OTU Only: What Kind of Ships Does Traveller Need More of?
- Thread starter dmccoy1693
- Start date
The type S can be operated by one person but have entanglements with the scout service, must be a scout character, and generally you have to do trade and speculation to make money due to the small cargo capacity. Carrying passengers is a quick way to need to roll up a new character if you are by yourself, so the extra berthing space is useless.
Re Robots and automation... highly dependent on the rule set, availability and technology. They become a NPC crew, which the player may be trying to avoid to give the Referee fewer opportunities to mess with the player inside his own ship.
While the detached duty Suleiman does come with the strings and problems you mention, it also comes three big benefits: No mortgage, free fuel at scout bases, and free annual maintenance.
Many years ago I looked into a detached duty/trading campaign for one or two players. I felt that the Minor and Incidental lot tables would produce sufficiently small cargo lots often enough. Such cargo would have to be break bulk, however, to take advantage of the ship's small dedicated cargo space, "attic", and rear mission equipment space.
Because most of LBB:2's spec goods lots are too big and the smaller lots too "pricey", I was planning on having the player(s) roleplay rather than "roll play" such trading. There was a historical practice I thought I could "tweak" for such a purpose.
The crews aboard East Indiamen and China clippers were allowed a certain amount of cargo room for what was called "private ventures". Usually little more than a chest or two, each crewman had to opportunity to import and sell goods for themselves. Rather than purchase small amounts of tea, porcelain, opium, or spices on their own and at a premium, crewmen would piggyback on the ship's far larger purchases.
Along the same lines, I planned for the player(s) to look for opportunities to become part of other larger deals. They could provide the additional capital needed to purchase a given lot or they could take "extra" dTons off a purchaser's hands. For example, they would partner with a crew coming up short on a bid for polymers in return for a portion of the lot or allow another crew to bid for a lot larger than their ship can handle by buying a portion of the lot from them. (I planned on imposing various legal, admin, and handling fees in all this too.)
You can see how all of this would be roleplayed rather than rolled on tables.
Like you, I don't view robots or automation as a solution. ATPollard's excellent "Robots cost the same as the skills they replace" rule should be part of every referee's tool kit. I also don't think AotI's wafers are a solution either. The novel presents some significant drawbacks for wafer use. Creating the wafer kills the donor providing the skills and knowledge, wafer use requires the user's sex/species match the donor, wafer use is limited to 30 day time spans, repeated wafer use risks brain damage, and wafers or their users occasionally develop "glitches" i.e. the accountant whose added everything up to 1 or -1.
TANSTAAFL should be part of every solution to the "best one man" trader question.
Finally, because I always link to it in threads like these, here's Walt Smith's excellent Jump Pod. It is, IMEHO, the best all around "one man" trader.
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Even better! Thanks Wil!
I was going off memory and not notes. A pair of players in my IISS Active Duty campaign were interested in a follow on campaign with short weekly sessions so I started some basic prep towards it. Sadly, this was also about the time Real Life began breaking up our gaming group. We drifted into one-session adventures and then eventually apart.
dmccoy1693
SOC-13
*Scribbles more notes*
Interesting thoughts I'll have to use.
*Scribbles more notes*
another way to implement that is the jump train. commercial tenders that pick up trade ship riders and jump them to regular destinations, for a fee. a single captain/pilot can easily operate a system boat, and with no jump fuel load can easily carry enough cargo to pay for his boat and the jump train fee.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
A fudge I used once was to build a 195t SX.
You have to use B drives to get jump 2 maneuver 2 performance, but you don't need a medic or engineer, only a pilot.
195t SX scout/courier - LBB2 81 design
b......20t
j2.....15t (B)
m2.....3t (B)
pp2....7t (B)
fuel..60t
c2......2t
srx1...4t (p)
84t to play with.
The same thing built under 77 rules and using a reduced power plant, maneuver drive
195t SX scout/courier - LBB2 77 design
b......20t
j2.....15t (B)
m1.....1t (A)
pp1....4t (A)
fuel..50t
c1/b...1t
srx1...4t (p)
100t to play with.
You have to use B drives to get jump 2 maneuver 2 performance, but you don't need a medic or engineer, only a pilot.
195t SX scout/courier - LBB2 81 design
b......20t
j2.....15t (B)
m2.....3t (B)
pp2....7t (B)
fuel..60t
c2......2t
srx1...4t (p)
84t to play with.
The same thing built under 77 rules and using a reduced power plant, maneuver drive
195t SX scout/courier - LBB2 77 design
b......20t
j2.....15t (B)
m1.....1t (A)
pp1....4t (A)
fuel..50t
c1/b...1t
srx1...4t (p)
100t to play with.
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dmccoy1693
SOC-13
Oh, there's one of those detailed in State of Chaos.
MT's Rebellion Sourcebook along with S&A explicitly states that ihatei ships are preexisting, lower TL, obsolescent or obsolete vessels seconded from clan assets. There are no purposely designed ihatei ships, they're just old naval vessels. (This is another reason why the Alien Conquests are such a suspender snapper.)
Those are interesting questions.
dmccoy1693
SOC-13
[Bunny Trail]
I'm not familiar with that expression. What does it mean?
[/Bunny Trail]
It's refers to the suspension of disbelief any fictional work depends on. People joke about having "belief suspenders" that "snap" when they're presented with information that doesn't "fit" or "work" within the whole.
Any work of fiction like a book, movie, or RPG attempts to create an internally consistent "secondary reality" of it's own in which to immerse the reader, viewer, or player. Just how successful that attempt will be depends on the factors like the strength of the story, how internally consistent the story is, the needs of the person in question, and so forth.
Putting it another way, plot holes often become pot holes. If large enough, they jar the reader, viewer, or player out of their immersion. Take The Empire Strikes Back for example.
The FTL drive aboard Solo's ship isn't working forcing the heroes to first hide in a planetoid belt, escape from a huge worm, and eventually hide in plain sight remora-like on a Star Destroyer. When the Imperial fleet leaves to conduct it's search, Solo's ship first hides among the dumped trash and then travels to Bespin where the FTL drive is repaired.
If the FTL drive is broken, how did they get to Bespin?
Another is from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy hijacks the truck carrying the Ark and gets it aboard a tramp steamer only to be stopped by a Nazi u-boat. The Nazis transfer the Ark aboard their sub at gun point and prepare to leave. Indy then swims over to the u-boat and lashes himself to the periscope as the steamer's crew cheers.
How did Indy breath underwater as the U-boat traveled to the island where the ritual would be held? If the u-boat didn't submerge, why didn't the crew in the conning tower notice Indy?
MT's story arc has many similar plot holes as the story of the Rebellion itself has a weak internal consistency. Too many factions appear too quickly, each too weak to win while also being too strong to lose. I'm sure you've seen the numerable threads discussing the "endless" Rebellion and how events should have played out.
The Vargr and Aslan incursions/conquests are another huge plot hole in MT. The Rebellion Sourcebook has an entire chapter dedicated to the strength and size of the Imperial Navy discussing the myriad of numbered, named, sector, subsector, and other fleets. Another chapter does the same with Imperial COACC and ground forces.
After discussing the Imperium's strength in detail, RSB then baldly tells us that ihatei forces aboard obsolescent naval vessels with a 2+ TL disadvantage vs. the IN somehow seized Imperial territory as far coreward as Glisten while at the same time escorting transports full of their wives and kiddies.
That's when my belief suspenders snapped.
There is an expression "suspension of disbelief" that you are probably familiar with (like when you watch a Spiderman movie and he has all these powers because he was bitten by a radioactive spider, but everyone knows that being bitten by a spider does not give you super powers, so you 'suspend' your 'disbelief' so you can enjoy the movie)
There is another expression "to snap your suspenders" which refers to someone pulling on elasic suspenders and allwing them to snap back to hit you in the chest. It means that something annoys you.
Combining those two yields a new expression "snap the suspenders of disbelief" which means that something is so improbable that you were unable to suspend your disbelief and found it annoying. An example is the revolver in an old western that fires 100 shots between reloads or the machine gun that shoots up everything in a room except the hero standing in the middle with a handgun shooting the people with machine guns.
Whipsnade changed "snap the suspenders of disbelief" into a noun "suspender snapper".
dmccoy1693
SOC-13
I read the first line and was like "Doh!" Just never head it referred to that way before.
This one I can actually answer. Non nuke-powered subs (which they all were pre-WWII) used diesel to power their engines, which mean they needed oxygen to power them. They used a battery when they dived, but that power was limited. So it was rather common for subs to stay on the surface until they needed to dive. While on the surface, it was rare for anyone to be on the top incase they needed to dive quickly.
No. There were always lookouts, watch officers, and the like topside. Not a large number, maybe a half dozen, but they were there for navigation, conning, surface searches, etc.
Submarines of the period are best thought of as torpedo boats that could occasionally submerge.
(Ninja'd by Fly!)
Depends on the referee.
As a player, I'd point out to the referee that a Detached Duty Type S is still Imperial property. The Imperium will make a much more thorough and effective attempt to recover it than the normal repossession rules describe, and all significant components will be tracked by serial number so simply parting it out won't provide hijackers with sufficient cover. It's just not going to be a desirable target.
I'd also point out that it will be common knowledge that with only one crew member, it's very simple to arrange a dead-man switch plus tamper-detection on the controls to trigger a self-destruct sequence. This means that a "successful" hijacking attempt will result in the ship blowing itself up, killing everyone on board, and ending up as a vaguely-starship-shaped chunk of twisted scrap metal. Together, these should deter nearly all potential hijackers of a Type S -- at the very least, they won't be striking at the listed odds of 1:216 (3D for 18+).
Also, the living quarters could be remodeled into a more easily-secured layout by moving partitions around.
That's the "as a character, in game" way to address it. At the out-of-character level of player and referee, it's pretty clear that unless the hijacker is just armed with a butter knife stolen from the galley, that a rules-as-written hijacking of a Type S is an almost inevitable total-party-kill (well, the party is just the one PC, but the principle holds). As a referee, there's seldom a good reason to inflict this on one's player(s) on a random dice roll. If the intent is to keep the PC from carrying passengers for hire, sure, but that should be made clear at the outset.
But the bottom line is that for game purposes, a Type S is not meant to be a platform for the PC crew to make money hauling cargo and passengers, just a way to let them get from one place to another without worrying about operations costs. If they want to play merchants, the players should be provided access to a different type of ship.
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Well... except there were people back in the 1950s and earlier who wore suspenders, and folks would walk up to them, snap their suspenders and then take off running. So its not just about 'can't ignore silly things in books and movies'.
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