Recent content by J. L. Brown

I would like to see what a winning fleet would look like without allowing Drop-Tanks.

Honestly, I was mostly wondering whether there was a 'Battle Dress' chassis type (similar to the 'cybernetic limb' chassis) on the worksheet that I was missing. The Robots book does not have 'Life Support', so building space-suits, armor, and Battle Dress did not seem to have a direct link...

Okay, it is possible to get something like a suit of BD out the other end -- but the person is actually riding around inside a specially prepared airlock. How many 'Battle Dress Modification Slots' does a design have? How does this interact with 'General Suit options'? The default electronics...

Is there a way to use the Robot sheet to design a suit of Battle Dress?

I think the pay-out should be a bit higher. I think I might have found a resolution to 'Everyone Imports Radioactives' issue. The Third Imperium exports Thorium (for non-weapon fission applications) to the Aslan Heirate, and Tritium to the Florians. The Aslan Heirate (already geared up to...

I agree. I think Traveller could use more granularity in combat in general; including space combat. More damage types, each with specific defenses -- with the result of interesting trade-offs for ship designers. So you might end up with some odd designs which have strong defenses against one...

Plasma and Fusion weapons would also seem to be susceptible to anti-electrically-charged-weapon defenses. They exist, so apparently such a EM-defense is not a simple 'I Win button'. For various reasons, weapon developers have been able to make their products viable. If you want to complicate...

That depends entirely on who designed & installed the powerplant. They could stand-by until Ion Damage is detected, then kick in to help negate it; but no power may be allocated from any source until all the Ion Damage is dealt with. There are not a lot of 'simple EM-shields' in charted space...

More thinking along this line: Ion Damage persists indefinitely, and accumulates. It does no damage to ship systems directly, but as long as a vessel still has one or more points of Ion damage it cannot allocate power to any system (exception: Hardened Systems, detailed below). Every point...

At the very least, when a book gives a rule on 'some-cool-item' they should include a brief summary of how it improves over the various TLs. The Fabricator appears in Central Supply Catalog, but I am forced to go digging through the Robot Handbook to find out what fabricators are capable of at...

Isaac Arthur has a neat video series on 'Civilizations At The End Of Time'; the era of the universe where there is no more fusion, all the luminous stars have sputtered out, and civilizations scavenge energy from the various remaining sources. 'Iron Stars' (the iron-rich remains of stellar...

I just want to mention 33 Polyhymnia here. The densest substance currently known to humaniti is Osmium, which is ~23 times denser than water. 33 Polyhymnia is estimated to be about 75 times denser than water. This might just be a measurement error, or it could be that there were some...

I have always been attached to the concept (never tried it out on players, though) that all the various 'fictional' languages they encounter are actual, real Solomani languages. Players might come away from the game with a smattering of a new language or two; which is a cool real-world skill...

An approach I would take, if I was writing 'Manufacturing Plant' rules is that each manufacturing plant takes in 'production stock materials' and out puts 'product' of its' own TL. I would make manufacturing a multi-step process: 1} Extraction (produces ore) 2} Smelting/refining (produces...

Fleet Combat (HG 2022, pg 113) uses (number of Sensor Operators/3) x (Crew Skill + EW program bonus) for number of missiles knocked out per round with Electronic Warfare. Cool. Different quality sensors ALSO add to 'all sensor actions', and Countermeasure Suites add either +4 or +6 to 'all EW...