Recent content by rinku

They can thrust in any direction but at a reduced value away from where the thruster plates are placed, which are usually aft. There's a discussion on it on HG p45, under "Concealed Maneuvre Drive". 100% thrust aft, 25% thrust laterally and 10% thrust forwards for a normal setup with the...

Current economics is enough of a black art and multidimensional shell game. I'm not sure Far Future economics needs to make sense to a 21st century gamer with opinions. Very, very much YTU territory. IMHO best to just state that there's a large background economy that is only seen by the big...

Just remember that anything the players can come up with, smart NPCs will already have thought of, and those outnumber the players at least millions to one.

Oh, John Scalzi's stuff is good. A bit of humour, sometimes absurd, but always an easy read. He mixes up his tone a bit too - some are outright military science fiction, others are pure people based ones. Kaiju Preservation Society is more or less Jurassic Park with Godzilla. Old Man's War as a...

Percentage of turrets was a CT High Guard rule, but only applied to big ships. It was assumed that the usual ships that could only harry a handful of turrets could always bring them to bear. Certain circumstances will cause a distinction between fixed mounts and turret mounts: * Dogfighting...

If you do want a rule re fixed mounts and firing, just assign a Thrust value to taking a shot with them. 0.1 Thrust for example. Simple.

Does precipitation cause damage or is otherwise a dangerous thing? I'd suggest it should, especially if it can be used as a shortcut to get around the 12 hour rule and allow in-system hyper-space travel. Otherwise you just point the ship at where Mars will be in a few minutes and push the...

Yeah. So High Guard did not change being able to detect objects at any distance with minimal information. It just added a couple of range brackets. "Far" is the new "there's something there, I'll get back to you after we've observed it for a while". The FULL section that's been partially quoted...

I'd turn this on its head a bit. The Imperium appears to be the main driver of TL advance, with the Navy at the forefront of all that. How much revenue is the IMPERIUM getting from providing technology to the private sector? Also, I'd expect that by TL15, and at the scale the Navy operates, they...

Seems solid enough. One consequence of the 12 hour minimum is that it can't be used for system travel - 12 hours at 1 parsec per week works out to be a 1/4 of a light year, or three light months. That's around 16,000 AU. Although maybe you can throttle the drive back to fractional values? And...

You can detect at any range. I'm talking about signal resolution, and that's constrained by physics. And please re-read the books. 50,000k isn't the limit on detection. Thermal works at distant, and distant is 50,000km and above, without a stated limit, as it should be. Emitted signals are also...

Nah, you just need the right Patron or quest. They make good hospital ships too; labs are the same size as medical bays - I'd let anyone that wants to, swap labs for medical facilities one for one before play starts, especially if they had terms as a physician. You could also reframe ownership...

In real life, you generally need observation time to gather more data. But also, spaceships are small things and you start to run up against the limitations of optics and other wavelength related stuff. If a ship on your scope is a dozen pixels, there's a limit to how much data you can extract...

To be fair, Mongoose took what DGP were trying to do, and with over two decades worth of development and hindsight, sorted it out. A lot of that was going back to CT, but there's DGP and TNE DNA in Mongoose Traveller too. I think TNE still has the most careers, as an example, and a good chunk...

Another strength is that it is self contained. If you want or need it to be. I'm one that had no other game to compare it to, when I got it for Christmas 1980. Devoured it, rolled up a subsector. Rolled up endless characters. Religiously stuck to the random encounter charts and combat results...