Derek--
You are definitely a man after my own heart, and this is a perfect example
of how I hoped players would pick up and run with the "fiddly tactical
detail" that we opened up in TNE/BL with ditching reactionless drive for
reaction mass. And you probably noticed how I started defining required
fuel volume per parsec of jump in ship designs to allow players to trade
jump for G-turns. And also similarly, "turn off this to run that." (My
intent was to introduce skill libraries to say, "turning this off and that
on normally takes X time, or a Difficult engineering task to do it in Y
time, Outstanding success yields Z time" and that sort of thing.)
And also your example of the use of missiles as sensor drones was exactly
the cool elements we pulled from Star Cruiser into TNE.
I also heartily approve of/agree with your use of common areas for
cargo/supplies. You've probably heard of how when US submarines depart on
patrol they do so walking on layers of canned food in the passageways
which are gradually consumed early in the patrol. I think that is exactly
how "real" starships would operate, especially in the "TNE universe"
(RC/post-collapse) where you're not sure when you're getting your next
resupply.
I also hao/aw low berths serving as bunks. That was always the case IMTU,
and I think that assumption may have seeped into TNE. Certainly if anyone
had asked, "is this allowed?" I would have said "yes," probably with the
caveat that in impairs crew efficiency if done too much/too long. But then
going back to US SSNs, you're aware that 688 boats routinely hot bunk so
there is an acceptable level of routine inconvenience that is acceptable.
Finally, after this big love-fest, you just had to toss a turd into the
punch bowl, didn't you? :-) Yeah, I've heard the slug glitch before,
definitely on this list. Maybe even before GDW went down and we had a fix
to put into FF&S Mk 1 Mod Next.
> I was very much a designer in this vein when I was building ships for the
> PE campaign I ran about 14 years or so back. The ship typically had enough
> juice to run the engines at full throttle and the weapons but if you
> wanted to crack fuel you had to turn something off. The Jump drives were
> J3 but it was only fueled for J2 so if you wanted to do a J3 you had to
> consume some of your maneuver fuel so the crew had the option of knocking
> a week off the trip but what was the consequence to be at the far end?
> Would they be short on fuel if they got into combat? The solution that the
> players came up with was to jump in, launch all the missles and use them
> as drone sensor net for information gathering while the ship ran silent.
> They'd then insert the missles into orbit as overwatch while they went
> dirt side and when the job was done they'd simply pick up the missles,
> refuel and restock them for the next port of call.
>
> I had a hand wave that allowed the characters to use common areas as cargo
> spaces, typically because they ships they were in were so tight and high
> strung they didn't have much more cargo space than was absolutly necessary
> for that APC / Grav Van that they were transporting. Unfortunately filling
> the halls with cargo makes routine maintenance much less routine.
>
> I was also running a handwave that allowed the use of lowberths as bunks.
> The crew bunked out in a single area and the captain had the only cabin.
>
> IIRC there was some weirdness in FFS around the design of small arms that
> basically increased range and dmg the larger the round and the slower it
> was traveling.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> From:
> To: "Traveller TNE" <>
> Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 9:18:27 AM
> Subject: [Traveller_TNE] Unique tech advancement approach
>
>
>
>
>
> I think Uxi and I discussed this system before, either on this forum or
> directly, and I liked it. I think this is related to something you've
> tried in your games, like those skill-related system charts?
>
> This reminds me of two things, and since I'm in a chatty mood lately:
>
> 1. I've mentioned this here before, but I was moving toward a
> skill-related system in the TNE starship construction system. I found in
> the process of designing Brilliant Lances (also rolled into FF&S) that the
> system's (incrementally) greater detail required more design trade-offs,
> and this requirement could be turned into a virtue by introducing fiddly
> little flaws and "personality" into ship designs (the sort that many
> games, most annoyingly BattleTech, handled by fake fiat, as it was not
> based on any actual antecedents in the design process) that would then
> require crews to counterbalance. In BL you were always finding systems
> that you could almost, but not quite, make as big as required. You could
> design them this way, but they would function less effectively. There
> would be defined thresholds based on % of actual requirement, and at each
> threshold the system would require a set of tasks (played day-to-day at PC
> level) or +1 skill, say Engineering (played at the long-term/fleet level)
> to keep the ship running effectively. I was already starting to put this
> into designs in fuel purifiers and power plants that couldn't run the
> whole ship at the same time (FP in the form of time to process full load,
> time to process J1, etc., or PP can run this, but not that at same time)
> and was going to define engineering tasks for "here39;s what it takes to
> seamlessly switch power between these systems under duress," but didn't
> get there before the lights started going out at GDW. I was really looking
> forward to this, because players and refs and ship designers and fleet
> builders who like "crunchy" details would have enjoyed it, although not
> everyone would have used it, as it would have raised the level of detail.
>
> 2. I did some work over the years on a ship design system kind of broadly
> based on things like the pre-WWI British-German naval arms race that was
> like Uxi's system, except that instead of player skills, it would be based
> on investment in industrial plant and research through-put, where instead
> of a one-size-fits-all "tech level" the different nations (wet navy) or
> races (SF) would have a "State-of-the-Art" (SOTA) which represented their
> farthest mass-producible engineering solutions. Obviously this would not
> be Traveller, as the global TL is exactly what it was NOT doing. Rather,
> it would be more like Imperium or Task Force's StarFire or Star Fleet
> Battles. The SOTA would be defined in several areas, engineering plants,
> weapons systems, sensor suites, etc. and these would embed various design
> trade-offs, so that one player might have systems that were lighter or
> faster, while another might have systems that were more robust or damage
> resistant, and these would interact to allow them to create ships that
> were distinctively different, and would have different implications for
> how they were operationally used, both at the fleet level and within the
> design. Another example of this from the pre-WW1 arms race would be the
> way the British a continuous powder train and the Germans had better
> ammunition hoist practices which affected rate of fire, but also meant the
> Brits were more susceptible to catastrophic damage from flash. This is
> very similar in feel and intent to what Uxi describes. I would say, "great
> minds think alike," but that would mean complimenting myself.
>
> Obviously Uxi's idea, though cool for your individual "IMTU," would be a
> difficult fit over top of Traveller UWPs. As the UWPs were already
> sufficiently buggy to begin with, adding an additional layer of
> interpretation over top of them would make everyone's head explode.
>
> Finally, "Bonus Dave Crunchy Hooey," the mention of "folio games." One
> thing we learned at GDW was that every time we tried to define a new way
> to knock out a "simple, quick" product that would free up design time for
> the bigger projects it always worked in reverse. The time required to
> develop them always became disproportionate to what we could make back on
> them proportionate to their size. The series of "folios" (what did we call
> them?) we put out for MT, Dark Con, and Twilight were blood baths. It
> turns out, as famously observed by Mark Twain, that it takes longer to
> write short than it takes to simply allow something to run long (observe
> my e-mails, for example), just so you can set a lower price point for it.
> Another "hey, here's a good quickie we can knock out" idea was Star
> Vikings. I think the end product was good, but it was not quick, nor a
> time-saver.
>
> Ah, well, life's a bitch, and then you die. There are trolls out there who
> will observe that this demonstrates the need for real business models and
> MBAs in the gaming industry. When I was in the biz, GDW was still a
> remnant of the "mom 'n' pop" operations that gave us the "golden age of
> wargaming," and that's where a lot of its fun and eclecticism came from.
> Besides, anyone with an MBA would know that there wasn't enough money in
> that sort of wargaming to begin with. The two answers to that, WotC and
> computer games are 1) life lessons on what happens when you get it, and 2)
> it's a completely different industry completely underwritten by deliberate
> government tax breaks. Welfare state for "slackers," perhaps.
>
>
>
>
>
You are definitely a man after my own heart, and this is a perfect example
of how I hoped players would pick up and run with the "fiddly tactical
detail" that we opened up in TNE/BL with ditching reactionless drive for
reaction mass. And you probably noticed how I started defining required
fuel volume per parsec of jump in ship designs to allow players to trade
jump for G-turns. And also similarly, "turn off this to run that." (My
intent was to introduce skill libraries to say, "turning this off and that
on normally takes X time, or a Difficult engineering task to do it in Y
time, Outstanding success yields Z time" and that sort of thing.)
And also your example of the use of missiles as sensor drones was exactly
the cool elements we pulled from Star Cruiser into TNE.
I also heartily approve of/agree with your use of common areas for
cargo/supplies. You've probably heard of how when US submarines depart on
patrol they do so walking on layers of canned food in the passageways
which are gradually consumed early in the patrol. I think that is exactly
how "real" starships would operate, especially in the "TNE universe"
(RC/post-collapse) where you're not sure when you're getting your next
resupply.
I also hao/aw low berths serving as bunks. That was always the case IMTU,
and I think that assumption may have seeped into TNE. Certainly if anyone
had asked, "is this allowed?" I would have said "yes," probably with the
caveat that in impairs crew efficiency if done too much/too long. But then
going back to US SSNs, you're aware that 688 boats routinely hot bunk so
there is an acceptable level of routine inconvenience that is acceptable.
Finally, after this big love-fest, you just had to toss a turd into the
punch bowl, didn't you? :-) Yeah, I've heard the slug glitch before,
definitely on this list. Maybe even before GDW went down and we had a fix
to put into FF&S Mk 1 Mod Next.
> I was very much a designer in this vein when I was building ships for the
> PE campaign I ran about 14 years or so back. The ship typically had enough
> juice to run the engines at full throttle and the weapons but if you
> wanted to crack fuel you had to turn something off. The Jump drives were
> J3 but it was only fueled for J2 so if you wanted to do a J3 you had to
> consume some of your maneuver fuel so the crew had the option of knocking
> a week off the trip but what was the consequence to be at the far end?
> Would they be short on fuel if they got into combat? The solution that the
> players came up with was to jump in, launch all the missles and use them
> as drone sensor net for information gathering while the ship ran silent.
> They'd then insert the missles into orbit as overwatch while they went
> dirt side and when the job was done they'd simply pick up the missles,
> refuel and restock them for the next port of call.
>
> I had a hand wave that allowed the characters to use common areas as cargo
> spaces, typically because they ships they were in were so tight and high
> strung they didn't have much more cargo space than was absolutly necessary
> for that APC / Grav Van that they were transporting. Unfortunately filling
> the halls with cargo makes routine maintenance much less routine.
>
> I was also running a handwave that allowed the use of lowberths as bunks.
> The crew bunked out in a single area and the captain had the only cabin.
>
> IIRC there was some weirdness in FFS around the design of small arms that
> basically increased range and dmg the larger the round and the slower it
> was traveling.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> From:
> To: "Traveller TNE" <>
> Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 9:18:27 AM
> Subject: [Traveller_TNE] Unique tech advancement approach
>
>
>
>
>
> I think Uxi and I discussed this system before, either on this forum or
> directly, and I liked it. I think this is related to something you've
> tried in your games, like those skill-related system charts?
>
> This reminds me of two things, and since I'm in a chatty mood lately:
>
> 1. I've mentioned this here before, but I was moving toward a
> skill-related system in the TNE starship construction system. I found in
> the process of designing Brilliant Lances (also rolled into FF&S) that the
> system's (incrementally) greater detail required more design trade-offs,
> and this requirement could be turned into a virtue by introducing fiddly
> little flaws and "personality" into ship designs (the sort that many
> games, most annoyingly BattleTech, handled by fake fiat, as it was not
> based on any actual antecedents in the design process) that would then
> require crews to counterbalance. In BL you were always finding systems
> that you could almost, but not quite, make as big as required. You could
> design them this way, but they would function less effectively. There
> would be defined thresholds based on % of actual requirement, and at each
> threshold the system would require a set of tasks (played day-to-day at PC
> level) or +1 skill, say Engineering (played at the long-term/fleet level)
> to keep the ship running effectively. I was already starting to put this
> into designs in fuel purifiers and power plants that couldn't run the
> whole ship at the same time (FP in the form of time to process full load,
> time to process J1, etc., or PP can run this, but not that at same time)
> and was going to define engineering tasks for "here39;s what it takes to
> seamlessly switch power between these systems under duress," but didn't
> get there before the lights started going out at GDW. I was really looking
> forward to this, because players and refs and ship designers and fleet
> builders who like "crunchy" details would have enjoyed it, although not
> everyone would have used it, as it would have raised the level of detail.
>
> 2. I did some work over the years on a ship design system kind of broadly
> based on things like the pre-WWI British-German naval arms race that was
> like Uxi's system, except that instead of player skills, it would be based
> on investment in industrial plant and research through-put, where instead
> of a one-size-fits-all "tech level" the different nations (wet navy) or
> races (SF) would have a "State-of-the-Art" (SOTA) which represented their
> farthest mass-producible engineering solutions. Obviously this would not
> be Traveller, as the global TL is exactly what it was NOT doing. Rather,
> it would be more like Imperium or Task Force's StarFire or Star Fleet
> Battles. The SOTA would be defined in several areas, engineering plants,
> weapons systems, sensor suites, etc. and these would embed various design
> trade-offs, so that one player might have systems that were lighter or
> faster, while another might have systems that were more robust or damage
> resistant, and these would interact to allow them to create ships that
> were distinctively different, and would have different implications for
> how they were operationally used, both at the fleet level and within the
> design. Another example of this from the pre-WW1 arms race would be the
> way the British a continuous powder train and the Germans had better
> ammunition hoist practices which affected rate of fire, but also meant the
> Brits were more susceptible to catastrophic damage from flash. This is
> very similar in feel and intent to what Uxi describes. I would say, "great
> minds think alike," but that would mean complimenting myself.
>
> Obviously Uxi's idea, though cool for your individual "IMTU," would be a
> difficult fit over top of Traveller UWPs. As the UWPs were already
> sufficiently buggy to begin with, adding an additional layer of
> interpretation over top of them would make everyone's head explode.
>
> Finally, "Bonus Dave Crunchy Hooey," the mention of "folio games." One
> thing we learned at GDW was that every time we tried to define a new way
> to knock out a "simple, quick" product that would free up design time for
> the bigger projects it always worked in reverse. The time required to
> develop them always became disproportionate to what we could make back on
> them proportionate to their size. The series of "folios" (what did we call
> them?) we put out for MT, Dark Con, and Twilight were blood baths. It
> turns out, as famously observed by Mark Twain, that it takes longer to
> write short than it takes to simply allow something to run long (observe
> my e-mails, for example), just so you can set a lower price point for it.
> Another "hey, here's a good quickie we can knock out" idea was Star
> Vikings. I think the end product was good, but it was not quick, nor a
> time-saver.
>
> Ah, well, life's a bitch, and then you die. There are trolls out there who
> will observe that this demonstrates the need for real business models and
> MBAs in the gaming industry. When I was in the biz, GDW was still a
> remnant of the "mom 'n' pop" operations that gave us the "golden age of
> wargaming," and that's where a lot of its fun and eclecticism came from.
> Besides, anyone with an MBA would know that there wasn't enough money in
> that sort of wargaming to begin with. The two answers to that, WotC and
> computer games are 1) life lessons on what happens when you get it, and 2)
> it's a completely different industry completely underwritten by deliberate
> government tax breaks. Welfare state for "slackers," perhaps.
>
>
>
>
>