How do I address you, Mr. Hyphen_DJW?
Those are good questions. I am discovering on this list that there are
things that I wrote that I don't remember until people point them out to
me, so some of my memory is suspect, but here goes.
> Actually, I think the jarring thing was the NUKE-pumped Xray lasers. As
> someone put it, "what happens if a bad-tempered grizzeled o'-timer comes
> out of jump and decides to start blasting away at everyone?" With the
> "ordinary" shipboard weapons of CT, lots of civilian would get killed, and
> eventually the Imperial Navy, local navy, or even nearby civvie would take
> him out.
>
> With nukes aboard, however, the equation changes. It wouldn't take too
> many thrown at civilian population centres to have a megadeath situation
> at hand. You don't even need to target the missiles' laser at anything,
> just tell it to explode over the top of a city. How do you play this one?
I think that's where the Traveller's eternal attempt to straddle, "generic
SFRPG, you don't have to play in our background" and "Traveller storyline,
play within it" sometimes overlapped, or in this case, underlapped. This
is especially the case because the storyline part was post-Imperial, but
to the extent that players could retrofit the TNE equipment onto a 3I
background, we maybe didn't talk enough about it.
First, the combat system was designed to capture the high end, military v.
military, and scale down from there, rather than low-end and scale up. So
things like X-ray missiles came out of that "here is the best military
solution" thinking, rather than, "here's how people with two hands tied
behind their backs fight, I wonder how the big guys do it?"
Also, the TNE background was a life-or-death background, not a sneaking
around hoping to avoid the notice of the Imperial Navy with your
"Ethically-Challenged Merchant Crew" (ECMC). There was real shit out there
trying to kill you, and you had to kill it first. So the background was
not focused on the 3I scenario, it was focused more on military and
para-military who were looking over their shoulders NOT for the local
police, but for Vampire fleets.
And with all that had happened leading up to TNE, if you've got players
running around nuking people or rooting for people who nuke people, WTF,
over? People who nuke worlds in TNE are the bad guys, and on top of that,
they're stupid. As slim as the living is in TNE, you're not going to find
a lot of edible food or useable tech in a city you've just nuked. If
you've got a ref who wants to allow that, a rule saying, "PCs shouldn't
own nukes" won't help.
So it's background-focused more than anything. And in the background we
showed that there were lots of missiles that were designed for planetary
bombardment, that fit in missile sockets, that were not nukes.
The gap, as I think you might be getting at, or Derek got at earlier, is
that there is a niche for non-nuke space missiles, that we might not have
published stuff for, and the reason was in the campaign setting, it didn't
really appear up at the top of the list for things to develop, because
that niche was really pretty small as I will explain.
For space combat, the matrix would be:
High-end v. high-end, which the rules cover.
High-end v. low-end, in which case the conclusion is foregone. Even if you
do have a "point defense" laser, it doesn't matter if he's shooting
nuke-pumped X-rays or a gazillion skin-to-skin missiles with custard pies
on the end of them, you're still dead.
Low-end v. low-end is the niche I think we are maybe talking about, where
my free trader is fighting your far trader, each with one laser turret and
one missile turret. In TNE, you're going to want a nuke-pumped X-ray,
because he's Virus or something else just as bad. But let's say you're in
the Regency, ECMC v. ECMC. You are not going to be overwhelming him with
missile saturation attacks, because you don't have it, and neither does
he, and you can shoot down the incoming skin-skin missiles.
Where it all began is in the fire control solution model which was based
on lasers. Given sensor signature time (C) and laser return fire time (C)
and target size and G-rating, there are certain ranges at which you simply
cannot miss. In the time it takes you to get the data and send the laser
shot back, the guy can only move so far, and there is an iron logic to
this. The closer you get, the more impossible it is to miss you. There
were one or two Challenge articles that went into this in great detail,
and that was from whence all else derived. Contact missiles by definition
do nothing but get closer to you. If you have any lasers the fire control
solution gets easier and easier and easier, and in this scenario, without
a battlecruiser dumping magazine loads of missiles on you, any laser is a
"point defense" laser. So skin-skin missiles don't do you any good here
either.
So the one place where concentrating on low-end non-nuke missiles makes
sense was first, a niche event, and a niche event where in TNE you
wouldn't want to take a knife to a gunfight, so we didn't pay a lot of
attention to it, to the best of my recollection.
Something that if we had decided to focus on, "these are the rules for
missile combat in this civilized area with these laws" we could have
covered, but that wasn't what we were focusing on developing. With the
discussion today, however, I would like to have added a sidebar saying,
"here are some conventional skin-skin missiles used for various
specialized situations..."
And even in 3I it's very easy to make the distinction, "did they use that
nuke missile in space combat where no ecosystem got irradiated, or did
they drop it on a city?" It's not illegal to own a car, it's just illegal
to get drunk and smash your car into a crowd of people.
> For me personally, the second issue I had was this: I could understand
> that naval vessels would have point defence fire control and thus shoot
> down conventional missiles aimed at them. But given the MCr prices for PD,
> I didn't think it would be installed on most _civilian_ ships. This makes
> contact missiles viable for player-character sized encounters, while
> allowing the _military_ to retain the nukes (which was the original
> premise, anyway).
I think I got at this above, with the Challenge article, where in Free
Trader vs. Far Trader scenarios, all lasers are PD lasers, so skin-skin
missiles still don't buy you that much.
> (My final nit - and it's just that, a personal preferencelikes/dislikes
> sort of thing - was that bomb-pumped xray laser missiles said "Traveller:
> 2300" to me. And that's a different game, y'know? Hey, I didn't even like
> the idea of arqubusses in AD&D, it was too... jarring. In a bad Warhammer
> way. But as I said, just a personal nit. ;-) ;-)
It was absolutely 2300, and I think inevitably so. Depending on who you
talk to, "Traveller 2300" was intended to replace or supplant CT as GDW's
latest, state-of-the-art SFRPG, based on newer thinking. At some point
this thinking was reversed, the "Traveller" got removed from 2300, and MT
came out and stuck with its classic weapons suites. But the thinking and
logic of nuke-pumped laser missiles as well as "no reactionless drives!"
that first saw light in 2300 continued on into TNE.
> Were these the sorts of discussions kicked around in the Workshop? And if
> so, what conclusions did you all come to?
God yes, as I hope the discussion above gives you some taste.
Dave