden acting in the purportedly romantic scenes are just about too painful to watch. It reminds me of the time more than 30 years ago, that I spent an entire day watching the rehearsals of an undergraduate theater class. This one girl played the most awful Viola ever.
QuoteI left no ring with her. What means this lady?
Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her!
To this day, the remembrance causes painful, mental anguish.
Quote from: Phillip;858994The orbital mechanics / delta vee thing refers most significantly to interplanetary travel. However, when you've got at least 1G constant (plus the contragravity or whatever that allows a mere 1G ship to take off from a planet like Earth), I'm expecting fairly 'straight' courses. Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere as far as delta-vee goes. Energy-conserving paths are beside the point when you have an effectively unlimited supply.
Constant Acceleration drives are still bound by orbital mechanics. The primary limitation factor is not the amount of delta-vee you are carrying on-board as fuel but how fast you can change your delta-vee.
An extreme example are real life ion drive probes. While they have constant thrust it is so low that they have to spiral out over month befores they reach earth's escape velocity.
Traveller reactionless drives have a lot more thrust that NASA ion probes but even 6 G ships have limits on the trajectories they can take.
As far as gaming goes this stuff can be incorporated by incorporate the limitations but foregoing the actual math. For example A group of players have to intercept a station within 15 minutes of lifting off. I would roll a d6 to get a sense of how far out of position the station is. 1-2 they are already within the window, 3-4 they have to wait a half hour , 5 a 45 minutes, and 6 an hour. This based on the fact that spacecraft orbiting below the van Allen belts generally take 90 minutes to orbit the earth.
If the players don't care how long it takes I just roll and see how long again based on what I know how various rendezvous go even when it done with continuous thrust. (it will probably take 2 to 3 hours on average).
Where this has failed in past games is designers trying to get players to do math That kind of accuracy is not needed to make it feel realistic. For example you don't need to know the exact speed of a river to adjudicate a river crossing. It enough to know whether it is calm, swift, or a raging torrent to come up with a ruling that fits the situations.
The same with orbital mechanics. All you need to know that if you want to get off the ground quickly and to a orbiting target, there only a limited periodic window to do so. Otherwise it will take longer.
If you want to catch something in a planetary system you need to slow down to a lower orbit.
If you are within a certain distance you can ignore the effect of orbital mechanics and treat it like a straight line situation. In interplanetary space that can be within 100s of km of the target. In close orbiter it may be only within 1km.
And so forth and so on.
You know, this stuff is the sort of thing that makes a great RPG supplement, basically: Faking Orbital Mechanics, or some such similar title. Practical, in-game solutions and shortcuts for these kinds of questions. Maybe you need to branch out in your writing?
Quote from: Bren;859021A better casting director would have helped. The wooden acting in the purportedly romantic scenes are just about too painful to watch. It reminds me of the time more than 30 years ago, that I spent an entire day watching the rehearsals of an undergraduate theater class. This one girl played the most awful Viola ever.
To this day, the remembrance causes painful, mental anguish.
Teen romance is always painful to watch. Watching Anakin make an utter fool of himself for Padme hit pretty close to home.
QuoteOh, Force, yes. Hell, "Revenge of the Sith" is constructed like a Bel Canto opera for the same reason; everybody already knows the plot.
You and Camille Paglia are among the few to get this.
QuoteLucas' reach fell short of his grasp on that one and it's too bad; if he'd partnered with a better writer and a really good editor, people would be frothing at the mouth and shitting themselves over that movie. The basic concept is breathtakingly brilliant.
There are screenwriters better than Tom Stoppard out there? Better editors than Roger Barton? Can you name a few? I'm genuinely curious.
Quote from: Bren;854885I do to. For Star Wars. ;) But SW is space opera. You can tell by William's leitmotifs.
Or the ship is in atmosphere.
Quote from: Bobloblah;859145You know, this stuff is the sort of thing that makes a great RPG supplement, basically: Faking Orbital Mechanics, or some such similar title. Practical, in-game solutions and shortcuts for these kinds of questions. Maybe you need to branch out in your writing?
Thanks, I have some stuff put together and slowly working on it amid my other projects. It will be pretty graphic (but not math) intensive to illustrate the various concept.
There is already a similiar on-line source Winchell D. Chung's Atomic Rockets
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php
However he goes for comprehensive, and includes some math. Good for world building not so good for at the table.
Also a comment on Traveller's burn, turn, and burn default.
A brachistochrone orbit is the quickest route from point A to point B. It is the curve that result from constantly accelerating, flip, and constant decelerating to the target. This can be done by any thruster that has a thrust rating above that of the local gravity field. Drives that put out .01 G (actually slightly lower) can use these orbits.
So wait does that mean I am all wrong?
The orbit always works when you taking off from the central body of a system for example from the Earth to the Moon or anything else orbiting.
Where it is inaccurate is if you are taking off from one body orbiting a central mass to another body orbiting the same mass.
The inaccuracy is that the central mass can act as a barrier and block the brachistochrone orbit thus increasing the travel time as another orbit needs to be used.
In game terms this amounts to the fact that for a certain percentage of time you can't get to the destination the fastest way. Which is how it should be handled. Just roll if it is low then increase the travel time. I don't remember how much the increase is off hand but from what I remember it can be a lot depending on the position of the two planets.
Also it comes into play if you are landed on the central body in this case the ground beneath the craft is the barrier that creates the longer travel time.
Also for gaming it is only something that needs a ruling when timing or positioning is important. For the earth moon system there the longest wait for a window is never more than 24 hours and in most cases there are multiple opportunities throughout the day.
Quote from: estar;859188...
In game terms this amounts to the fact that for a certain percentage of time you can't get to the destination the fastest way. Which is how it should be handled. Just roll if it is low then increase the travel time. I don't remember how much the increase is off hand but from what I remember it can be a lot depending on the position of the two planets.
...
Also for gaming it is only something that needs a ruling when timing or positioning is important. For the earth moon system there the longest wait for a window is never more than 24 hours and in most cases there are multiple opportunities throughout the day.
The relative positions and motion of planets in a system make a big difference for travel between planets, unless you have extremely fast propulsion. And they change in complex but predictable ways (orbits) that place over months/years/decades or more, so "Just roll" only works if/when your game context is just doing a hit and run in its involvement with the system (or the players don't care). If it is relevant to the game's interests (e.g. if the players care about the travel conditions in the system and their changes over time), then planetary arrangement is a long-term condition which would make sense to have a schedule for, even if it's abstract and initially generated by rolls.
I would say attempting to work out orbital mechanics for a star system to work out less than general distances only works if you are setting your game in a single, or very very limited set, of solar systems.
For a game like Traveller, where the 'setting' is potentially hundreds of star systems (thousands if you REALLY want to play the entire setting...), that's impractical.
While I recognize that a difference of a few thousand, or hundred thousand kilometer differences between potential gas giant orbits may be a big fucken' deal, there is a practical value in having generic orbital ranges that are true for every system.
It depends on what is important for your sense of immersion. I will tell you, with some experience over at the Citizen's of the Imperium forums, that there isn't a practical level of realism that makes everyone happy. I think Marc Miller did a pretty good job of guessing the approximate level for a gamist focused system. The biggest complaints amongst superfans seems to be about the economic model of the game, not the space mechanics.
Quote from: Willie the Duck;859345It depends on what is important for your sense of immersion. I will tell you, with some experience over at the Citizen's of the Imperium forums, that there isn't a practical level of realism that makes everyone happy. I think Marc Miller did a pretty good job of guessing the approximate level for a gamist focused system. The biggest complaints amongst superfans seems to be about the economic model of the game, not the space mechanics.
Definitely a bad news / good news situation. The economic model is flawed. But at least Traveller
has an economic model.
I would not complain about a referee working out the orbital distances and rates of an entire star system and keeping track of where all the various bodies in that system are. It is not a level of detail I would want to track most of the time.
Yes, I know that using traveller maneuver drives it could be quite significant where insystem body A is relative to body B, and some adventures could hinge on plotting the most time efficient course.
Most of the time though I am more interested in what happens planetoid.
As for the intersteller economics of Traveller, I just play that game as a game. There are plenty of other things in RPGs that make me twitchy. I am happy that Traveller at least recognizes that economics will be important to the setting.
Quote from: Skarg;859208The relative positions and motion of planets in a system make a big difference for travel between planets, unless you have extremely fast propulsion. And they change in complex but predictable ways (orbits) that place over months/years/decades or more, so "Just roll" only works if/when your game context is just doing a hit and run in its involvement with the system (or the players don't care). If it is relevant to the game's interests (e.g. if the players care about the travel conditions in the system and their changes over time), then planetary arrangement is a long-term condition which would make sense to have a schedule for, even if it's abstract and initially generated by rolls.
In a tabletop RPG it is crucial in order to adjudicate a river crossing to know the rainfall, the slope of the terrain, the type of stream bed? All of these important factors in determine current speed in a river.
While a referee could come up with all these factors and do the math to figure out the current speed, it is overkill and in my opinion doesn't add much to the game if anything at all.
However if you know that there was recent rainfall, that the slope is steep, that the river bed in this section is rocky that is sufficient to rule that likely what the PCs encounter is a set of raging rapids. The same if referee said the river is moving slowly if the PCs encounter a section of the river in a flat terrain, on a mud bed, with normal rainfall.
Coming up with the relative positions of multiple bodies along with the attendant delta-vee/distances number take a similar amount of work to calculating the exact current speed of a river.
It is deceptively simple in it looks simple with a sun in the center and planets orbiting around it. But when you try to do anything with it you quickly get into what I would call overkill math. To be precise it because of how the math for orbital mechanics works.
The exact distance isn't the central piece of data for the "terrain" of a solar system. Just as the exact current speed isn't for the terrain of a river.
For a river all you really need to know is if it is slow, swift, or raging.
For solar system travel all you really need to know the minimum travel time, the maximum travel time, the length of the windows for the two, and how often the two windows cycle. You then just roll to see where you are in time relative to the two windows. That will give you a percentage to
compute the actual travel time.
Many sci-fi games, including traveller, use standard orbits which mean making this in to a easy to use table straight forward.
Finally my point is that you can have more realistic abstraction that is no more difficult to us then using a continuous acceleration formula on a fixed distance.
As a side note it is perfectly understandable why Marc Miller and the other Traveller designers opted for the acceleration formula. It wasn't until the early 2000s that there existed practical software that a layman can use to get a sense of how orbital mechanics work. Prior to that you had to learn the math and even with the computer crunching the number that wasn't the same as actually seeing what is happening.
But today with programs like Universe Sandbox, Orbiter Space Simulator and the Kerbal Space Program you can see the practical effects of different orbital manuevuers and use that knowledge to make a more realistic ABSTRACTION for RPGs.
Quote from: Willie the Duck;859345It depends on what is important for your sense of immersion. I will tell you, with some experience over at the Citizen's of the Imperium forums, that there isn't a practical level of realism that makes everyone happy. I think Marc Miller did a pretty good job of guessing the approximate level for a gamist focused system. The biggest complaints amongst superfans seems to be about the economic model of the game, not the space mechanics.
In my experience most people don't get orbital mechanics. Not because they not knowledgable but rather a lot of it is counter-intuitive or just that math heavy. So even the hard core traveller fans don't debate it much. Plus the focus of Traveller is rarely on in-system travel. But interstellar trading has always been a popular type of campaign for Traveller. So a lot of attention has been focused on that.
For the former, you have to slow down in order to catch up with a target in orbit*. For the latter, computing travel windows is very math heavy. The best a designer can do to make something practical is to present a table.
*This is because lower orbit travel faster around the central mass than higher orbits. So to catch up you need to drop to a lower orbit which means you need to slow down as lower orbits have less energy. The trick of actually intercepting a target in orbit involves waiting until the right moment when you can put yourself into a eccentric orbit (an orbit that more of an ellipse than a circle) that intersect the target. Then when you reach target burn to match it's velocity and orbit. If you are close enough (500m or so) you can treat the situation as if taking place on a flat table.
Quote from: Elfdart;859156There are screenwriters better than Tom Stoppard out there? Better editors than Roger Barton? Can you name a few? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm curious where you get Stoppard credited with the screenplay or script.
A change in the relative positions in orbits of planets changes how far you've got to go and the difference in vectors. Constant acceleration works if your starting vector is what you want to have at the end; otherwise you need some additional at one end or the other.
As metaphor, driving Highway 65 might always work, but the matter of getting to and from Highway 65 can make a big difference in the trip.
A table of average travel times does not represent the great variation at different times.
Depending on the details, you might get there not just faster but sooner by delaying the trip. (That's counter-intuitive since Highway 65 is always first in first out, "rush hour" snail crawl or not.)
Quote from: Phillip;859401As metaphor, driving Highway 65 might always work, but the matter of getting to and from Highway 65 can make a big difference in the trip.
Except in the case of in-system travel the highway is always bending towards the central mass. Which is why trying to compute a travel time once you are on the highway is not simple let alone figuring out how to get on or off.
Quote from: Phillip;859401A table of average travel times does not represent the great variation at different times.
You are right and that not the table I am talking about.
Regardless of the numbers a in-system trajectory works for a specific departure time with the two bodies in specific positions. This which work out to a specific arrival time using a specific amount of energy over time.
Most RPGs use an abstraction of computing a straightline distance and a constant acceleration profile with a turn in the middle.
A better abstraction is to use a table of windows for maximum travel and minimum travel times, and how often they occur. You roll to see where you are in the time period and use that to determine the travel distance.
For example period of windows appearing for Hohman trajectories is little over 2 year between earth and mars. You could go to mars at any time but the window for a minimum energy transfer is only roughly 2.1 year. Any other time involves more energy.
But for Traveller we are not talking about Hohman trajectories but rather the continuous acceleration profile of brachistochrone trajectories. And like Hohman trajectories there is a window where if you launch you reach your destination in the shortest time. If you launch at any other time the voyage will take longer.
And the distance travelled is not when the two planets are closest to each other. Nor it is the distance between the two a certain degree apart. But it is periodic and that allows a table to be created and dice rolls to be use to see what the situation is at a certain time.
And if a referee wants to track relative positions you can supply the degrees of separation at which the maximum and minimum windows appear and then use a proportional system to figure out the in-between times.
For example for Classic Traveller using Book 6 where Terra is in Orbit 3, and Mars is in Orbit 4. One entry of the table will have from Orbit 3 to 4, the minimum travel window occur every X weeks and is open for X days/week and will take X hours/days. The maximum travel time takes X hours/days/weeks.
For the guys who think tracking the relative positions of planets important you would include the following.
The degree of separation for minimum travel time is X degree, and extends +/- degrees. The degree of separation for maximum travel time extends +/- degrees.
So if you determine are a quarter of the way between minimum travel times. You figure out the travel time as (Max Time - Min Time /2) + Min Time.
Quote from: Phillip;859401The same for the other orbits.
Depending on the details, you might get there not just faster but sooner by delaying the trip. (That's counter-intuitive since Highway 65 is always first in first out, "rush hour" snail crawl or not.)
For every acceleration rating or amount of fuel if you are using rockets there is always a minimum travel time or energy expenditure where you can't get any better result. Obviously if you get a drive with a better acceleration or more fuel (to a point) you will get better results.
I understand that calculating actual travel times in a solar system is quite complex.
Here's the thing though. Even if it were a Star Trek game, planets move in orbits predictably on a scale of months and years. There are certain reasonable questions that even someone who understands what that means at a pre-pre-algebra level might reasonably ask and expect an answer more consistent that rolling dice on a table each time it's asked, even if the table is brilliant and accurate. Questions like what's the orbital period of each planet (i.e. how long does it take to go around the sun)? Because it should be possible without too much math to at least have planets that move in orbits and have that determine their distance, and not have the GM roll each time it's asked even about the same planet later in time .
Now, I realize that the distance isn't all that's needed to determine the travel time for ships without FTL drives, and the less thrust they have, the more relevant all the other orbital math is, but it would make sense to be have the travel times fluctuate on an appropriate schedule, and to have the values be predictable. Because, the changing travel times between planets could be very relevant for planning what happens where when, whether it's a simple itinerary for the players, or for trade patterns, or for fleet deployments, or whatever.
On a related but different note, I wonder if a (perhaps simplified) system for doing such math couldn't be (or hasn't already been) put into a handy software tool somewhere. I know gamers like to be able to roll some dice for everything, but computers can be great for doing complex game math and record-keeping...
Quote from: Skarg;859409I understand that calculating actual travel times in a solar system is quite complex.
Here's the thing though. Even if it were a Star Trek game, planets move in orbits predictably on a scale of months and years. There are certain reasonable questions that even someone who understands what that means at a pre-pre-algebra level might reasonably ask and expect an answer more consistent that rolling dice on a table each time it's asked, even if the table is brilliant and accurate. Questions like what's the orbital period of each planet (i.e. how long does it take to go around the sun)? Because it should be possible without too much math to at least have planets that move in orbits and have that determine their distance, and not have the GM roll each time.
Actually you don't have to roll each time just the first time. Because you know how long windows appear you just keep track of in-game afterwards. However the point of a roll is to eliminate trying to figure where each planet is when the players arrive in the system. It not an important point as most in-system travel involves one or two destination outside of the main world.
Quote from: Skarg;859409On a related but different note, I wonder if a (perhaps simplified) system for doing such math couldn't be (or hasn't already been) put into a handy software tool somewhere. I know gamers like to be able to roll some dice for everything, but computers can be great for doing complex game math and record-keeping...
Yes there is however they are not a in a form easily usable during a RPG session. For example Orbiter Space Simulator has a Interplanetary Travel MDF that will give you a time in the future where you can initiate your hohmann transfer.
Kerbal has even a niftier function window that will display a delta-vee map based on your craft's capabilties. However it also focused on hohmann transfers.
My personal recommendation for a person serious about getting this right for a RPG campaign is to get Kerbal Space Program and practice orbital manuevuers and interplanetary transfer for a couple of session and you will develop a sense of how it all hangs to together. Learn the basic formulas of orbital math to get a sense of how long things take and that pretty much all you need to rule on the fly.
For myself I was deep into add-on development for the Orbiter Space Simulator for several years and created a complete simulation of the Mercury Space Capsule and worked some on the Gemini Space Capsule. I also helped the guys doing the Apollo Capsule.
http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/
I have done hundreds of of maneuvers for my own enjoyment and in playtesting my add-ons. In general I can summarize the experience as figuring out the exact numbers is very hard, learning how things generally work is not, but it is not intuitive and there is a learning curve to master the details.
As for why I never wrote up anything because while I am good at creating hardware simulation, I always relied on more savvy people for the formulas. I know enough to do a writeup for hohmann transfers and windows but not enough for brachistrone trajectories involving constant Gs. I have built simulations of Traveller craft and flown them enough to learn that it is not point and shoot. You have still plot out a trajectory and you still only have limited windows in which to do them. Of course it is way better than kick and burn rockets. But again it is also not just point and burn either.
For example if you are trying to fly a Free Trader with 1G thrust or a Scout Ship with 2G thrust from the surface of the Earth to orbit you still have to following an ascent path.
If you can lift straight up to say 150 miles and starting thrusting. But you have to do it just right and maintain your altitude. I can fly by hand a ascent path by using a table of values called a pitch program. It tell me what angle my pitch needs to be at at what time to go into orbit.
The fly straight up and then thrust method not only requires automated control, it also take longer than following ascent path. Because too much of your thrust is devoting to pointing down to maintaining your altitude.
The more Gs your drive can put out as acceleration the easier it gets and the less time it takes but it never goes away. And at the higher Gs atmospheric heating becomes a factor. We are talking temperatures and plasma heating reaching level found at the surface of the sun. And there is the brute force beating of the atmosphere slamming into your craft.
Anyway my view is that playing RPGs is more about the experience in being someone else in another time and place than the numbers. So as long as you get the experience right, then the referee has done his job.
Quote from: Phillip;859399I'm curious where you get Stoppard credited with the screenplay or script.
Script doctors seldom get screen credit, but
here's Stoppard talking about working on Revenge of the Sith: (http://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/tom-stoppard-interview-ive-always-been-strangely-eclectic)QuoteSCRIPT DOCTORING FOR GEORGE LUCAS
This is your first time working with Ewan McGregor, right? That's a trick question: Didn't you work uncredited on George Lucas's Revenge of the Sith?
Which one was that?
The third of the recent prequels.
I did talk to George about one of the episodes. It must have been ten years ago. Actually, it was Steven. Steven Spielberg asked me to read a script and do a kind of dialogue polish. I did a bit, but I wouldn't want to usurp the writer's claim on the movie. [Laughs] Polish is such a strange word for what one does. I interfered with George's script in a mild way.
"Interfered." That's a very Ortonian way of putting it. Ortonian or Etonian, I can't decide which.
[Chuckles] Well, you know, it's slightly misunderstood. It's not structured like you've got this job to do. It's more like spending time with friends and giving a hand. I didn't even know Ewan was in the film.
He played the Alec Guinness role. A younger version of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Oh. I wonder if he got to say anything I wrote. I must ask him.
He also did a "polish" on the third Indiana Jones movie.
To come back to the original question:
What I like about Traveller is that it is broad and focused at the same time. For example take the Vargr. You can use them as pirates, as an enemy in war time, as an ally, as a mysterious other race you don't understand, as mercenaries in your team or you can play an all out Vargr party. I you do the last you can use them as soldiers, pirates, spies, merchants, explorers etc. Whatever you choose the game will support you.
What I don't like about it is the enormous scale, the endless hexcrawls, the gigantic fleets and all that stuff that is just more of the same. Less is more to me.
Quote from: estar;859411Actually you don't have to roll each time just the first time. Because you know how long windows appear you just keep track of in-game afterwards. However the point of a roll is to eliminate trying to figure where each planet is when the players arrive in the system. It not an important point as most in-system travel involves one or two destination outside of the main world.
Yes. The main thing I was thinking was it would be overly random to just roll randomly each time the question comes up, for the same situation. Though I can see that it would be possible, for a system with multiple interesting locations and groups using them for different purposes over years, for it to be very relevant for people to know and plan based on the known future changing travel conditions between the planets.
QuoteYes there is however they are not a in a form easily usable during a RPG session. For example Orbiter Space Simulator has a Interplanetary Travel MDF that will give you a time in the future where you can initiate your hohmann transfer.
Kerbal has even a niftier function window that will display a delta-vee map based on your craft's capabilties. However it also focused on hohmann transfers.
My personal recommendation for a person serious about getting this right for a RPG campaign is to get Kerbal Space Program and practice orbital manuevuers and interplanetary transfer for a couple of session and you will develop a sense of how it all hangs to together. Learn the basic formulas of orbital math to get a sense of how long things take and that pretty much all you need to rule on the fly.
Cool. Thanks!
QuoteFor myself I was deep into add-on development for the Orbiter Space Simulator for several years and created a complete simulation of the Mercury Space Capsule and worked some on the Gemini Space Capsule. I also helped the guys doing the Apollo Capsule.
http://www.ibiblio.org/mscorbit/
I have done hundreds of of maneuvers for my own enjoyment and in playtesting my add-ons. In general I can summarize the experience as figuring out the exact numbers is very hard, learning how things generally work is not, but it is not intuitive and there is a learning curve to master the details.
As for why I never wrote up anything because while I am good at creating hardware simulation, I always relied on more savvy people for the formulas. I know enough to do a writeup for hohmann transfers and windows but not enough for brachistrone trajectories involving constant Gs. I have built simulations of Traveller craft and flown them enough to learn that it is not point and shoot. You have still plot out a trajectory and you still only have limited windows in which to do them. Of course it is way better than kick and burn rockets. But again it is also not just point and burn either.
For example if you are trying to fly a Free Trader with 1G thrust or a Scout Ship with 2G thrust from the surface of the Earth to orbit you still have to following an ascent path.
If you can lift straight up to say 150 miles and starting thrusting. But you have to do it just right and maintain your altitude. I can fly by hand a ascent path by using a table of values called a pitch program. It tell me what angle my pitch needs to be at at what time to go into orbit.
The fly straight up and then thrust method not only requires automated control, it also take longer than following ascent path. Because too much of your thrust is devoting to pointing down to maintaining your altitude.
The more Gs your drive can put out as acceleration the easier it gets and the less time it takes but it never goes away. And at the higher Gs atmospheric heating becomes a factor. We are talking temperatures and plasma heating reaching level found at the surface of the sun. And there is the brute force beating of the atmosphere slamming into your craft.
Anyway my view is that playing RPGs is more about the experience in being someone else in another time and place than the numbers. So as long as you get the experience right, then the referee has done his job.
Very cool. Thanks for elaborating and sharing those things! I remember playing Omnitrend's Universe back in the 80's, and finding it very cool that the better drive systems you managed to install, the less time-consuming gradual spiralling in you had to do to get into a useful orbit of larger planets. That game seemed to have pretty credible formulas, but it would just ask you for the destination and then plot the course for you, generally using the same strategy, though when you had a powerful enough engine and/or light enough gravity well, the ship wouldn't need to circle a planet (or not as many times).
In general in RPGs I'd agree, but sometimes RPGs can get into strategy and planning, and as I've said, I can easily imagine scenarios where I'd want not necessarily lots of numbers and math, but at least a schedule of what the future situation is going to be like in terms of relative difficulty getting between different planets in the system, and it'd be nice if that could be consistent and make sense in terms of orbital distance and periods.
Would that be the same as SPI's Universe? I've been wanting to have another look at it but the only download I can find is a nasty Trojan horse.
With my games I've tried to do orbital mechanics through vector addition using two concentric rings to represent the orbital positions. It's a bit boardgamey but I always feel that just lining up the appropriate vectors and laying down a ruler is easier than a bunch of math.
Quote from: David Johansen;859541Would that be the same as SPI's Universe? I've been wanting to have another look at it but the only download I can find is a nasty Trojan horse.
...
No, Omnitrend's Universe was an awesome (for 1984) computer RPG made for 1984 computers (I played on Atari 8-bits, as opposed to Apple II or MS-DOS). It came with an awesome manual in a padded 3-ring binder, and used 4 floppy disks plus a saved game disk. Here's a contemporary review and grainy manual picture: http://www.cyberroach.com/analog/an20/universe.htm
Here's a nostalgic more recent review that points out it was a kind of predecessor to Elite in being a game where you run a spaceship and can go about doing what you like: https://extralives.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/from-the-pages-of-the-past-ads-of-yesteryear-omnitrends-universe/
Quote from: Skarg;859409I understand that calculating actual travel times in a solar system is quite complex.
And there are these things called computers that would to all the math.
I can think of absolutely no fucking reason to do complex mathematical calculations in a SF game. Just tell me how long it will take me to reach Alderaan from Naboo. And if the imaginary number you pull out of your ass isn't "accurate" for an imaginary propulsion system in an imaginary universe, imagine I don't fucking care.
Sure, but Traveller doesn't exactly come from that tradition. There has always been a subgroup of science fiction fans who are physics junkies. And while you might not think it's fun, other people love doing it. Personally my skill with math and physics caps out a little below that. I love the idea, but lack the capacity.
Traveller's never quite been there either. It's had various attempts but they often butt up against the sheer size of space. In my experience, getting your free trader from the gas giant to the main world almost always works out to be a matter of months rather than days even with one gee constant acceleration. Never mind that most systems are a series of under developed and unlivable rocks.
I've often been tempted to try using Triplanetary's movement system with the big solar system hex map from Starfire New Empires. And the planetary movement rules found there. Of course, in Starfire you've got lots of motivation to develop every rock you can stick a base on as the resources generated within a star system are largely protected from attack by the warp point / choke point.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859553And there are these things called computers that would to all the math.
I can think of absolutely no fucking reason to do complex mathematical calculations in a SF game. Just tell me how long it will take me to reach Alderaan from Naboo. And if the imaginary number you pull out of your ass isn't "accurate" for an imaginary propulsion system in an imaginary universe, imagine I don't fucking care.
So, you are a highly educated man whose opinion gamers should respect because you gamed with Gygax and Arneson, but you are afraid of math.
Got it.
But let's keep in mind that the only sfrpgs where the navigator breaks out the slide rule are the ones based on sf from around 1930. In any others, the computer crunches the numbers.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. "
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859640"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. "
6G acceleration for a month is fast. Really fast. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly fast it is ... It shrinks those distances right down to a manageable level. ;)
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859553And there are these things called computers that would to all the math.
I can think of absolutely no fucking reason to do complex mathematical calculations in a SF game. Just tell me how long it will take me to reach Alderaan from Naboo. And if the imaginary number you pull out of your ass isn't "accurate" for an imaginary propulsion system in an imaginary universe, imagine I don't fucking care.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859640"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. "
OK, we got it. You are a highly educated twat who thinks his opinion should be respected, but math scares you.
Well, guess what, there are a significant number of Traveller players who:
(https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xlt1/v/t1.0-9/12141598_911529665601081_6682625119205211611_n.jpg?oh=db871a3abc3aa37094fa2b01452b1888&oe=56CA6307)
Quote from: jeff37923;859725OK, we got it. You are a highly educated twat who thinks his opinion should be respected, but math scares you.
Nice try, but nope.
If starships exist, I promise you that navigation timing will not be done by guys with calculators.
It's bogus for exactly the same reason the old Fletcher Pratt naval wargames rules were bogus. Warships have rangefinders and fire control directors; the captain needing to guess range to the enemy is total bullshit because the ship has equipment on board that does that. Just like a starship will have equipment on board that does that.
"Math" or "science" has nothing to do with it. The game is making you do by hand shit that would not be done by hand.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859728Nice try, but nope.
If starships exist, I promise you that navigation timing will not be done by guys with calculators.
It's bogus for exactly the same reason the old Fletcher Pratt naval wargames rules were bogus. Warships have rangefinders and fire control directors; the captain needing to guess range to the enemy is total bullshit because the ship has equipment on board that does that. Just like a starship will have equipment on board that does that.
"Math" or "science" has nothing to do with it. The game is making you do by hand shit that would not be done by hand.
So the simple algebraic equation of "Travel Time equals two times the square root of Distance divided by Acceleration" is too much for your aged brain to handle, and I am supposed to respect your opinion why?
Maybe you should stick to lying about writing a book describing yourself as one of the original disciples of Gygax and Arneson. You know, the vaporware one that you have been talking about for a couple of years now.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859728"Math" or "science" has nothing to do with it. The game is making you do by hand shit that would not be done by hand.
Dick Seaton would like a word with you on that exact point. Hold on a moment while he puts down his slide rule.
Gronan, and Jeff you are both wrong as to what the problem is.
@Jeff the problem is not the math but rather the wrong math is being applied. And frankly the right math in this situation is just that hard and convoluted especially for constant acceleration. Even with all the experience I have with writing realistic simulation of historical spacecraft, ultimately I rely on the genius of a half dozen wunkerking who not only know the math but can right a useful software utility to calculate what i need to know based on the situation at hand.
@Gronan sure we can make up shit and use our Bergenholms and Spindizzies. But just like some if not the majority of D&D settings don't have rivers flowing uphill. It would be nice to describe and adjudicate space travel as it is actually is. Even if the actual math is not done.
Quote from: jeff37923;859725OK, we got it. You are a highly educated twat who thinks his opinion should be respected, but math scares you.
Naw, I'm with Gronan. My degree and background are solidly in science but when I sit down to a scifi game I'm not looking for a bunch of guys who can't resist spending the entire session warbling on about the technicalities of what's going on.
Unfortunately that's too often been my experience of what hard/firm/barely erect scifi RPGs fall into. During the last session of Shadowrun I played in, the OCD player, who'd worked for six months hawking cell phones, brought everything to a halt because he had a mentally painful disconnect with the inaccuracy of the setting's assumptions about telecommunications.
'Hard' scifi games seem to attract guys with inner Sheldons who can't keep their slide-rule in their pants.
It's functionally no different than the jerks who ruined a zombie apocalypse game I was in by ranting at the GM because he'd gotten the layout of the Denver airport wrong... or the guy in our current Traveller game who keeps bringing up his stint in 'Special Forces' to point out why our plans suck.
For whatever reason I don't run into that crap nearly as much in non-modern fantasy games (even though our plans there also suck).
Quote from: Bren;859731Dick Seaton would like a word with you on that exact point. Hold on a moment while he puts down his slide rule.
I have a small lathe and milling machine over here, you can cut the cams for your ship's robot brain.
Quote from: estar;859734@Gronan sure we can make up shit and use our Bergenholms and Spindizzies. But just like some if not the majority of D&D settings don't have rivers flowing uphill. It would be nice to describe and adjudicate space travel as it is actually is. Even if the actual math is not done.
But we don't know what actual FTL would be like.
A one-time table of times is all that's needed. It takes * poit * three days to get to Naboo from Alderaan, and *poit * four days from Alderaan to Tatooine.
And if your ships are fast enough sub-light to travel in-system in hours instead of months, navigation between planets is going to be more like driving a car than anything else. Just roll dice to see if the planet happens to be close or far away when you come out of Aetherwarp.
Quote from: estar;859734@Jeff the problem is not the math but rather the wrong math is being applied. And frankly the right math in this situation is just that hard and convoluted especially for constant acceleration. Even with all the experience I have with writing realistic simulation of historical spacecraft, ultimately I rely on the genius of a half dozen wunkerking who not only know the math but can right a useful software utility to calculate what i need to know based on the situation at hand.
I got that, but the math is close enough for most Traveller players. Sonofabitch, it is basic algebra that was taught in Middle School. If that is too much for someone then they are probably playing the wrong game for their enjoyment.
Quote from: Simlasa;859735Naw, I'm with Gronan. My degree and background are solidly in science but when I sit down to a scifi game I'm not looking for a bunch of guys who can't resist spending the entire session warbling on about the technicalities of what's going on.
Unfortunately that's too often been my experience of what hard/firm/barely erect scifi RPGs fall into. During the last session of Shadowrun I played in, the OCD player, who'd worked for six months hawking cell phones, brought everything to a halt because he had mentally painful disconnect with the inaccuracy of the setting's assumptions about telecommunications.
'Hard' scifi games seem to attract guys with inner Sheldons who can't keep their slide-rule in their pants.
It's functionally no different than the jerks who ruined a zombie apocalypse game I was in by ranting at the GM because he'd gotten the layout of the Denver airport wrong... or the guy in our current Traveller game who keeps bringing up his stint in 'Special Forces' to point out why our plans suck.
For whatever reason I don't run into that crap nearly as much in non-modern fantasy games (even though our plans there also suck).
What you just described is not a game problem, it is a player problem. You knew this guy was OCD, so why let him damage the game you are running?
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859736I have a small lathe and milling machine over here, you can cut the cams for your ship's robot brain.
Maybe you could build a ghost writer for your book.....
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859737But we don't know what actual FTL would be like.
A one-time table of times is all that's needed. It takes * poit * three days to get to Naboo from Alderaan, and *poit * four days from Alderaan to Tatooine.
And if your ships are fast enough sub-light to travel in-system in hours instead of months, navigation between planets is going to be more like driving a car than anything else. Just roll dice to see if the planet happens to be close or far away when you come out of Aetherwarp.
This is because you are talking science fantasy and not science fiction. It is the difference between Star Wars and The Martian. Both are good, but both approach the subject matter very differently.
Quote from: jeff37923;859739What you just described is not a game problem, it is a player problem. You knew this guy was OCD, so why let him damage the game you are running?
Yeah it's a Player problem... but that same guy had been mostly fine all through a long stretch of Earthdawn and Deadlands... but the near-future scifi skated just close enough to something he could lecture us on. And like I said, I seem to keep running into this... guys wanting to pontificate at the table about how they think this or that bit of the technology would work. The 'hard' scifi attracts them like flies.
The GM could just tell them to STFU but most of the time the GM engages with the rivet-counter in some long theoretical daisy chain.
Quote from: jeff37923;859742This is because you are talking science fantasy and not science fiction. It is the difference between Star Wars and The Martian. Both are good, but both approach the subject matter very differently.
... and The Martian would most likely be a very dull RPG at the table.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859736I have a small lathe and milling machine over here, you can cut the cams for your ship's robot brain.
You got my point.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859737A one-time table of times is all that's needed. It takes * poit * three days to get to Naboo from Alderaan, and *poit * four days from Alderaan to Tatooine.
Personally I like having a star map rather than just a table. And a map looks nice on the transparent star plot in the navigation area.
I will agree that it is a problem is the math given is wrong. I am not a math person, so a table of travel times would suit me just fine. My starships tend to move at the speed of plot. But it is nice for the calculations to produce the right results for those who enjoy running them.
I have occasionally driven game designers up a tree by asking them about how exactly some point of the biology of their SF world works or similar.
If you are going to science in your game, make sure the science holds up.
I have played RPGs with gun bunnies who winced at every inaccuracy in the fire arms in game.
We may not all care if the ecology of a planet works, the orbital mechanics are correct, or the firearms have the proper ranges, but some of us will notice if they are wrong. For those who notice it can ruin the immersion.
Just because I do not play the game the way you do does not mean one of us is playing it wrong.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;859553And there are these things called computers that would to all the math.
I can think of absolutely no fucking reason to do complex mathematical calculations in a SF game. Just tell me how long it will take me to reach Alderaan from Naboo. And if the imaginary number you pull out of your ass isn't "accurate" for an imaginary propulsion system in an imaginary universe, imagine I don't fucking care.
I was about to write the same thing, but now I don't have to. It's like concocting intricate weather systems for D&D when you could just roll one die for the type of weather; another for the time of day the weather hits. Or just make it up as you go, with whatever tickles your fancy:
"Late afternoon by the coast? Time for rain."
As much as I enjoyed fiddling with
the ORBIS site (http://orbis.stanford.edu/), where you can calculate travel times in the Roman Empire, with variables such as weather, season, terrain and types of transport thrown in, I've found that creating such a thing for a D&D campaign is silly, since it is more pointlessly complex and still every bit as arbitrary as pure ass pull.
This is exponentially so in sci-fi settings like Traveller.
Quote from: DavetheLost;859761We may not all care if the ecology of a planet works, the orbital mechanics are correct, or the firearms have the proper ranges, but some of us will notice if they are wrong. For those who notice it can ruin the immersion.
Others of us see those things and choose to keep our gob shut for the sake of everyone else playing the game... that stuff happens all the time and it's better for everyone if you just roll with it. Yes, the GM said 'magazine' when what he meant was 'cartridge'... is it really worth stopping the game to point out?
When you're watching movies in a theater do you shout at the screen if an actor pumps a shotgun that already has a shell in the chamber?
QuoteJust because I do not play the game the way you do does not mean one of us is playing it wrong.
No, it just means I don't want to play games with you.
And generally I do keep my gob shut and roll with it. I don't know how to calculate orbital mechanics and don't care. I use "clip" and "magazine" interchangeably.
For many of us a large part of the appeal of Hard SF is that teh science is right, or as close to right as can be. So some players want accurate manuever drives and orbital mechanics, I like plausible ecosystems, some have already commented about the problems with the economic model, and of course there are the debates about computers.
When you starting premise includes "accurate science" don't be surprised when people who are science geeks show up and call out errors in the science.
It doesn't really bother me in the giant, flying, fire-breathing, hyper-intelligent lizard games, because those are not intended to be "realistic". "Magic" goes a long way to explain and excuse all the silliness.
Quote from: DavetheLost;859819It doesn't really bother me in the giant, flying, fire-breathing, hyper-intelligent lizard games, because those are not intended to be "realistic". "Magic" goes a long way to explain and excuse all the silliness.
The arguments are just over different things. Like between the people who want surf-board sized swords, midriff baring armor, and high-heeled steel boots in their RPGs vs the people who really don't.
Quote from: Bren;859882The arguments are just over different things. Like between the people who want surf-board sized swords, midriff baring armor, and high-heeled steel boots in their RPGs vs the people who really don't.
Just, for some reason, I don't see those arguments during the game nearly as much... unless it's some in-game discussion like how to build a bear trap (and then the bear comes out of the bushes and it's all moot).
Quote from: Simlasa;859884Just, for some reason, I don't see those arguments during the game nearly as much... unless it's some in-game discussion like how to build a bear trap (and then the bear comes out of the bushes and it's all moot).
OK. That's a fair point. Magic does seem like a more acceptable hand wave than Sci-Fi tech.
I have seen a fair number of arguments in FRPs, but the range the gamut from rules questions through historical tactics, facts, and trivia. Of course I may just have gamed with a lot of argumentative people. Who would ever have expected that I would have some argumentative friends, eh?
Quote from: Bren;859886OK. That's a fair point. Magic does seem like a more acceptable hand wave than Sci-Fi tech.
Well, I suppose you could have arguments over historical accuracy... weapons, armor, farming, disease, religious practices... what long range for an archer is... plausible geography/weather/constellations... there's loads of factual stuff to obsess over... but I've seldom seen it halt a game.
I have been lucky and most of the "disect the science" discussions springing from our SF games have happenned after not during play. Or been me trying to get it right while writing an adventure,
Quote from: ChrisGunter;854637I want to know what you guys think of Traveller. It has been around a while but I've never played it.
My neither, though I bought a copy to see what all the fuss was about, and some aspects of it are interesting (like the character creation).
What I thought was odd was how lots of people wax lyrical about (some) old TSR modules and (some) old Judges Guild modules, but I can't see anyone reminiscing about old Traveller modules, and I wasn't that impressed with the couple that I got. Is there a go-to classic traveller adventure (other than the full-on campaign that is The Traveller Adventure)?
Quote from: JoeNuttall;859925My neither, though I bought a copy to see what all the fuss was about, and some aspects of it are interesting (like the character creation).
What I thought was odd was how lots of people wax lyrical about (some) old TSR modules and (some) old Judges Guild modules, but I can’t see anyone reminiscing about old Traveller modules, and I wasn’t that impressed with the couple that I got. Is there a go-to classic traveller adventure (other than the full-on campaign that is The Traveller Adventure)?
Twilight Peak
Adventure #3 from GDW
The Skyraider Trilogy by the Keith brothers from FASA
Back in the day when both were new our group played D&D modules, but all our Traveller adventures were home rolled.
Quote from: jeff37923;859738I got that, but the math is close enough for most Traveller players. Sonofabitch, it is basic algebra that was taught in Middle School. If that is too much for someone then they are probably playing the wrong game for their enjoyment.
That's pretty much all there is to say about it. Traveller has a specific 'dial setting' with regards to acceptable math. There's no right answer. So play it as is if you like that level, change it (sort of playing a different game), or play a truly different game.