They Rhyme

 Something else I noticed, even though I experienced in real time the "this new game is so much better than the other game we've been playing!" feeling.

They all handle things pretty much the same way.

Most of them have a point where you're wounded so badly you pass out.  Most of them have a chance for medical intervention to keep you from dying even if you took a LOT of damage.

None of them are particularly difficult to use, once you've gotten past the author.

LBB Traveller and Top Secret are particularly bad in how they're laid out.  T2K suffers from things being widely separated in the rules as well.

GURPS 2e and 3e both suffer from an odd way of grouping the skills, but the index and Instant Characters sheet works around that.

GURPS 4e's index is very poor compared to the previous versions, but the layout is easier to navigate. 

M16ish At 50 Yards and/or Meters

Little Black Book TRAVELLER 

Traveller is my first game that had guns at all.

In Traveller the "M16" would be an assault rifle from Book 4: Mercenary.

Defenders range modifiers are (semi/auto): Close -4/-4, Short +1/+1, Medium -1/+2, Long -2/0, Very Long -4/-3; Wound Inflicted 3D; Defender's Armor: Nothing +2/+4, Jack +2/+4, Mesh -1/+2, Cloth -3/-1, Reflec +2/+4, Ablat 0/+2, Battle -5/-4.

The skill you use it with is Gun Combat, with a specialization in assault rifle.  We're going to go with Gun Combat: Assault Rifle - 2 to be consistent with the skill level 12 in GURPS later on.

The basic roll to hit is an 8 or higher on 2d6.  The average roll of 2d6 is 7, so you need some modifiers, like your skill, to actually hit on average.

You get +1 for every level of skill you have. 

If your Dext is below 5, you get a -1 to hit.  If it's 8 or higher you get a +2. 

50 yards meters is "Medium" range.  -1 to hit with semi-auto fire (one shot per round), +2 to hit with auto (4 shots per round).  The magazine holds 30 shots.

If the target is unarmored, +2 to hit with semi, +4 with auto. 

If our Gun Combat: Assault Rifle - 2 character with Dext 8 fires on someone at 50m they need a 3 or more (97.22% chance) with semi-auto fire and 2 or more (100% chance) with automatic fire on 2d6.  The average damage applied to any stat will render our target unconscious.

But if we're dead average across the board, our Dext is 7.  That means we need a 5 or more (83.33% chance) with semi-auto and 2 or more with autofire.

It'll do 3d6 damage when it hits.  Each die is applied, randomly to Strength, Dexterity or Endurance.  When one stat is reduced to zero, the victim is rendered unconscious; two is seriously wounded and all three is dead.  Two dice hitting the same stat can end the fight in a single round.

Notice that firing more rounds increases your chance to hit, not the amount of damage done. 

All in all, it's pretty straight-forward and simple.  There's an unneeded complication with range bands we never bothered learning or using.  I remember we changed armor to absorbing damage rather than making it harder to hit, but I don't remember the specifics.

Top Secret

Top Secret is the first game I owned that had an assault rifle called M16 by name.

The M16 is PWV 79, Range modifiers of: PB +5, S -8, M -50, L -160, WS S, Rate 3, Ammo 20, Cost 325, DECP NC, HWV 14.

I remember TS being convoluted in figuring out combat and I did not misremember. 

First you need your "Offense Value" this is the average of your Coordination and Courage.  You rolled percentiles to get those and the average percentile roll of 55 gets you a score of 65.  (65+65)/2=65, so the average Offense is 65.

How much damage you can take is determined by your "Life Level" which is the average of Physical Strength and Willpower.  Same average of 65.

Once again, 50 yards is medium range.

To hit you take your Offense Value, add the weapon's PWV (Projectile Weapon Value) subtract the Range Modifier and subtract the penalty for extra shots.

Semi-auto fire is 1 shot per turn, the M16 can fire up to 3 per turn.  The second and third shot get -11 and -22.  The Top Secret M16 has a 20 round magazine.

That extra shot penalty adds up until you take a round to recover, it can grow to be very severe.  It's actually quite GURPS like!

There are other penalties for movement and position we're skipping for now. 

So, at 50 yards with our M16 we have 65 + 79 - 50 = 94 or less on percentiles against a standing opponent for our first shot, 83 or less for the second and 72 or less for the third if we fired automatically.  On average, all rounds will hit.

That's more like sniping, ain't it.

If we're firing from rice-paddy prone (-5) at a target who's running and dodging (-20)...  That drops our chances to 69, 58 and 47 respectively.  On average only the first two hit.

On to damage! 

We roll on the General Injury Determination Chart to see where we hit with those two rounds.  The average roll of 55 will generally hit the abdomen or lower back.

Then we roll two d10.  The first tells us what type of damage from abrasion to internal damage.  The second tells us if the wound is serious or light.  The average roll of 5 gets a light laceration which applies 5 points against the target's Life Level, down to 60 from 65.  At the other end, a 6 and a 10 gets a serious internal injury and does 12 points of damage, down to 48.

It's going to take more shots than I remembered to shoot someone to death.  Top Secret trends to the cinematic end of the scale!

There are optional rules in the Top Secret Companion that give the location, type and severity in a single d1000 roll.

Twilight: 2000

Stats are determined by rolling 4d6-4, making the average 10.  A favored stat averages 15 and a slighted stat 5.

Hit Capacity varies by hit location.  Head is equal to CON, body is STR+CON+STA, other locations are equal to CON+STA.  Average person has 10, 30 and 20 respectively.

Everyone starts with the Combat Rifleman (CRM) skill at 20.  You can buy that up using skill points.  We'll buy it up to 74 to match the Skill 12 in the GURPS 2e example.  The skill is modified by range to get a "Base Hit" number which you need to roll, or less, on a d100.

An M16A1 has: ROF 4, Mag 10, Rng 50, Dam 2, and Arm -.

ROF is rate of fire in "shots," Mag is magazine capacity in "shots" which are 3 bullets each.  Rng is a range increment in meters.  In our example 50m is close range (the "Base Hit" is 60% skill or 44), 100m is medium range (30% skill or 22) and 200m is long range (10% skill or 7) and 400m is extreme range (special to hit rules), Arm is the armor multiplier which makes armor more or less effective against some weapons (no effect here).

Did you hit?

On average, a 74 skill is going to be missing at 50m.  If you spend a turn aiming, your first shot of the next round is at double the "base hit", or 88 in our example.  The aimed shot will, on average, hit.

Where did you hit?

An aimed shot can hit a specific hit location by halving the base hit number, which was normally doubled by aiming, returning it to it's original value, or 44 in our example.  Sniper weapons don't suffer this penalty!

If you didn't aim at a specific hit location, you roll 1d10 on the appropriate hit location chart.  Most likely hit the abdomen.

How much damage did you do?

At close range the M16A1 does the 4x the base damage plus 4d6 or 4d6+16; average of 30.  That's enough to drop someone's body damage capacity to zero.  This is a serious injury and they need to make a CON roll (d100 of CONx5 or less or 50 in our case) or fall unconscious.  This is beyond negative head damage capacity (a critical injury), so they'd be automatically unconscious and die in 1d10x10 turns if no medical assistance is rendered.

NPCs are supposed to use a simpler set of rules that gives them less damage capacity, 2d10x2 or 22 on average.  We never did use this rule, it doesn't add that much bookkeeping to the game and it made the fights better. 

I don't think we adhered to the rules very closely at all. 

GURPS 2e

All GURPS skill rolls are 3d6.  We're ignoring passive defense.

We don't have an M16, so we'll let the M-26A2 from GURPS: Autoduel 1e stand in.

With a, commonly taken, 12 skill in Guns/TL7 and straight 10 stats.

Our 10 ST is above the minimum of 8, so no penalties from that. 

It's Inc. is 20, so there's a -3 for range.

You can fire 2 shots semi-automatically or 3 shots in a burst.  We get 30 shots.

If you take turn to aim before firing, you take no penalty to the first semi-auto shot or any of the rounds in the burst.

If you don't take a turn to aim, they are all "snap shots" and have a -4 penalty.

So, chance to hit with an aimed shot is 9 or less (37.50% chance).  Snap shots are 5 or less (4.62% chance).

Two aimed, semi, shots are at 9 and 5.
Two snap, semi, shots are at 5 each.
Three aimed, burst, shots are at 9 each.
Three snap, burst, short are at 5 each.

On average you're gonna miss.

But if you aimed, you can pick a body location, and take a penalty to hit.  The body is a -0 though.  Some locations do more damage and have special effects, like crippling a limb or knocking them unconscious before their HP drops to zero.  The head, for example is -5 to hit, has DR 1 for the skull, but gives double damage and damage of HT/3 or more causes them to be stunned and HT/2 or more knocks them unconscious.

The hit location of a snap shot is determined by a 2d6 roll and looking at the table.  Coincidentally, the average roll of 7 on 2d for a random location also hits the body!

The M-26A2 does 2+2 dice of crushing damage. 

The average damage is 9, and will do 9 points to an unarmored torso; they keep fighting.  This same damage roll would do 16 points to the head, this both stuns and knocks the target out; but you'd need a 4 or less to hit with an aimed shot. 

We didn't play much Autoduel, so we never really got the warts located. 

GURPS 3e.

Update: I forgot the blow-through rules. 

The average person has straight 10 stats and we're sticking to a skill of 12 in Guns/TL7 - Lt Auto.

An M16 does 5d crushing damage, SS of 12, Acc 11, 1/2D 500, Max 3,843, Wt 8, RoF 12*, Shots 20, ST 9, Rcl -1, Cost $540, TL 7.

First, the unaimed semi-auto shot:  The range of 50 yards is a -9 penalty giving us a net skill of 3.  That's below the SS number of 12 so we get an additional -4 to hit for a -1 chance on 3d6.  Any roll of 9 or higher is a critical failure, so...  maybe don't make this shot.

Aimed, semi-auto shot:  -9 for range, +11 for Acc, for a net +2 or 14 or less (90.74% chance) to hit the body, 13 or less (83.79% chance) for a second shot and 12 or less (74.07% chance) for a third.  On average, all three hit!

5d crushing does an average of 17 points of damage to the body, but is reduced to 10 because of the blow-through rule on p.B109, which is enough to warrant a "consciousness roll" against HT on 3d6 to stay awake.  On average, they make it, but are very penalized by the damage with regards to movement and DX based skills.  The second shot drops them to -10 and this adds a "death roll" against HT to keep from dying.  The third shot drops them to -20, another consciousness roll and two more death rolls.  This is bad.  Three death rolls in rapid succession rarely yields happy results.

Aimed, semi-auto shot at the vitals:  -9 for range, +11 for Acc, -3 to hit vitals, for a net -1 or 11 or less (62.50% chance) to hit the body, 10 or less (50% chance) for a second shot and 9 or less (37.5% chance) for a third.

On average two rounds hit. 

Vitals do triple damage after subtracting the DR of the target, which is 0 here.  So our average roll of 17 damage does 30 points dropping the target to -20 and requiring 4 death rolls.  The second shot takes them to -50 and 6 more death rolls.

How about an unaimed blast of full-auto fire?  Same chances as before, but with an additional -1 for recoil on the first burst, -2 on the second, -3 on the third, and -4 for the fourth.  Spraying and praying doesn't really work.

An aimed blast is 13 or less for the first burst, 12 for the second, 11 for the third and 10 for the fourth.  Using our average rolls of 10 we look at the table on p B120 and find: we hit with 3 rounds from the first burst, 3 from the second, and 2 from the third.

8 rounds to the body doing 10 each on average because of blow-through totaling to 80 points of damage which is well past the 60 needed to get auto-death.

The players really liked rolling for each separate round/burst. 

GURPS 3eR with High Tech 3e.

The average person has straight 10 stats and we're sticking to a skill of 12 in Guns/TL7 - Lt Auto.

An M16 does 5d crushing damage, SS of 12, Acc 11, 1/2D 500, Max 3,843, Wt 8, RoF 12*, Shots 20, ST 9, Rcl -1, Cost $540, TL 7.

First, the unaimed semi-auto shot:  The range of 50 yards is a -9 penalty, -5 for bullet-shyness, giving us a net skill of -2.  That's below the SS number of 12 so we get an additional -4 to hit for a -6 chance on 3d6.  Any roll of 4 or higher is a critical failure, so...  maybe don't make this shot.

Aimed, semi-auto shot:  -9 for range, +11 for Acc, -5 for bullet shyness for a net -3 or 9 or less (37.50% chance) to hit the body, 8 or less (25.92% chance) for a second shot and 7 or less (16.20% chance) for a third.

On average, all three miss!  But let's assume one does. 

5d crushing does an average of 17 points of damage to the body, which is reduced to 10 because of blow-through, which is enough to warrant a "consciousness roll" against HT on 3d6 to stay awake.  On average, they make it, but are very penalized by the damage with regards to movement and DX based skills. 

Aimed, semi-auto shot at the vitals:  -9 for range, +11 for Acc, -3 to hit vitals, -5 for bullet shyness for a net 6 or 6 or less (9.25% chance) to hit the body, 5 or less (4.62% chance) for a second shot and 4 or less (1.85% chance) for a third.

Even though we probably missed, vitals do triple damage after subtracting the DR of the target, which is 0 here.  So our average roll of 17 damage does 30 points of damage because of blow-through dropping the target to -20 and requiring 4 death rolls.

How about an unaimed blast of full-auto fire?  Same chances as before, but with an additional -1 for recoil on the first burst, -2 on the second, -3 on the third, and -4 for the fourth.  Spraying and praying doesn't really work.

An aimed blast is 8 or less for the first burst, 7 for the second, 6 for the third and 5 for the fourth.  Using our average rolls of 10 we look at the table on p B120 and find: we missed with all 12.

Adding in that bullet shyness penalty, because combat, really pissed the players off. 

GURPS 4e

The average person has straight 10 stats and we're sticking to a skill of 12 in Guns/TL7 - Rifle.

The M16A1 is TL7, does 5d pi damage, Acc 5, Range 500/3,200, Weighs 7.2/0.7, RoF 13, Shots 20+1(3), ST 8†, Bulk -5, Rcl 2, Cost $550/$34, LC 2.

Snap shots have been eliminated!  So has blow-through for the body.

Skill 12, -8 for range, 4 or less to hit with three rounds of semi-auto fire.  Yeah... No.

Aim for a second.  Skill 12, -8 for range, +5 for Acc.  9 or less.  On average, still a miss.

Aim for two seconds.  Skill 12, -8 for range, +5 for Acc, +1 aiming bonus.  10 or less!  On average, one hit.

5d pi to an unarmored ST 10 torso is about the same as before, doing 17 points of damage on average, but without blow-through, all of those points do damage.  It takes the victim to -7 points of damage, requiring a HT roll to remain conscious.

13 round blast without aiming?

Skill 12, -8 for range, +3 for volume of fire.  7 or less.  Prolly missing with all of those too.

After aiming?

Skill 12, -8 for range, +5 for Acc, +3 for volume of fire.  12 or less.  Average roll of 10 with a Rcl of 2 means two rounds hit.

17 damage from the first round gets to -7 and a consciousness roll.  17 from the second round gets to -24, another consciousness roll and a death roll.

4e angered several players because their characters became ineffective with the golden standard of a 12 skill.  I'd been looking for a means to simulate the vast expenditure of ammo to a single hit since I started playing GURPS and 4e solves for it nicely. 

The Fire Hose

Traveller is a gigantic universe using just the published materials, let alone the shared stuff that GM's did on their own.

Traveller also has more than one published timeline, depending on the publisher.

OG GDW goes into Megatraveller and a new long night.

GURPS: Traveller and Mongoose reject the event that leads to that dark night.

"Long night?  NEW long night?  What are you on about, Thag?"

If you know Traveller history then you know that The Long Night is the collapse of the 2nd Imperium before the rise of the 3rd Imperium.  It's 1,500 years long.

In the generic Traveller campaign, it's 1,100 years ago.

I know all this because I've been playing since before this was established.

A problem for a new player is their character is FROM the Imperium.  They grew up there, they took history classes in school, they were raised with the cultural norms of the Empire.

How do they learn this?

Well, technically, they can learn the same way I did.  Open the books and read up on it!

Just the GURPS books are a stack more than a foot tall.

I read it in little bites from 1980 or so to present.

It's a big ask to expect the player to read all that.

So, how does one get a person from TL8 USA to make a character from TL11 3rd Imperium?

I figured out a cheat.

Have them make a character from a TL8 world that joined the Imperial military.

The Imperium pretty much HAS to have a training program to bootstrap people from low-tech backwaters to productive members of the military; otherwise only the high-population, industrial and technologically developed worlds will be carrying the entire load of defending the place.

The military isn't so much interested in their recruits learning Imperial culture, as they are to get them effective at their MOS.

So our prospective character has Cultural Familiarity in their home TL8 culture and their branch of service and they get to learn Imperial culture on the fly as the game proceeds!

An entire party of these waifs works because there are a lot of undeveloped worlds.

I suddenly see how the Traveller's Aid Society came into being!

It's Official

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. 

Counting Type-S

My version of counting sheep to go to sleep is running through all the steps of bringing a Type-S scout ship from cold-iron to pre-flight.

Figuring out the ship in this level of detail has messed with a couple of my Traveller players.

Hitting them with, "Have you checked the flight manual for this problem?" really screwed up one of them after a failed skill check.  I was like, "Dude, the test is open book in real life!"

College students, amiright?

But...

To get the left fusion plant running, you need to charge the capacitors and the power for that comes from some sort of ground cart.  In this case, the air-raft your drove up to the cold ship.

As I was drifting off, I realized that I had been imagining parking it aft of the ship and climbing up to the engineering room hatch...

An air-raft is literally a flying car.  I can park it hovering AT the rear hatch!

My mental image has been amended to include cleats to tie the air-raft there now. 

It's Not That

It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's just that I keep finding that I've already said it and forgot.

Like using gravity to create an artificially larger lens to extend laser ranges in Traveller.

Or someone has moved from theory to application about phased arrays in visible and shorter frequencies.

Found It!

Using a laser or fusion gun to burn through armor!  I've mentioned it before.

I found the note for it on p.559 of the Basic Set.

Repeated impaling, piercing, and large piercing attacks against the same small spot (an area with SM 0 or less) lower DR at that specific point as if it were semi-ablative; repeated burning, corrosion, crushing, cutting, or huge piercing attacks at that same spot reduce DR at that point as if it were ablative.  DR never falls below 1 for wood or 3 for brick, concrete, or stone. For rules governing semi-ablative and ablative DR, see the Damage Resistance advantage (p. 46).

I knew I'd read it someplace! 

Bigger

The Traveller jump drive is essentially a fusion power plant and bank of capacitors.

I've found conflicting information, but it would appear that all of the jump fuel is consumed prior to jump.  Drop tanks are canon and they don't work otherwise.

One source says "about an hour" between jumps if you have the fuel.

So a Type S has to move 270,000 liters of liquid hydrogen in an hour.

At about 2m per second that needs about a 10" pipe.

I seem to remember that a jump can take place in a single 20 minute combat turn, so we're going to need a bigger pipe than that!

If we move it faster, just over 3m per second we can get away with a 12" pipe.  17" if we don't speed up the flow.

12" pipe fits with my mental image of how the engineering spaces look.

Not Very Impressive

The Type S scout / courier from Traveller uses 20 dTon of liquid hydrogen in the course of a 2 parsec jump.

My mind had always envisioned giant pipes and bolted flanges to move all that liquid.

It might still need that, depending on how fast it uses the hydrogen, but if it's used up over the entire two weeks instead all at once, a mere 1/2" line will suffice to feed the drive.

I cannot remember if a canon answer is given. 

FTL Speeds

In case I never calculated it before:

Jump 1 is 170.1c

Jump 2 is 340.1c

Jump 3 is 510.2c

Jump 4 is 680.3c

Jump 5 is 860.3c

Jump 6 is 1,020.4c

By way of comparison...

Larry Niven's Known Space quantum I hyperdrives are 121.75c.  Quantum II are 420,768c!

Star Trek speeds for the OG TV series were supposedly the cube of the warp factor times the speed of light or:

Warp 1 = 1c

Warp 2 = 8c

Warp 3 = 27c

Warp 4 = 64c

Warp 5 = 125c

Warp 6 = 216c

Warp 7 = 343c

Warp 8 = 512c

Warp 9 = 729c

Warp 10 = 1,000c

This is not consistent and several point in the various shows contradict it.

I Wasn't Counting

Some campaigns that went far longer than 7-sessions that I can remember.

Carl's Champions world and my character Prowler.

Carl's AD&D dungeon world where we could play ourselves.  Thag the Evil Magic User was a force to be reckoned with there.

He rebooted that world for GURPS and it ran all summer.  One of the players sleeping with his wife killed that one dead...

He ran a more conventional fantasy world with GURPS we played for a couple of years.  My GM'ing schedule caused me to drop out.

Standing Bear ran many fantasy worlds that lasted for years and years.  From his homebrew version of D&D through GURPS.

FuzzyGeff ran an excellent nexus campaign that definitely ran longer than 7 sessions.

My first Traveller campaign ran twice a week for 9 months.  With just "The Traveller Book" and no modules no less.

Before I left for the Army, my Twilight: 2000 game ran for two years.

My semi-comical pirates campaign ran longer than 7 sessions.  It even had people watching us do the roleplaying part.  That one fell apart when two players abruptly decided they needed to leave and rather than take ten minutes to get their characters back to the ship, chose to let another player run their characters.  That player chose to sacrifice their characters to a tribal god to make peace with an island of savages.  Somehow that was MY fault.  Sigh.

T2K runs well with GURPS.  But I remember Kalisz more times than Krakow, so the campaigns must have been short.

Traveller and GURPS got some excellent runs.

Modred ran a good long time.  Alternate history where the Nazis murdering Jews opens a rift that lets magic and demons into the world.  Letting the players play characters who were both from the world and from other worlds really helped let them make characters they wanted.

But there's a scrap yard of worlds that only made it a session or two.  Players leave and don't come back after establishing themselves as essential to the campaign at a point where you can't work around it being an all to common occurrence.

K'Tanga was one such.  A gateway to another world from Zaire was the hook.  I let the players decide who was going to assume what roles and the person who took the "chosen one" job quit after two sessions and did it in the middle of the game by not coming back from dinner.

Even The Droyne

 

Special guest star Erin Palette!

Distribution

Technology does not advance evenly.

For example: Afghanistan lacks almost all of the infrastructure we take for granted in the US and their manufacturing base is, maybe, GURPS TL4.  TL5 tops.

Yet TL8 electronics abound.

This made me rethink a lot of things in a Traveller campaign.  The TL3 non-industrial agricultural world with a feudal government is going to have state of the art consumer goods because some free-trader is going stop off and trade a load of the stuff in exchange for whatever the they can get.

Free traders are experts at arbitrage.

A non-industrial agricultural world might (almost certainly) have the wealth to purchase modern farming equipment even if they cannot be manufactured or serviced with local know-how.  The Imperial equivalent to Allis-Chalmers will also send teams of people to do that service post-sale for a fee.  It might even be appealing to these people to live in a pastoral, low pressure, low-tech environment between jobs.  They won't really be giving up much in comforts, consumer stuff is widely available!

Compact, self-contained, fusion generators are going to be prime trade-goods.

I don't think there's a good real-world model for the kind of trade that operates on the fringes and free-traders serve.

It also hits me that someone from that TL3 world, as a citizen of the Imperium, has the right to enlist in the Imperial military.  That heavily implies that the Imperial military has a remedial program that brings these volunteers up to speed on modern technology.

Machines To Make The Machines

There was an old BBC show called "Connections" and it was fascinating.

They'd tell you how two, seemingly, unrelated items or events led from one to another with lots of steps in between.

It really colored how I looked at technology and it's why I notice some things that some people don't or I question things that others don't examine.

Today's connection:  Are the meson gun and nuke damper related?

Yes.

It's explicitly stated in GURPS: Traveller.

It isn't in LBB Traveller, but I'd speculated that they had to be related because the meson gun is keeping the mesons from decaying until they're at the desired distance; and that implies we're manipulating shit like a nuke damper does.

Smush Smush Boom

The Traveller nuclear damper works by weakening the strong nuclear force and causing the nuclei of the warhead to, kinda, fall apart at a molecular level.

It stops fission from the shed of neutrons, that prevents the chain reaction.

It stops fusion by keeping the two hydrogen nuclei from sticking together well enough to form a helium atom and that prevents the release of energy normally associated with it.

In a real world nuke, that'd keep it from working because all of our fusion weapons use a fission explosion to get the heat/pressure up far enough to force the fusion reaction.

In Traveller, many warheads dispense with the fission stage and use the insanely miraculous gravity manipulation technology to say to two H atoms, "now kiss!"

Under a damper, they bump into each other and...

Well the grav pinch is still happening, but where's the kaboom?

Since the grav pinch is designed to happen once and briefly, I speculate that you end up with a warhead with dead capacitors and burned out grav plates with a capsule of tritium in the center.

Motivation

Years ago I started converting the GURPS: Traveller character templates from 3e to 4e.

I stopped somewhere in the middle of First In and never got back to it.

Tonight I summoned enough motivation to open the file and see where I'd left off, but not enough motivation to remember where I was at in the last template I was working on.

Maybe tomorrow.

Traveller vs Ogre

I've had a vision, in my head that an Ogre cybertank was the ultimate, invincible armored vehicle.

Without nukes they cannot penetrate the armor of a Third Imperium grav tank.

The fusion gun of the grav tank needs a lucky hit to penetrate the frontal armor of an Ogre mkVI, but it can.

If the Imperium uses proper combined arms tactics, and the Imperial Army normally does, then the most effective weapons the Ogre have will be nullified.

A battlefield nuclear damper field will put a... um... damper on the effectiveness of the normal nuclear projectiles from the primary and secondary guns.  Even without this protection, the VRF gauss gun on point defense mode is prolly sufficient to keep nukes from being effective.  The point defense X-Ray laser is even better at the job.

We'll just ignore the meson gunned artillery units that even the thickest bi-phased carbide armor can't stop.  A perfectly intact Ogre without a mark on it and no brain...

This assumes the Imperium wishes to land troops.

They could drop things from orbit.

Lots of rocks out there to drop from orbit.

The Emperor doesn't LIKE dangerously radioactive glass balls in Their Imperium.

Dangerously radioactive glass balls don't pay much in the way of taxes and are hardly a reward when you create a new noble and grant them a fief.

Confusing Guidance

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!

Magic

Just like you can't play a character who's smarter than yourself, you can't portray technology past your understanding.

I've watched a lot of ultra-tech space settings where the GM kept presenting problems that would be definitively solved by technology listed in the game.

One of the most famous fiction examples is how Star Trek conveniently forgets all the replicator and transporter accidents.

The two most important words in science are, "that's odd," and NCC-1701 sure found a lot of them.

Not least of which is a fountain of youth.

Since I played Traveller the most, it's where I see tech concept blind spots most often.

You don't even have to get to Traveller TL 14 to make some of the errors and I blame Hollywood.

If you encounter a back-pack nuke ticking away, how do you disarm it?

Hollywood tells you that you have to find the red wire.

I says light it up with your rifle.

The explosives surrounding the core might still explode, but they will do so asymmetrically and no fission boom.  If it's a fusion bomb, you've made sure it's not going to get fusing.  You're going to have a problem with explosively scattered fissile materials now, but not near as spread out as if you'd let it go high-order.

Starting about Traveller TL9, they don't even bother with the fissile materials!

Gravitic technology is sufficient that you use artificial gravity to collapse your fuel to fusion pressures.

The minimum size to do this gets smaller and smaller as tech advances and for a bomb or warhead, you are skipping the hardware that siphons off power from the unit, and keeps it from exploding.  Exploding is the point.

But it shouldn't make them less susceptible to being bashed on to the point they don't work anymore.

Getting something to fusion is difficult.  Slight asymmetries cause failures to go boom.

How did I conceptualize all this?  Having a high-school education and being resistant to math when you have a, no shit, doctor of astrophysics and two people who do calculus for fun in your gaming group means your assumptions about a tech WILL be challenged.

Physics is, regardless of how you achieve them.  Traveller technology is astonishing on many levels.

How the meson gun MUST work is a terrifying level of control over subatomic particles.

But back to the Traveller TL 12 equivalent to a backpack nuke.  It's going to need a powerpack (some sort of super-science insane rate of discharge capacitor) to fire off the gravitic node that collapses the fuel, holds it for a swish then lets it go.  Ripping that pack off the side of the node-core means no-boom.  It might discharge spectacularly, but it doesn't detonate.

Likewise, a couple light armor piercing explosive rounds into the node will keep it from forming a symmetrical wave-front and no boom.  It might not be a good idea to stand next to it as it collapses from it's brief attempt to be degenerate and then fly apart again when the powerpack tries to fire the node...  But it will be a much smaller explosion than firing correctly.

But the point is... it's easier to keep nukes from going off than to get them to go off.

Ideally, you separate the powerpack from the node without the pack discharging.  Demolitions, Engineer or Jack of All Trades skill should get you there.  Mechanical or Electronic should get a roll with penalties.

Dangerous, no skill required, methods are chancy, but are better than letting a nuke go off.

Old Grognard

I, jokingly, commented on a Traveller session that Erin participated that the Aslan player's pronunciation of Trokh (Aslan primary language) was atrocious.

I said he had an atrocious accent, riffing on the old meme of someone not being able to speak French well because of their accent.

It hits me that I've been doing Traveller a LOT longer than they have.

I knew it was Trokh without looking it up.  Just as I know the most common Vargr language is Gvegh.

I started in 1979 with little black books and kept up with it through MegaTraveller.

I translated both LBB Traveller and Megatraveller to GURPS 3e.

Then GURPS: Traveller.

Then translating that into 4e.

Then GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars.

I corresponded with Loren K Wiseman when he was still Traveller line editor at SJGames.

I have watched the setting develop from nothing to the crunchy mass today.

I have not done much with Mongoose's version of the rules.

But the setting remains the same.

It amuses me that the Aslan's player has no idea who I am or how long I've been at it when they replied.

But I'm only teasing.  It sounded like he's got the essence of being an Aslan male in command from listening to the session.