Hahaha. Ya guns were one of my things in the game, my character designed a couple of gauss weapons for specialized rolls, I disliked the 2cm LAG intensely. A 4mm Gauss SMG with 30mm GL and a 10mm Gauss rifle for anti battle dress / robot / light armored vehicles. The nail gun.
The smg was actually compact enough that I ended up slinging it under the front end of a 5 round semi auto GL, it was odd looking but was a stupid handy weapon. The door crasher special.
I've got some super nice deckplans somewhere too.
I was kind of a firm believer that fuel for Jump was consumed during jump to maintain the jump envelope. Once you had enough fuel to create the hole in space / time you could get in and continue refining and burning while you were in the hole.
Derek Stanley
Sent from my iPhone...
Derek Stanley
Sent from my iPhone...
> On Mar 10, 2014, at 10:13, wrote:
>
> 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.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
The smg was actually compact enough that I ended up slinging it under the front end of a 5 round semi auto GL, it was odd looking but was a stupid handy weapon. The door crasher special.
I've got some super nice deckplans somewhere too.
I was kind of a firm believer that fuel for Jump was consumed during jump to maintain the jump envelope. Once you had enough fuel to create the hole in space / time you could get in and continue refining and burning while you were in the hole.
Derek Stanley
Sent from my iPhone...
Derek Stanley
Sent from my iPhone...
> On Mar 10, 2014, at 10:13, wrote:
>
> 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.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>