Recent content by Strithe

One thing I forgot to add was "Round fractions down, not up."

A quick & dirty fix would be to just ignore the Effect part of critical hits occurring and simply base it on damage (i.e. 1 severity point of critical hit per 10 points of damage). If you're adding Effect to damage high Effect will still come into play.

They may not have huge fusion-torch drives, but as I recall they also don't have direct matter to energy conversion either. This means that some percentage of that energy becomes heat or other emissions. There don't seem to be some sort of obvious radiators on any canon illustrations or deck...

The only good point he makes is on chapter headings for Colony & Outpost "Design." Probably "Generation" would have been a better choice. Although, to be fair I playtested those rules and didn't pick up on that either.... As for not "getting" the content I agree. True, the random tables can...

Given the technological assumptions of the OTU the invulnerable to tank-fire starships make sense. Remember even an "unarmored" ship is supposed to take high-speed hits from micrometeors without being vaporized. For 2300AD this is a problem, though. The assault landers can fairly easily take a...

You're mostly right. A better phrasing would be that they're designed to prevent incapacitation from glancing or peripheral hits from the common sidearms of the day. For iron-age socities that's a dagger or shortsword, for the modern era its handguns, light rifles, and shrapnel. As written the...

If I recall correctly 3g's is about the upper limit of where you'd need a G-suit to function as a pilot. I don't know that the weight lifter analogies are that accurate: your own body weight is going to be much more evenly distributed than lifting weights outside your body. Still, the strain is...

Unless you're running a crossover campaign, this isn't an option as there's no grav plates in the 2300ad setting.

I think this is probably one of the reasons why the navies in 2300AD are relatively tiny. You simply don't want to have huge numbers of nuke-armed ships flitting about. Maybe it's also a provision the Melbourne Accords (something similar to the 1920's Washington Treaty on battleships). Even...

Good point. Now that I think about it the Shuttle's probably not a good example anyway. They had considerable support from ground stations, whereas a starship needs to be more self-contained.

On Earth, I think it would actually be Orbital Quarantine Control. There's a reference in the old Challenge magazine articles about the original edition about traffic control being merged with Orbital Quarantine Control on Earth. In other systems with heavy traffic (Beta Canum, or the big...

I forgot about the engineering crew required for the MHD turbine (oops). I'd look at it like this: use the non-commercial numbers for a safe minimum crew. In the Throez's case that's a bridge crew of 7, plus 2 engineers. Barring comments from Colin, I'd say then divide the non-commercial crew...

Keep in mind that the staffing levels for bridge crew are for multiple shifts (page 205). I imagine it's "regulation" to have the extra crew. The Thorez class courier has a full crew of 12 bridge crew, but there are only 5 bridge stations on the deck plan. I'd say it's not inconceivable that...

I would think it would be SOP to drop out of "FTL" mode every once in a while (6-12 hours?) and do a sensor sweep & make course corrections. This wouldn't be just for debris hazards, but also to look for distress signals.

I always interpreted the crew numbers as "fully staffed according to regulations." I figure the only time you'd see full crew compliments is in the core. Out in the frontier I'd bet the crews would be smaller for a variety of reasons: illness, difficulty in finding qualified or trustworthy...