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Traveller, set in the year 5621 at the beginning of most campaigns, is now officially an alternate history.
How can something set almost 3,600 years from now be an alternate history?
Because there was no Treaty of New York in 2024 where all of the nations of Earth ceded their sovereignty to the United Nations and made the UN the new world government.
After making sure that everyone had a Funny New Guys character...
We didn't even manage to kill anyone we cared about in Interstellar Wars.
Despite the six year gap between sessions we managed to get it rolling and have a good time.
Got the plot advanced a little bit too.
Still more to do there as well.
Plans to continue fell through with conflicting obligations and the reality that playing until our normal quitting time meant a zombie FuzzyGeff for his trek back to Ioway.
Better he get a good night's sleep.
I've got my mission plan set for Interstellar Wars.
The party has ticked off a local Vilani noble family during the lead-up to the 4th Interstellar War.
Lots of interesting things can be done to the players when there's increase scrutiny about an obviously Terran ship that anomalously has impeccable documentation and licensing as a domestic Imperial free-trader.
Marv has assumed the role of the ships loadmaster, and he's a point of contact for Imperial officials who've been given tips about illegal activity on board.
This could lead to armed conflict and possible ship to ship combat.
Blowing up the ship ends the campaign pretty effectively.
If that happens, I'll fall back on Technomancer: Funny New Guys. Got to get JT to make a character for that. FuzzyGeff and Marv have theirs.
Erin contacted me and wondered how to calculate her Droyne sport's mass.
The various sources mostly agree on the height range, but the definitive source for mass is GURPS: Traveller Alien Races 3 which does a good job of giving the height and weight, in 3e terms, for the standard sized Droyne.
The problem is the sport caste and warrior caste are bigger.
Sports are 50% taller. Warriors are twice as tall.
I did some back of the napkin calculations and, assuming a constant form factor, got her a weight for her character.
4'-10" and 97.5 lb. (1.5m and 44.2 kg) using the stuff from 3e.
4e is not quite the same in the build chart.
Interstellar Wars says a Nugiiri (what the Vilani called the Droyne down rimward near Sol before everyone realized that all those enclaves of gray, bug-eyed sophonts were actually the same race, Droyne) should be 50% the height of a person, but using the ST 7 line ends up with characters who are too short for the racial range.
So I cheated. They are 50% the average height for their ST+3! That puts the height and weight in the correct ranges when you apply the skinny modifier.
Huzzah! Solved for all time!
I've long held that if you're going to play GURPS on the standard 1" hex map, you should be using Lego Minifigs as your marker.
This is Musush Dahveeie, an NPC from my Traveller: Interstellar Wars campaign.
Fresh pic of Robert Jenkins from a Rhodesian campaign set in GURPS: Technmancer.
All hail Brick Arms, by the way.
The more bad Star Trek and botched Star Wars I see...
The more I want to cajole my local resources and get back to playing Traveller.
I can't really do worse.
Star Wars and Foundation have been very pretty, but not well made.
I REALLY can't do worse.
The Vilani use a gauss rifle that's near identical to the 4mm the Terrans use in performance.
6d+2(3) pi-
That averages to 23 points raw damage.
Thanks to the armor divisor, that will penetrate 69 points of DR. The down side is whatever makes it through the armor is cut in half.
Terran torso armor comes in at DR 75, so you're relatively safe.
Extremities are far more vulnerable.
Soldiers should keep their heads down. The infantry combat helmet is pathetic with DR 27.
I can see the space combat helmet being substituted.
I'm also considering statting out a heavier infantry helmet because when you arms are better protected than your noggin, your confidence wanes.
The Terran Marine laser rifle doesn't penetrate near so well with its 6d(2) burn.
It will only cut through 42 DR on average, but it's recoilless. That matters in zero G.
In Traveller: Interstellar Wars the Terran Confederation Marines and the infantry of the Terran Confederation Army wear full suits of body armor.
Marines wear TL10 Space Armor with the Space Combat Helmet.
Soldiers wear TL10 Combat Hardsuits and Combat Infantry Helmet.
Both have DR 75 to the torso and DR 45 for the limbs.
The Marines have the better cover with DR 60 to the head and brains with DR 45 to the faceplate. Soldiers get DR 27 to the skull and DR 18 to the faceplate.
The Marines are lugging more weight around with 45 lb for the suit, 7 lb. for the helmet plus 2 to 10 lb. of air tanks for 8 to 36 hours of operation on internal air.
Soldiers armor is 35 lb. for the suit, 5 lb. for the helmet and they don't carry an air supply, relying on filtration in the helmet's facemask.
The Army prefers the 4mm Gauss rifle. 6d+2(3) pi- and 60 shots in a handy 8.5 lb. package. Sighting is via a heads-up display in the helmet. The Marines use the 4mm and a laser rifle. 6d(2) burn with 83 shots from a D cell pack. 8 pounds for the gun, plus 5 for the power pack.Basic load for the Gauss gun is 5 magazines including the one in the gun. The laser gets just three packs, often using non-rechargable cells for double the number of shots.
Because the Terran Confederation is from Earth and Star Wars exists... Except for the color, the armor looks Stormtroopery. I like the look of the Phase 2 Clone Trooper.
Watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch makes me itch to get this down.
I created the turrets for the Lightning as a separate model because I knew it'd be getting revised several times and there's four of them.
In theory, the dwg reference I inserted into the grebel drawing will update as I make those changes.
But I cannot remember how to make it update to the new model.
It's simple, but I can't remember.
JT's slicer program will tell you how much filament you need to complete the print.
Setting it to 100% infill, we can use that amount as a proxy for the volume of the print.
My model of the Lighting class comes to 361g of filament. The Akkigish class comes to 349g.
My model will be losing a bit of filament as I get more greebel done too.
My main worry was that I'd made an error because the Lightning seems so much bigger than the Akkigish.
The cyan lines will be changed to shallow grooves so the print looks more interesting.
Thank The Gods for the mirror tool!
UPDATE!:
Got the top surface plotted out, now I need to extrude it into the surface and subtract it from the solid to leave a groove the printer can see.
I can see what's going on because I made the model.
The one on the right is the rearranged version.
Upper and lower cargo and being able to isolate the passenger section makes more sense to me.
Never mind the original seems to have forgotten an airlock...
I noticed that the cargo bay as shown was too small.
So I extended it forward a lot.
Then I started looking at the layout and thought, "this is not set up well at all."
So I started rearranging components.
This got especially drastic when I found that there's no place to put the power plant in engineering as shown on the rules-as-written deck plans.
Fine, you're gonna make me rearrange, then lets REARRANGE!
Passenger staterooms have been moved to the lower deck.
Some of the cargo has been moved to the upper deck and an air-raft sized deck elevator installed there.
Passenger country can be isolated from the rest of the ship.
Airlock and companionway have been added to the port side so the passengers don't have to walk through the cargo bay or engineering to get to their staterooms.
Best of all, it all fits properly in the 3D model I showed the other day! Huzzah!
I can make my hull shape work with some small changes to the deck plans.
Two corridors outboard and forward of staterooms 13 and 16 are crawl-spaces; but that's OK because there's a corridor aft of these rooms that connects to the inboard ones.
The corridors that go around staterooms 3 and 4 lose a little bit of headroom forward and outboard, but that's mostly up above the drop ceiling.
The cargo bay gets expanded out to meet the hull in the aft portion and extended under the staterooms almost to under the bridge with a 9' ceiling.
Staterooms 13 and 16 lose some headroom in the head because of the angle of the hull.
I think that, if it were my design, I'd have made the Lightning a bit less, well, slab sided and flat.
I'm modeling it as the artwork in the book says to do it.
And I just noticed that the cargo hold, as shown in the deck plans is a mere 78.5 dTon when it's supposed to be 162 dTon.
I assumed a 9' ceiling and to make volume it needs a 20' ceiling. Or it needs to be twice as long as shown on the plans.
That means a substantial redesign of my model... Grumble!
I got the bridge windows and the refueling scoops on! Coming up with an aesthetically pleasing and not wildly out of scale set of windows was a pain in the ass!
Greebeling is no darn fun when the feature has to have some real function that's identifiable.
JT printed the Lightning without any greebling so I can do some drawing on the plain part to plan the greebling.
Notice that it seems to dwarf the Type-R?
The differences in volume can be illusory. I think the Type-R should come in a bit larger than the Lightning by volume despite appearing smaller here.
JT got a good print of the Type-R Subsidized Merchant and we made our first run of an un-greebeled Lightning Frontier Merchant in 1/270 scale!
Uh... Isn't the Lightning a 400 dTon ship, like the Type-R?
This is what happens when you use a GURPS book for the dimensions where a hex is 1 yard across flats. So this was scaled in inches... The slicer defaults to millimeters.
A scaled up version is printing right now!
While FuzzyGeff was in town we frog marched Marv into making a Traveller Interstellar Wars character.
We skipped trying to integrate him into the existing campaign, so everyone made a Promethian belter.
The quick, light, scenario was them prospecting in the inner belt and finding a poorly disguised UN Navy listening post.
The first person they encounter was a buck naked, dead drunk Lieutenant Commander.
As they were leaving the asteroid base, the commander was stone sober.
I did not explain it to them, but the drug he took is called "purge".
It's a standard med found in Ultra-Tech that nullifies alcohol and recreational pharmaceuticals in a couple of minutes taken orally, or in a few seconds injected.
Here's the artwork in Interstellar Wars:
Here's the deckplans I'm working from:
Already you can see they don't quite agree.
Here's my nearest approximation of this design that accounts for the deckplans and the overall displacement of 400 tons of liquid hydrogen.
No greebeling yet, and I can't quite get the same angle as the artwork.
I am becoming more and more convinced that the art came first, then a game stats THEN someone tried to make deckplans off those stats while looking at the artwork.
