Traveller: Ship to Ship Combat

[Lacco]

You and me both; i can't even carry a conversation in a timely manner

No worries, I am practically unable to currently maintain a stable presence here. Still, thank you for still looking at this.

Also: made a homebrew thread to work on the "mod".

A big change was damage. A 1e free trader had 4hull and 4structure. A 2e free trader has 80hull (modifiers are plentiful but that is base) and that is it. At 0 it falls apart. A beem laser does 1d6 hull, my memory is fuzzy on what 1e.

I have a 1e Mongoose, 2e Mongoose (recently bought) and T4 (Marc Miller's) + T5... yeah, I like the system and the ideas.

From what I understand, T4 works closest to my ideas: a T13 laser battery has damage code of 2-2-0-0 (damage per distance - very short, short, medium, long). The damage is applied after reducing via screens/defences - so if hit by this battery, a ship gets 2 points of damage (if no screens apply). This reduces armor (if the ship has some) - if there is no armor left, it goes to the structure. If armor is hit, you roll on a table for surface explosion, if there is some, you roll for internal explosion.

A 12 on exterior explosion table = roll on interior. A 12 on interior explosion table = ship destroyed.

The "feel" of this is that you have a powerful laser battery that can carve a Free Trader in 1 to 3 hits.

I'm thinking this may be the way I'd like to go: turrets are for point defence (good for dogfighting), bays are for ship-to-ship battle. I'll have to think about it.

Next comes power and drives. 1t of fusion plant provides X power points for 'Y'TL. Base ship requires X pp, drives require X pp and performance is based on it taking up Z% of hull. Standard building practice is to have reactor big enough to power everything at once (base blueprints in books fall slightly short as convention has you stop moving before jump so full power is not needed) but can easily lower to emulate one of the systems. High Guard details what happens if power points become tight (like say from a hit to your power core) and you need to turn things off.

This I plan to keep with a small change - there will be only a minimal TL, each additional TL level will increase price & efficiency. I like the way fuel is set up - to be a little less issue than in previous versions.

I also like the idea of jump needing a LOT of power.

Shields are a screen (which takes up a hardpoint so one less gun) and it provides 10 'hull' that regenerates 1 per round. Engineercan assist for more. At lowest TL it takes up like 20t and 50pp and gets better with higher TL (never truly gets better than a weapon). Great at simulating Star Trek shields that fall after one blow. Omnidirectional bubble btw...

Well, here comes the idea I had: ships have sections. Hull points are distributed among the sections and shields can be spread around these as one (the engineer, usually) wishes (maybe even increasing the amount of points from shields).

Also: wouldn't want a shield that blocks everything. The "one blow and they are down" is fine for me - in a way.

You can evade fire. A ship has a thrust value and one can spend a point of thrust to evade the next attack. More thrust spent is more evade attempts (only one per unique attack as i recall)

Yeah, this is something I like, but with a twist. A point of Thrust spent this way gives your Pilot a chance to roll to evade. In addition, I'm thinking of creating a mechanic to give the pilot chance to rotate the ship to prioritize ship sections that get hit - so you can put energy to front shields and turn the ship so it gets hit more from the front. Most probably just spending a point of Thrust - no pilot check needed.

Again, thanks for the input. It helps a lot.