Hello to everybody,
I'm new to the list, having discovered - and devoured - Full Thrust
recently.
I'm currently trying to convert some First Edition Traveller ships to Full
Thrust. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, so if anybody can help, I'd
appreciate their advice. I've started going through the old Archives, but
if anybody wants to jump-start me on the state of the art, that'd be
great.
Any e-mail would be appreciated.
Thanks,
John Kovalic Madison, WI
> >
Mike,
Thanks for bringing me up to date. My thoughts are (and should I post these to
the list as well?)
Battle Rider would provide for the easiest conversions. Unfortunately, it
no longer reflecte current thinking in Traveller, starship-wise.
Book 9 (Fighting ships) is of moderate use, since it mixes several small ships
(1,000 tons and below) with several larger ones (50,000 and above), with few
falling inbetween.
I've been thinking about two different scales of play - Small Ships and
Super Ships,, with squads of small ships acting like fighters in the latter
group. This seems to me to have two advantages:
A) Being able to play System Defence Boats (for example) against Free
Traders without losing TOO much from dinky under-gunning you'd need if
the two scales were to be mixed. IE, keeping both the flavor of Traveller AND
Full Thrust.
B) Not having to equip Super Ships with (for example) 200 "C" Batteries by
grouping Weapons Systems together in an abstraction.
Tech levels have to be addressed if Traveller Flavor is to be maintained, but
I believe "Mayday" had an easy system that shouldn't be too hard to duplicate.
However, Tech Level 12 missiles attacking a Tech Level 16 ship would be like a
Sopwith Camel taking on a Tomcat. So some tinkering between different TLs has
to be taken into account other than just with detection and scanning.
I wouldn't lose too much sleep over the exact tonnages that I unit of Full
Thrust volume represents in Traveller terms, since so many weapons systems
will be abstracted anyway.
I'll dig out Mayday. I think the Vector Movement System has to be introduced,
but that's easy to pull over.
Anyway, these are just my first thoughts. I'm sure more will follow.
Best, and thanks again,
Boy, after reading this, Irealized how poorly I phrased this.
What I mean is that, using similar mechanics, you could play battles with
starships 50 tons through (say) 1,250 tons (the Kinunir - an arbitrary
cutoff point) OR you could play battles between ships 1,250 tons up through
the 100,000-ton-plus Superships. As an individual ship-to-ship game, the
two scales would be incompatible.
Fighters in the "Normal" scale would represent individual fighters as per Full
Thrust, for example. Fighters in "Super Scale" would probably represent
fighter WINGS, since a hundred or more individual fighters could be carried by
a single carrier. Instead of one stand of six figures representing six
fighters, it would represent (for example) 36 fighters.
Scouts, Couriers, SDBs etc. would be grouped in the Super Scale as well
-
this time six SDBs on one base would represent six SDBs. These would operate
as fighters do in the Normal scale, but could not dogfight, and would have
greater weapon range.
> Battle Rider would provide for the easiest conversions. Unfortunately,
Though Book 9 (and, to a lesser extent, Mayday) no longer reflect current
thinking in Traveller, they're a lot closer than any Traveller: the New Era
designs are.
> I've been thinking about two different scales of play - Small Ships and
At this scale of play you'd be able to fight out small battles, ala
BattleRider.
> B) Not having to equip Super Ships with (for example) 200 "C" Batteries
In the SuperScale, that is. One big difference between the scales would be the
inclusion of shields in the Super Scale. Small Traveller ships just wouldn't
have shield capability. This would alter the "feel" of the game so one scale
wouldn't be just a larger version of the other.
> Tech levels have to be addressed if Traveller Flavor is to be
To keep Full Thrust's flavor, this would probably be a simple die roll (or a
modifier to attacks).
Sorry for making one of my first posts so incoherent. :-I