Liam Devlin
SOC-14 5K
For the thread of mercenary starships where the digression has called for a separate topic of its own..gentlemen, the stage is yours.. 
Vehicle and Starship Armour Thickness Differences
- Thread starter Liam Devlin
- Start date
The most "Traveller" way to alter the High Guard armor rules ("X" percent of hull = "Y" points of armor protection) would be to use a "Traveler" rule set (like Striker) as the basis and translate it back to HG values.
It might be interesting to develop a chart that cross references the USP hull shapes with the Percent of ship required per point of armor. The result might only be a little more complex than HG but yield results much more compatible with Striker or MT.
Just some thoughts.
It might be interesting to develop a chart that cross references the USP hull shapes with the Percent of ship required per point of armor. The result might only be a little more complex than HG but yield results much more compatible with Striker or MT.
Just some thoughts.
You can already do that fairly easily. Due to the logarithmic nature of Striker damage, you can actually just say Armor = Af + S + Vf, where Af comes from the HG armor factor, S comes from shape, and Vf comes from size (you can basically read off displacement in dtons on the armor chart and divide by 3 to get Vf; i.e. 5 dtons would be (18/3) or +6).
A problem you run into is Mass vs Volume, though. Unless you use volume-based maneuver drives (or, in reverse, use mass-based jump drives), a high percentage of hull armor should result in a severe loss of thrust.
A problem you run into is Mass vs Volume, though. Unless you use volume-based maneuver drives (or, in reverse, use mass-based jump drives), a high percentage of hull armor should result in a severe loss of thrust.
Say I'm slow. Could you run through an example of this so that I can follow it.
Example 1: I want to add 2 points of High Guard armor to a 300 dTon Trader. The ship is a wedge.
Example 2: I want to add 2 points of High Guard armor to a 300 dTon Trader. The ship is a sphere.
In HG both ships require the same percentage, but in real life, the wedge has a much larger surface area, so the armor will be thinner. How does your formula fix this?
Scott Martin
SOC-13
It is possible to do this, but it just points out how "broken" the conversion is. You can calculate the thickness of armour that the hull *should* have and add that amount of armour (using striker) but this would give different amounts of armour volume required than HG uses.
Since these are inconsistent, you don't want to go here.
If you *really* want to go here, use MT, which converted everything to "striker-land" and then back-converted to HG armour values (IIRC it was effectively (striker AV -40)/3=HG AV) by the DM's on the starship combat table.
HG combat is inconsistent generally, since the only armour "steps" are nuclear vs non-nuclear missiles, and spinal mounts vs smaller stuff.
This means that a "vehicle" weapon can have considerably more penetration capability than a starship spinal mount according to this rules set...
Moral of the story: HG "Armour" is an abstraction which is suited to the abstract nature of HG "fleet actions" and doesn't map onto *anything* else. If you try to do this, you will notice that maybe, perhaps, it is inconsistent with the rest of the universe.
So the question is: do you want to use HG as the core of your combat system, or something else?
Judging from all of the later versions of Traveller, the answer is "something else", but that doesn't change the fact that HG is the favored system (and the base of GT and CT) for building military starships. This disconnect is perhaps one of the fundamental issues in Traveller. While we can discuss how armour *should* work until we are blue in the face, at the end of the day a lot of people really don't care, they just want their ships to act like they did in HG
Scott Martin
Actually, no, they don't want ships to _act_ like they did in HG. They want to be able to use HG to build ships, because, well, HG is easy to use.
The fact is, HG ship combat doesn't fit well with the universe implied by the ships given in the various ship supplements. Using HG combat, a Tigress is not a good design.
The fact is, HG ship combat doesn't fit well with the universe implied by the ships given in the various ship supplements. Using HG combat, a Tigress is not a good design.
Ok, now I am up to speed. I was thinking about using Striker to adjust the HG armor values for use in HG. I wanted 1 "point" of HG armor to equal a specific thickness of armor for all ship sizes, so the percent of the ship would vary with ship size. That is not what Anthony was talking about.
Anthony: What rules system do you conduct ship combat under? Striker? A House Variant?
I have always hoped to adapt the HG ship designs to the book 2 combat. That requires new Book 2 rules for things like Armor, Screens and Bay Weapons. The MT rules might be a better place to start.
Anthony: What rules system do you conduct ship combat under? Striker? A House Variant?
I have always hoped to adapt the HG ship designs to the book 2 combat. That requires new Book 2 rules for things like Armor, Screens and Bay Weapons. The MT rules might be a better place to start.
BetterThanLife
SOC-14 1K
Mayday included an option to use the Mayday rules for movement and the LBB5 tables for combat. Making it a great compromise. If you are staying away from the big ships the T20 Advanced Combat rules also work well. And scale nicely between People, Vehicle and Starship, provided you don't grant 100-1000 round bursts for Gauss weapons.
IF you want to play with big ships, be warned that T20 has a few issues. (But at least the small ships are playable.)
