Striker - MT compatibility?

[Supplement Four]

How compatible are vehicles designed using the Striker system vs. vehicles designed using the MT system?

Are they 100% compatible as the design systems are the same?

Or, are they "pretty much" compatible as the systems are almost exactly the same except for a few quibbles?

Or...are they much different than what I'm thinking they are?

 

[Judas Iscariot]

If I knew MT better, I would be able to tell you...

I know Striker like the back of my hand.

 

[atpollard]

I found the vehicle components to be identical (although MT adds some new items that Striker did not have - like fusion rocket engines). Armor is identical. Grav vehicle performance is identical.

The vehicle analysis section of MT is based on the MT task system - so the final vehicle listing will contain data that may seem strange to Striker (like a "target lock" with passive sensors being a "routine" difficulty task).

Computers might be different. (I am not familiar with vehicle computers in Striker.) MT requires 1 small expensive computer for ground vehicles (optional); 2 computers for aircraft and 3 computers for spacecraft. A MT model 1 computer requires 2 cubic meters and costs Cr 400,000 (x3 for a spacecraft).

One difference that is a non-issue, Striker uses cubic meters and MT uses kiloliters. 1 kiloliter = 1 cubic meter. In MT, 1 dTon = 13.5 cu. meters; in Striker/CT 1 dTon = 14 cubic meters - but no calculations are based on dTons, most are based on metric tons of mass.

In the end most parts are "100% compatible" with a few areas that are "mostly compatible". In my experience, the difference is less than a rounding error (ie. rounding a value up instead of down).

 

[Supplement Four]

Originally posted by atpollard:
In the end most parts are "100% compatible" with a few areas that are "mostly compatible". In my experience, the difference is less than a rounding error (ie. rounding a value up instead of down).

Excellent. Thanks!

I've been looking at thinning my Traveller collection via eBay, and I was waffeling on some things like DGP's 101 Vehicles.

Looks like I'll keep it!

 

[Tobias]

Originally posted by atpollard:
I found the vehicle components to be identical (although MT adds some new items that Striker did not have - like fusion rocket engines). Armor is identical. Grav vehicle performance is identical.

Well... yes and no.
The basic armor calculations are identical. However, MT does use a different approach to hull design and includes neither armor sloping nor armor facings. That makes military vehicles designed by one system largely incompatible to the other.

Computers might be different. (I am not familiar with vehicle computers in Striker.)

There were none, except battle computers.

The whole control panels and computers section wasn't present in Striker.

In the end, I would rather say "pretty much" than "100%".
As for the designs in 101 Vehicles: Most of the civilian vehicles can be used without modification (many have only Level 0 computers - or even none at all - and cheap controls which do not significantly influence the costs.) The military vehicles are a different matter, since these often have a lot of armor, powerful computers and extensive sensor arrays, the three areas in which the two systems differ most.

 

[jec10]

I agree with Tobias. You are getting a wrong steer if you think military vehicles from 101 Vehicles for MT can be used in Striker without some work. The key problem is the armour ratings system in MT, which while using the same numbers is not the same as Striker in that different faces or angles are not considered.

 

[atpollard]

All the armor difference means is that the MT vehicles have:

(1) equal thickness of armor on all sides with no sloping faces, or

(2) variable thickness sloping armor with the thickness vs slope adjusted to provide equivalent protection on all sides.

That could give Striker designed armor a combat advantage, but it need not invalidate the MT design.

Am I misunderstanding something about Striker armor?

 

[Tobias]

It is a little more complicated than that. MT used a different approach to basic hull design. Namely, you pick a hull size from the table, modify its mass according to configuration and multiply by armor thickness and density. (In effect. The procedure is slightly different, but mathmatically the same.)

STRIKER lets you design a box hull by dimensions, calculate its surface area, which you multiply by armor thickness to get armor volume, which in turn is of course multiplied by armor density to compute mass.

Principal differences:
- MT does not take hull shape into account by anything more than very basic configurations, which do not have a great effect.
- MT hulls are way too efficient. Even the optimum shape, a spherical hull, could not achieve the surface/volume ratio MT hulls have, let alone STRIKER-typical box hulls. A MT vehicle covered in heavy all-around armor will thus be considerably lighter than a comparable STRIKER vehicle.
- MT ignores armor volume, taking only mass into account.

None of this is of any great relevance for civilian vehicles with light armor. Hull mass is usually a rather small fraction of total vehicle mass for them, and the volume taken up by very light armor is negligible as well. However, for heavily-armed and armored military vehicles, the difference can be dramatic.

 

[aramis]

One can use Striker designs in MT simply by aplying the ratings and looking up the stats for the stock weapons in PM, RM, or 101V. Armor and Pen are the same scale in both.

Design differs notably, as mentioned by others. But using the stats in an MT game is no issue at all.

Going the other way is not so useful, but likewise doable.

 

[atpollard]

Originally posted by Tobias:
- MT does not take hull shape into account by anything more than very basic configurations, which do not have a great effect.
- MT hulls are way too efficient. Even the optimum shape, a spherical hull, could not achieve the surface/volume ratio MT hulls have, let alone STRIKER-typical box hulls. A MT vehicle covered in heavy all-around armor will thus be considerably lighter than a comparable STRIKER vehicle.
- MT ignores armor volume, taking only mass into account.

None of this is of any great relevance for civilian vehicles with light armor. Hull mass is usually a rather small fraction of total vehicle mass for them, and the volume taken up by very light armor is negligible as well. However, for heavily-armed and armored military vehicles, the difference can be dramatic.

You are all correct. I went back to the rules to quantify "dramatic". An armor 10 MT vehicle is 0.2 percent more more expensive and 5 percent lighter than an armor 10 Srtiker vehicle. An armor 40 MT vehicle is 2 percent more more expensive and 20 percent lighter than an armor 40 Striker vehicle. So the cost difference is too small to worry about, but MT vehicles will be 1 percent lighter than the Striker equivalent per 2 points of armor (on all sides).

The issue of armor volume tended to be a wash when you consider the fact that the MT dTon is 13.5 cubic meters and the Striker dTon is 14 cubic meters. For the Astrin grav APC, MT lists the 10 dTon hull with 40 points of armor as 135 cubic meters of usable space. In Striker, the same 10 dTon craft would have 140 cubic meters before armor, but only 136 cubic meters after adding 40 points of armor to all sides. A difference of 1 cubic meter in 10 dTons is trivial (less than 1 percent).

For what it might be worth, I found the Striker need to calculate precise dimensions and exterior surface area to be very tedious for relatively little actual accuracy (the surface area of a steeply sloped front armor is not the width of the vehicle times its height).

 

[jec10]

Originally posted by atpollard:

For what it might be worth, I found the Striker need to calculate precise dimensions and exterior surface area to be very tedious for relatively little actual accuracy (the surface area of a steeply sloped front armor is not the width of the vehicle times its height).

It is invaluable though when converting real-world armoured vehicles to Striker.

 

[Judas Iscariot]

Yep.... It has a lot of errors like that in it. That is one of the reasons that I have spent so much time working on updatinga dn re-writng it.