I thought it said the errata was from 1986, but the new production was recent.
Incoming!! But how fast?
- Thread starter san*klass
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I thought it said the errata was from 1986, but the new production was recent.
Nope... 'Cuase they aren't all the same.... SS3, BL, BR all used a 10,000km "hex" Mayday uses a a 1 Light Second (300,000km) "Hex"
Also note that Mayday contains the 1st draft of the missile construction rules.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
It's the nomenclature that is standardised.
They all use the same meaning for 6g6 etc.
They all use the same meaning for 6g6 etc.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
I had the house rule since the 80s because it made no sense. The errata just validates what I had seen about CT maneuver.
In fact, I went looking for errata when I came back to the game last year precisely because the original SS3 was still driving me crazy with it's mangling of the formulas, I figured there had to be better since there was so much goodness in the various interactions of warhead, detonator, guidance, etc.
The revision edition was no doubt done recently, but clearly off Don's errata, which notes that the original conversation and Miller's scribbled in notes dates from 1986.
I don't see how you can characterize the <#of>G<burn> system as any sort of standoff system.
Lasers have effectively three ranges, 8+ 0-250,000 km, 10+ 250-500,000 km, and 13+ 500-900,000 km (no hits unless skill/predict advantage allows it).
Missiles by contrast have an effective attack of first turn G + inital launching vessel vee- in the case of the standard Traveller missile, 50,000 km ahead of launching vee.
After that, all one has to do is get out of that initial 2500 km intercept radius to evade the missile entirely. Anything with 2G vector can evade the standard Traveller missile after the first turn of movement, since it only has 1 G of burn left according to the first interpretation.
There are 'solutions', among them classically firing a 'spread' so at least one missile will intercept any given course endpoint the target ship may go to, but that spread and number of missile increases greatly if you are 250,000 km or more out, long range by CT standards.
And that's the thing that makes it so distasteful a ruleset, the lasers end up being longer ranged then the missiles- completely against everything I've ever played in every other GDW product.
Another issue is firing on pursuing ships. The missile barely has enough fuel to slow down, much less intercept.
It's use in that case is to be dropped as a 'mine', no fuel used so it can go to maximum burn in any direction as it drifts along at it's release vee.
Essentially a threat hanging out there in space against pursuit, or at least a laser drain to draw fire on the missile threat, not the ship.
A third limitation is off course heading targets, ones that are to the side of the launching ship. Unless they AND the firing ship are at very low vee, it's virtually impossible to hit them with a burn interpretation of 5G6.
No, at best, this is effectively a ramming spar torpedo, only suitable for mines or close range direct fire, not a missile missile.
RAMMING SPEED!
Another clue that this was a misstatement or 'work in progress' error are the tables themselves- why have the possibility of building a 6G1 missile, when by the burn set of rules such a missile can only accel 1G one turn?
There should be great big 'cannot build' dashes across any entry of a missile that has a higher G then burn.
But there are not any such dashes.
In fact, I went looking for errata when I came back to the game last year precisely because the original SS3 was still driving me crazy with it's mangling of the formulas, I figured there had to be better since there was so much goodness in the various interactions of warhead, detonator, guidance, etc.
The revision edition was no doubt done recently, but clearly off Don's errata, which notes that the original conversation and Miller's scribbled in notes dates from 1986.
I don't see how you can characterize the <#of>G<burn> system as any sort of standoff system.
Lasers have effectively three ranges, 8+ 0-250,000 km, 10+ 250-500,000 km, and 13+ 500-900,000 km (no hits unless skill/predict advantage allows it).
Missiles by contrast have an effective attack of first turn G + inital launching vessel vee- in the case of the standard Traveller missile, 50,000 km ahead of launching vee.
After that, all one has to do is get out of that initial 2500 km intercept radius to evade the missile entirely. Anything with 2G vector can evade the standard Traveller missile after the first turn of movement, since it only has 1 G of burn left according to the first interpretation.
There are 'solutions', among them classically firing a 'spread' so at least one missile will intercept any given course endpoint the target ship may go to, but that spread and number of missile increases greatly if you are 250,000 km or more out, long range by CT standards.
And that's the thing that makes it so distasteful a ruleset, the lasers end up being longer ranged then the missiles- completely against everything I've ever played in every other GDW product.
Another issue is firing on pursuing ships. The missile barely has enough fuel to slow down, much less intercept.
It's use in that case is to be dropped as a 'mine', no fuel used so it can go to maximum burn in any direction as it drifts along at it's release vee.
Essentially a threat hanging out there in space against pursuit, or at least a laser drain to draw fire on the missile threat, not the ship.
A third limitation is off course heading targets, ones that are to the side of the launching ship. Unless they AND the firing ship are at very low vee, it's virtually impossible to hit them with a burn interpretation of 5G6.
No, at best, this is effectively a ramming spar torpedo, only suitable for mines or close range direct fire, not a missile missile.
RAMMING SPEED!
Another clue that this was a misstatement or 'work in progress' error are the tables themselves- why have the possibility of building a 6G1 missile, when by the burn set of rules such a missile can only accel 1G one turn?
There should be great big 'cannot build' dashes across any entry of a missile that has a higher G then burn.
But there are not any such dashes.
I wouldn't call this errata. It's not a clarification, it's not fixing some typos, it's a fundamental change in the design.
They force the attacker to consider crossing the threshold and take on the missiles. Missiles as an artifact "control space". Anything that stops within range of a missile is subject to attack. The Plasma Torpedo in SFB has similar characteristics. They're very good at disrupting attack runs as many attacker think twice before entering their operational envelope. Many times I've seen attackers peel off at range, torpedoes in pursuit. Want to keep an attacker out of overload range? Lob a torpedo big enough to eat their front shield their way and then spend the next 5 minutes watching the attacker study the impulse chart, his turn mode, and counting hexes.
Can you out maneuver a missile? Yes you can, but you have to be moving quite quickly, and hope that you don't fall within the bubble of the missile. Consider the typical (original) 6G6 missile. Your net vector needs to have a magnitude of 13 or more. Consider the simple case of closing directly on a ship. You must move to range 7 (to be outside the missile envelope), and then, next move, you must be, again, at range 7, on the opposite side of the missile. If the target happens to be stopped, that's a vector of 14. And that assumes that you deftly maneuvered to hit those thresholds. Off by one hex, and BAM, here they come.
You may just shoot them down. You may just try and eat them. You may simply not care for the +2 DM that you get going inside that range. But either way, the missiles presence will certainly be considered by the attacker.
Those spreads are used to provide barriers that the attacker must consider and decide whether to move around them or not. Laying down the missile patterns is like putting up a fence around the defender. Missiles are how Traveller adds terrain to the battlespace.
Lay down a spread of missiles, and evade behind them, forcing the attacker to either deal with them, or move around them, meanwhile, you may be scurrying away.
There was no misstatement. The rules as written are pretty clear. They wrote them not just once (Mayday), not twice (S3v1), but three times if you include TNE (and all 3 of its uses of the paradigm). So, hard to say it was a "work in progress". The Book 2/Traveller Book missile rules are basically incomplete by any standard.
And while the copyright does say 1986, clearly Frank Chadwick didn't get the memo when he wrote TNE's combat systems.
The fact that you can out maneuver a missile is just a cold fact of space combat. Earth missiles are mostly effective because they can fly faster and turn faster than their targets. Traveller missiles (outside of TNE) can't do that. At best they're as fast, but they can't turn any better than a starship.
That's why they don't work as well as a smokey Standard Missile rocketing off the Ticonderoga towards it's prey. Their doctrine is different.
It's worth noting that Don, having spent much more time at Marc's than probably anyone on the boards (perhaps excepting Robject, and excluding Avery, for that is Marc)...
Marc and Don may have been going over Marc's notes and found old material intended by Marc to have been part of the 3rd edition... that said, those notes only saw the light of day in the last few years, and don't solve any real issues...
Note that TNE used XgY with Y equalling G-turns because it made sense to Frank, and many players found it simple and useful.
It also goes back to CT 1E, where small craft also had similar fuel limits.
And note: if the firer and target are on closing vectors, missiles with high G and low burns are practically unavoidable using CT combat. Your one chance to fire is at range...
Especially if the closing vector is high. This is QUITE different from the prototype for the Traveller setting - Imperium - has missiles being long range and beams short...
Mayday's are a bit shorter than lasers, but much more damaging.
Marc and Don may have been going over Marc's notes and found old material intended by Marc to have been part of the 3rd edition... that said, those notes only saw the light of day in the last few years, and don't solve any real issues...
Note that TNE used XgY with Y equalling G-turns because it made sense to Frank, and many players found it simple and useful.
It also goes back to CT 1E, where small craft also had similar fuel limits.
And note: if the firer and target are on closing vectors, missiles with high G and low burns are practically unavoidable using CT combat. Your one chance to fire is at range...
Especially if the closing vector is high. This is QUITE different from the prototype for the Traveller setting - Imperium - has missiles being long range and beams short...
Mayday's are a bit shorter than lasers, but much more damaging.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Fair enough background.
However, you use the term G-turns as opposed to G-burns. Is that intentional? That was a key rewording in the revised edition.
Incidentally, the way I read the revised edition, the limited burn missiles use effectively '2 burns' for every course correction, plus a rule about the limit of course change per turn being half the difference between maximum G and G the missile is operating at.
The example is a 6G missile that is fired at 2G can execute 1G course changes for 2 burns each, and at 1G it can do 2G course changes for 4 burns.
Only discretionary missiles change course to move one burn/one G/one turn as a ship with fuel limits. You have to pay to get that wider engagement envelope.
Continuous just stays on course, effectively cheap Zuni space rockets with limited intercept, the dogfighter missiles, and according to both SS3s the default propulsion type for the standard missile- another reason to highly doubt the 'number of burns' model, used as 'space control mine' the way Whartung and I are talking about.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Heh, that's why one always approaches a PT user with phasers loaded and a Wild Weasel ready to kick out- and another reason Fed decel is the path to victory, not a weakness as you assert.
One difference might be that we never followed the path most went with tournament free movement- plotted movement or die.
So you do your thinking about what that plasma ship is doing ahead of time, and be prepared for PPTs and the rest.
You don't charge a PT armed ship, but you don't let it go either- have to tease them into firing at suboptimal ranges and be able to double back and abuse them.
Ok, let's define conditions. This sounds very much like range bands. I'm talking traditional mini movement (actually using graph paper rather then minis).
And I don't NEED to close anywhere near the damn thing, I can stand off at 200,000 km, have all the running room I need assuming at least matching G to the missile launcher, and laugh and laugh at the wee 60000 km engagement range that thing has.
Yes closing by your PT example and Aramis' point will shrink that range down fast, but if I know what I'm doing I need never fear this version of the missiles.
It's a weapon system that requires closing superior vee (RAMMING SPAR) or charging morons obligingly impaling themselves on an Agincourt stake line.
The default CT rules already kill 50% of entire missile attacks dead with ECM and have the anti-missile shot, a matched set of opponents is going to get through with only 25% missiles, with the missile maneuver neuter rules far fewer of them are going to hit barring drastic error or luck- maybe 10%.
Which may be an effect you like, but I don't like tying up a rack for 10% when I can take my chances with laser/sand and outmaneuver that sand cloud.
It will force a pursuer to go around, perhaps take themselves out of the battle or engage the missiles at the expense of letting the enemy ship get away.
Or the pursuer can risk the missiles, ECM them all off half the time, anti-missile the rest, and concentrate fire on the escaping ship.
Or the vee can be high enough that the vee imparted by the launching ship makes the missiles basically firing 'off boresight' and they are already out of the fight.
That's just the way the rules are written, not 'cold fact'. Since missiles can be 80% or more fuel and maneuver and are built to use it all up in 20 minutes to 2 hours worth of maneuver, arguably they should be set to a much higher G at least since they don't have human cargos to inertially compensate for.
I read these more as Harpoons, a discretionary burn one would be more like a Tomahawk, and bay missiles as P-700/Shipwreck.
A continuous burn cheaper anti-missile missile would be more in line with a Standard.
pendragonman
Absent Friends Margrave
Funny, that is not how I dealt with the plasma armed opponent. My object was to force them to fire it sooner than later, then absorbed it and killed them during their reload. Even a type R can be dealt with if you plan for it from the start.
Ya know, the game has actually changed a bit since 1979. For example, every ship can decel, not just the Fed. Every ship has a free HET as well, and plotted movement went the way of the original Fed CL, which was a miserable waste of BPV. The only people who play plotted movement are like the folks who hand churn their own butter.
Stopping may have been viable when ships had a crummy power balance, but in the late war period, (and tournament, which has excellent ships), you stop, you die -- that simple. If I knew I could launch a plasma and force someone to decel -- oh happy day.
You keep projecting and making rules up to suit yourself. In CT/Mayday, a missile can go 6G, just like any other ship. It's straight forward to fly faster than a missile can react, it simply doesn't have the dV to engage.
In TNE, you can make faster missiles, and they in fact do make faster missiles. But whether it's 1G, 5G, 10G, or 20G, a space ship can fly faster than the missile can respond. It doesn't run in to the physical airframe issues that aerospace craft do, a ship effectively has no speed limit, and the ship needs a velocity higher than the dV of a missile to be able to dodge the missile. By the time the missile can change course and engage the target, he's too far gone.
That's fact. That's physics. A higher G missile makes the maneuver more difficult, but not impossible, and eventually you start running in to physical limitations of the device to handle G forces.
And the your point about ignoring the missiles, and the point just highlights the fact that he who brings the most gun tubes to the party wins the game, whether the ships park at range 1 and fire salvos, or whether they just make high speed fly by's trading shots. More guns, more shots, more net gun advantage, more chances for victory.
G-turns is a more accurate term.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Well, it's already clear to me we will never agree on what we want out of our space combat games.
I wasn't a big cheese with the game, but two of my friends were, one worked with Cole on some of the 80s products, and the other was a near plank owner of the Hydrans, his character is actually on a couple of the old classic scenarios.
Churning butter? Perhaps from your POV- from me and my friends' collective view, free movement made it a game about whizzing around at speed 15-20 in a free weapons flinging dogfight, not a game about being a superior captain that can foresee future enemy moves and outwit them.
We saw the writing on the wall, the free movement stuff made it a fighter video game, and we collectively lost interest.
Still another of my friends wrote a long essay about 'red vs. blue' in the context of the mania for 'balanced ships' that notably started with the whole war cruiser fiasco.
Not a fiasco from many people's perspective, because they were screaming balance, but a fiasco from ours when all ships got homogenized to different paint jobs and a different fizzy weapon.
We had a great time with it before, but once it become short attention span jousting, we were collectively gone.
We went Starfire, and promptly created radically different background races with extremely different doctrines, which made for some wild battles.
Because the rules were written that way, and then apparently Don saw the same horror show I did and asked Miller about it, and it looks to me at least like they both came down closer to my perspective. I have no idea what that interaction was, but given Don's apparently rock solid care with a huge amount of material consistently over decades of rules work, it's not just me making things up.
And you know what? You are JUST as free to run things the way you see them now as I was to ignore/revise the initial SS3 release all those years ago.
What you aren't free to do is say I am just howling in the wilderness, because I'm not just making this SS3 revision up.
Oh, you are responding to my statement about the missile speed.
That IS my opinion, and I clearly labelled it so, so yes I do get to 'make things up', just like you are at the moment, other then 'if all things are equal ships and missiles go same speed no environmental issues' which is true enough.
Except they AREN'T the same.
Missiles don't have fuel-sipping M-drives.
When a missile is 80% high speed fuel and propulsion and a spaceship is a lot less fuel burn and drive proportionally, the missile should have a greater capacity to accelerate and alter course in a short tactical period of time because it can burn a lot more fuel a lot more quickly.
The US ABM program didn't get your memo, best we forget all about those 100G missiles we built and flew- well above any conceivable G anyone would care to put into this game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
Because it may be factually correct that overwhelming force is likely to win, therefore any critique I have of 'the way things were understood to be' is false?
The original Fed CL was a crummy ship. Much like the original Fed DD. The DD wasn't great, the CL was worse. Heck, many of the early ships were lousy, especially when held in the light of the later ships.
But, yes the game certainly transformed over the years from the heady chaos of the original expansions. I never played a lot of plotted movement, and never really learned the game that way, even in the beginning we just "skipped that part".
it was self imposed from ADB with their promotion of the BPV. With BPV dominating the "scenario" state, everyone was looking for spikes in the BPV curve, so they had to special rule everything. It's not that gatling phasers (for example) are overpowered, but rather they're cheap for what they can do, so they clamped down hard on when and where they can be deployed on ships.
We used to play simple free-for-alls where each player rolled 100-600 BPV on dice for their fleet and just managed to do what they could. More than once I rushed in, crashed shield, burned a ship and just ran away since I was so completely outnumbered.
But, certainly, at least in our group, we all loved the war cruisers for their speed.
Well that's my point. I'm focusing on the rules of the system, not the "physics" of it. The rules and mechanics represent the "understanding" of the engineering available. For whatever reason, the missiles in early Traveller were little more than tiny ships with all of their limitations, and better used as "smart mines" than "missiles".
And I can see appreciate how the missile didn't operate like some may visualize missiles, but that didn't make them useless. Less useful? Perhaps. Harder to deploy? Sure. But not useless.
No, not at all.
Simply, my lament about "realistic" space combat systems is that the playing field is so level (big, empty space), that simple, raw firepower (i.e. ships design/economics) dominates the outcome. Up to the point where we have High Guard which basically completely hand waved almost the entire concept of maneuver. In SFB, maneuver (and the use of energy allocation to facilitate the balance of maneuver and weapons) is the heart of the game and a key component that distinguished good players from poor players. So, eliminating maneuver, to me, is a "big deal".
Raw firepower dominates so greatly, I feel (and it's just a feeling, having not played any volume of actual games), that the player brings little to the table that can affect the outcome of a scenario outside of blowing on the dice. I can see very little hope of a "Taffy 3", or some smaller force routing a larger one.
At least not with raw combat mechanics. Throw in some strange command mechanic, or moral mechanic, then, sure, that may happen.
In this way, High Guard is actually rather insightful. But as some who enjoys pushing the ships around and feeling theirs a purpose to it, it kind of takes the wind out of my sails to acknowledge that all that pushing may not matter at all in the big picture.
Add in some stealth mechanic, and you might be able to have some guerrilla action where a small force keeps a larger force pinned in a system, but then we start drifting away from "realistic".
Several things:
In Re Traveller: DOn was given a pretty free hand in the errata. Marc's oversight was present, but mostly focused upon the material for T5.
And the other things...
1: the fed CL and DD were pretty solid in the first edition of SFB - provided you used the proportional movement costs. The later churn (commanders and captains editions) was filled with bad ideas made manifest, and lots of good ideas tossed in the mix.
2: The free movement was a different, but equally as good, game. Still, ADB adopted it not because they thought it better, but because fans demanded it. SPP commented about this on GEnie.
3: Starfire is a great game... but it's always been a free movement game, with the option for plotted... Choosing it over SFB when one dislikes the free movement game rings false; failing to mention its relative speed and ability to handle larger scenarios also rings a warning tone about credibility... or the lack thereof.
pendragonman
Absent Friends Margrave
Since I started SFB when it came out in little 8.5 by 5.5 booklets in little baggies, I played both until I ran into too many rules lawyers.
The old Fed CL had its job, and kept to that job it did quite well. The Fed DD, when used by itself was problematic unless you started at WS III. Power curve issues.
As part of a squadron or fleet, however, it worked quite well.
Both ships, as Aramis pointed out, benefited from fractional power needs for speed.
As part of our campaign game, leveraging the Law of Averages, we often deployed a dozen or so Fed DDs to the 30 hex range to bombard bases. A one in six chance to hit with a photon torpedo doing 8 damage, 4 per ship, 20 or so torpedoes every turn in a rolling barrage...very useful indeed. Throw a scout or two in if you are playing with full EW rules.
The old Fed CL had its job, and kept to that job it did quite well. The Fed DD, when used by itself was problematic unless you started at WS III. Power curve issues.
As part of a squadron or fleet, however, it worked quite well.
Both ships, as Aramis pointed out, benefited from fractional power needs for speed.
As part of our campaign game, leveraging the Law of Averages, we often deployed a dozen or so Fed DDs to the 30 hex range to bombard bases. A one in six chance to hit with a photon torpedo doing 8 damage, 4 per ship, 20 or so torpedoes every turn in a rolling barrage...very useful indeed. Throw a scout or two in if you are playing with full EW rules.
The Kaufmann (reatreating at Speed 15-20 while firing proximity torpedoes or DERFACS distruptors) was a mid-commander's edition innovation, and really, only works if the enemy will follow.
On the other hand, many an SFB player has made excellent use of the (as we called it) Cat-who-coughs retrograde... Put a line of kzin ships in retrograde 15 so that the enemy is flying into their speed 12 or speed 20 drones and their Range 22 or 30 disruptors... The enemy is likely to be doing speed 15-20, and so the closing speed is 27-40...
Which brings us back to topic. Slow missiles in a closing situation are much faster than they look on paper.
pendragonman
Absent Friends Margrave
Like running toward a dodge ball flying your way, blink and you get hit.
Let is remember that if our ship has all of that nice delta V built up going anything close to towards the missiles (within FA to FH depending on the agility of the ship for all you SFB people) the ship will likely not be able to dodge the missiles and thus will need other means of stopping them.
It also brings in gameplay issues. The retrogrades are perfectly valid tactics, that happen to make for really crummy game play. Having Mayday battles at high speeds, dunno how interesting those battles are not. The Battle Rider Map is 2 sheets of 18x11. A speed 20 game on that play field would be a real pain to pull off.
We had one game, where a player was running off with his Fed BC, and a couple of folks were charging after him, a medium cruiser and a destroyer. He was asked "Are you ever going to turn around?" to wit "Are you going to stop chasing me?". Hands went up in the air after that. That could have been fought to conclusion, but there's only so much time in the day.
As players, we naturally constrain ourselves to the available play field, even on a floating map folks try to not run to far off course.
But it also points to the other issues, simply space is big, and there are rarely any fixed targets.
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