2.0 - So Now A Laser Pistol Can Damage A Starship?

[AnotherDilbert]

I'm not sure I understand the "problem" (perhaps "thought experiment" is a better term?).

Should a sidearm do no damage whatsoever to a starship?

In earlier editions of Traveller starships were, by default (Armour 0), rather well armoured against micro-meteorites and the rigours of jump space.

So normal man-portable weapons had no effect on spacecraft.

In this edition they might, hence perceived problem.

 

[wbnc]

The ISS seems to be doing fine with ~2-3 mm of aluminium.

if I remember right the shuttle ran into some debris on one occasion it stuck the shuttles windscreen and cracked the outer layer of the windscreen.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19950019959.pdf
The report I just read indicates the shuttle windscreens had been hit 177 times. This only counts impacts sufficient to damage the windscreen. but none of those strikes penetrated the outer protective panel of the windscreen assembly. considering the size of the windows, compared to the entire forward cross section its a safe bet that the shuttle has taken a great number of debris, and micrometeorite impacts, and none have done significant damage.

Now the shuttle is orbiting at a leisurely 28,000 Kph. a starship moving at interplanetary speeds might suffer a bit more energetic collisions with similarly sized debris. But open space is less cluttered than our orbital space..we keep loosing nuts, screws wrenches, and some bright boys decided to blow up satellites in orbit for some strange reason. lining the leading face of a starship with high strength plating, and spall liners could deal with anything too small to detect and avoid. that protective sheathing wouldn't be Armor in the truest sense of the word since it is designed to handle small impact and not a direct attack, but it would explain why starships can shrug of most hand held weaponry and jus get mildly annoyed.

 

[GamingGlen]

Could this be fixed by saying that a starship with '0' armour actually has 0.5 armour - it rounds to zero on starship scale, but on personal scale it would provide a (minimal) 5 protection - enough to knock a couple of personal weapons down to 0 - 1 damage at most?

Even starships with 0 armour have 500 rad protection - so they should at least get something.

That said, this isn't going to come up much in practice,

Thinking in cinema terms, two examples from Star Wars movies:

A New Hope : the storm troopers set up a large tripod(?)-mounted weapon to fire on the Millenium Falcon,
Force Awakens : blaster fire from storm troopers damage the engine of the blue X-wing in the beginning of the movie. Now those are blaster rifles, probably equivalent to Traveller laser rifles (still do 5D6 in v2?).

At first I was against the whole idea of small arms damaging any space ships, but after recalling those scenes I can accept that some personal level weapons could do some damage to unarmored or lightly-armored space ships. Besides, it gives the PCs something else to worry about when going in harm's way.

 

[Condottiere]

Our hulls are self healing.

There may be some dents in the walls where the micro meteorites penetrated the hull.

 

[Solomani666]

.

See this thread for my conclusion to this:

http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?f=89&t=119555