Ff&s2

[zonk]

OK, don't know what happened there. If this posts twice excuse me.

Is the FF&S2 I see mentioned in the design sequences in this forum the second edition FF&S from TNE or is it FF&S from T4?

And if it's the later, isn't there some problems with the T4 FF&S? Was there errata to fix it? I know I should ask that over on the T4 board but it seemed to flow... Anyway if it's not applicable then I'll ask it over there

Thanks

 

[Gallowglacht]

Its the T4 one.
I think there was an errata but I dont know where.
I avoided T4 like the plague when it came out. Only looked at it again last week.

 

[Scott Martin]

It's the FF&S for T4.

I much prefer the *system* for TNE, but T4 did change the required "structure" for starships to be 10% of that required in TNE, which made fast ships possible (lugging around all of the required structure and armour made it almost impossible to get a 6G ship below TL-13, and difficult below TL-15)

Of course since the system for TNE was much more granular, the design sequences (especially for sensors) was IMO significantly better.

The original FF&S was also much better laid out, and had good explanatory text for what stuff was, as well as including alternate technology that actually fit into the rest of the tech mix.

Scott Martin

 

[jfetters]

Scott,

As someone who does not own FFS2, could you elaborate on the structure difference between the two? I am trying to understand what you mean. I like to design fast ships, too, but it's very difficult to do that in V1.

 

[aramis]

FF&S2 has all the tables in the back of the book, and not in the various chapters. It also replaced the multiplication symbol with a double-headed arrow. If the tables had been a separate booklet (ala Starter Traveller), it would have been awesome. But, since it's "Perfect bound" it's merely frustrating beyond belief.

 

[Antony]

You can use some of FF&S2 with TNE. I did this for some asteroid hulled ships for example, but try getting them to move! using HePlaR thrusters. Immediately you are in to actual thrust/mass ratios.

As for fast ships it is possible in FF&S1 but sometimes there is a trade off, normally the jump capacity is reduced to increase provision for maneuver drives (all my ships use reaction drives not thruster plates) I did manage to do a version of the old 75,000 Regal class battlecruiser which still had Jump-4 and 6G. The biggest problem I found with the larger ships was getting everything on the hull I wanted. In the case of the old Regal this was done by hybridising the hull form to a Needle/Wedge AF.

http://www.skaran.net/banners/equipment/craft/imperial/regal.html

I do love the idea of a squadron of these flying NOE!

 

[TheDS]

Considering you're not realy supposed to have 6G ships without 6G of compensation, it's not as big a deal as they're making it out to be.

If you're in the market for a new FF&S, you should be aware that there's a Mk1 Mod1 version of FF&S, which has a lot of corrected stuff in it, but there's still some errata. There are also half a dozen books/articles that expand on the rules.

FF&S2 was for T4, but a lot of it could be seen as an expansion of FF&S. The presentation of it left a lot to be desired, not to mention the difficulty in reading some of the formulae.

I have heard rumors of an FF&S3 for the upcoming Traveller made by that other company (not SJG) being in the works, which is not to be confused with my abortive and not official attempt a few years ago.

 

[zonk]

Considering you're not realy supposed to have 6G ships without 6G of compensation, it's not as big a deal as they're making it out to be.

I don't understand. Possibly more words with fewer syllables in them?

I have FF&S Mk 1 Mod 1 (as well as the first printing). I wasn't aware that there was a Mk 1 Mod 1 version of the basic rule set. I need to check my copy...

I guess I should look over this forum... but as long as I have you here, do you know where the errata is for FF&S Mk 1 Mod 1? And, if there is any, for the TNE rules Mk 1 Mod 1? For that matter maybe errata for the plain jane TNE rules cause I don't know which I have just now... see above.

edit to add
um, OK. I already have the Mk1 Mod 1 errata for both. I should look at my computer a little more often eh? Anyway I guess I haven't read either just yet, but I'ma gonna.

So back to my real question. 6G 6G compensator, what? I hafta confess I haven't read FFS in a long time so what are you saying here, with a bit of exploratory text for us dummies?

 

[TheDS]

Compensators are to reduce or eliminate the crew feeling the ship maneuvering. In previous versions of Traveller (Okay, I'm pretty sure it was in MT) you couldn't build a ship that had a higher G rating than what your compensators were rated for. So, at TL15, you could build a ship capable of accelerating up to 6G, because your G compensators could handle that much. At each reduced TL, you reduced the compensation by 1, so that at TL10 you had 1G of compensation, and I think they gave you 1G at TL9, just like you had J1 at TL9 and TL10.

TNE changed that a little, by allowing you to build to whatever G-rating you wanted, but you had to have a strong enough internal structure, and your crew might get turned to jelly if you accelerated more than your compensation. There was specific mention that you could exceed your compensators by 1G without ill effects, but each G higher than that, you needed to make rolls to see if you killed your crew or something like that.

And if you were in combat, this safety threshold was reduced by 1G, so you could maneuver up to your G compensation rating without ill effect, but above that, things got difficult. Not easy to walk when the ship is twisting and turning in all directions in an effort to make it hard for the enemy to figure out where you'll be when their laser beam reaches you.

As I recall, the progression of G compensation in TNE was the same as mentioned above.

There were some ways to get around this, to a limited degree. You could install special seats that would negate a G, or install G-tanks that would negate several G's; something like that.

I hope this is more helpful than my previous quip.

 

[Theophilus]

Of course, under the TNE rules, the actual speed of the ship was based on g's of thrust and G-turns. So a 6g ship with 10 turns had a max speed of 60. While a 2g ship with 30 turn had a max speed of 60.

I usually went with less g's and more burns in my designs, you may outrun me off the line, but I'll catch you in the end.

 

[Antony]

I have to admit I did get carried away once and designed an Imperial Inteceptor with a 12G drive. It had 69.2 G Turns of fuel so at full burn it would run out of fuel pretty fast, the crew would probably be a little "under the weather" too. It was the FZ22 Hermes class interceptor for anyone interested.

http://www.skaran.net/banners/equipment/craft/imperial/hermes.html

 

[zonk]

Thanks TheDS, got it. Or at least I mean I understand

I've always considered the TNE rules the more 'advanced' Traveller rules, but that's probably only because it seems more like SF than CT. CT was early 1960s/late 1950s SF. Oh I enjoyed it and we played the heck out of it but it didn't seem very science fictionish. But by the time TNE came out we had stopped playing Traveller entirely. I assume that we were not unique as GDW went out of business after TNE arrived.

Now I'm getting maudlin, I miss GDW, not just the Traveller stuff but the rest of it. It was probably my favorite gaming company.

To get back on topic while we didn't play TNE I did play with FFS back when, but it's been a long while. I vaguely recall what you wrote about, now that you've brought it to my attention. FFS was a gearhead's dream, even if it did have problems.

Compensators are to reduce or eliminate the crew feeling the ship maneuvering. In previous versions of Traveller (Okay, I'm pretty sure it was in MT) you couldn't build a ship that had a higher G rating than what your compensators were rated for. So, at TL15, you could build a ship capable of accelerating up to 6G, because your G compensators could handle that much. At each reduced TL, you reduced the compensation by 1, so that at TL10 you had 1G of compensation, and I think they gave you 1G at TL9, just like you had J1 at TL9 and TL10.

TNE changed that a little, by allowing you to build to whatever G-rating you wanted, but you had to have a strong enough internal structure, and your crew might get turned to jelly if you accelerated more than your compensation. There was specific mention that you could exceed your compensators by 1G without ill effects, but each G higher than that, you needed to make rolls to see if you killed your crew or something like that.

And if you were in combat, this safety threshold was reduced by 1G, so you could maneuver up to your G compensation rating without ill effect, but above that, things got difficult. Not easy to walk when the ship is twisting and turning in all directions in an effort to make it hard for the enemy to figure out where you'll be when their laser beam reaches you.

As I recall, the progression of G compensation in TNE was the same as mentioned above.

There were some ways to get around this, to a limited degree. You could install special seats that would negate a G, or install G-tanks that would negate several G's; something like that.

I hope this is more helpful than my previous quip.

 

[TheDS]

Of course, under the TNE rules, the actual speed of the ship was based on g's of thrust and G-turns. So a 6g ship with 10 turns had a max speed of 60. While a 2g ship with 30 turn had a max speed of 60.

I usually went with less g's and more burns in my designs, you may outrun me off the line, but I'll catch you in the end.

As you yourself have already pointed out, there's a speed limit imposed by your fuel, not your drive. You may as well have the bigger drive, unless you can't afford the space for it. But a bigger drive grants you more dodge bonuses.

 

[mike wightman]

It was a good design decision IMHO to have reaction drives return to Traveller. Fuel becomes a resource you have to carefully track since you are using it for g-turns and as jump fuel.

 

[TheDS]

Conceptually, yes, I totally agree that ships need some kind of endurance limit. However, the limits imposed seem much too small for my taste, and worse than that, required additional stretches of reality to accommodate, and on top of that, wound up breaking a lot of things that had been in the game since just about forever.

A navy's strategies depend on its technologies. Indeed, a navy cannot exist WITHOUT technology. Wind-driven ships had to make use of very specific tactics; steam ships wiped those away overnight. Battleships (B) also had to be used with certain tactics, but dreadnoughts (BB) changed all that with their big guns and one-shot kills. And then torpedoes changed everything again. Then aircraft and then missiles changed it all yet again.

With virtually unlimited endurance, you can pretty much assume that travel to and from a jump point only takes a few hours, but if you have a limited amount of thrust-time, suddenly it becomes VERY important to know how big the star is you're jumping to/from, as it can take anywhere from hours to MONTHS to travel to and from the mainworld. Worse, there's little point in refueling at ANY world (or GG), because by the time you climbed back out of the world's jump shadow, you need to refuel again.

DN mentions elsewhere that the change was intended to bring ships to the mainworld, but it did no such thing. It REQUIRED a space station interface at a significant percentage of worlds, and considering the time savings, would have become the standard situation everywhere. Far from encouraging things to happen on planets, it instead encourages bypassing every world which doesn't have a station outside the jump shadow.

C-rocks can be easily dealt with: simply impose a speed limit on reactionless drives. Consider the Stutterwarp (iirc). It can only teleport you so many times per second, and only so far. On top of that, anything moved by it retained its inertia. Maybe you think you can simply drop a rock toward a star, then warp it out, repeating until you have a fast rock, but that doesn't have to work either. We're more or less ignoring the relative motions of stars and planets anyway (some of which travel pretty darn fast!), who's to say we're not ignoring them because the drive in question aligns itself to the relative motion of whatever large mass (star) it's near? Or give whatever other handwavium you want.

I always found the "fuel use" of a jump drive to be rather ridiculous too. The solution I came up with was to say that the fuel wasn't consumed, but rather that it served as a heat sink, since heat can't be radiated while in jump space. When you emerge, you pop out your radiators for a while. This concept can be stretched to include our in-system drive: the drive doesn't use prodigious amounts of fuel, but rather it builds up heat which exceeds the ship's normal ability to radiate. Now and then, your heat sink gets too full and you have to stop making heat and/or deploy the radiators.

Why yes, it's not terribly unlike Battletech.

TNE initially wanted to make use of heat as an important factor, because in reality, it's a VERY important factor. But it got removed because they hadn't figured out a way to make it workable.

Just to min-max/powergame the heplar problem, I created a world which orbited a supergiant star. The star's jump shadow was large enough that incoming ships had to drift for YEARS to reach the main world. People lived there because it made it very hard for outsiders to invade. The residents made heavy use of fusion rockets. "You want to invade us? We'll wait. After a few months, when your crews have starved to death, we'll come collect your ships. We've got fusion rockets, so we'll be able to tow them back to you in a few weeks so you can try again."

(Of course, even in a Thruster plate universe, a supergiant star makes for a good fortress, but far less impregnable.)