2300AD next year

[Melbourne Accords]

This is a great development! Traveller 2300 finally becomes Traveller!

 

[GJD]

This is a great development! Traveller 2300 finally becomes Traveller!

Traveller engine - but not part of the 3I setting, I hope. 2300AD should remain distinct, no Vilani or Vegans just out of reach.

 

[Clanger]

It is a good setting with some of the best Aliens seen in RPG's. The Kafers were excellent and well written and they made sense. The background was very well thought out.

Though I am not a fan of the Traveller system I will stick to the GDW version of the game or 2320AD.

 

[Melbourne Accords]

Just making fun of the first edition name. I'm really looking forward to this.

 

[Melbourne Accords]

What were some of the aspects of 2300AD that you all most enjoyed? For me, the near future setting struck a useful contrast to the wonderful 3I of Traveller. Aurore and Nyotekundu were first class backdrops for adventures. Mission Arcturus is an outstanding piece of adventure writing. It enables new players to step into the near future setting in a confined, manageable environment (an approach that I'm about to use in our campaign). Multi-polar politics, beanstalks, starship silhouettes and the near star map all made for great fun. This is a worthy addition to MGT.

 

[rust]

What were some of the aspects of 2300AD that you all most enjoyed?

For me the Third Imperium setting with its tens of thousands of planets
and thousands of years of history always had a touch of ridiculous me-
galomania. 2300AD has much more comprehensible and usable spatial
and temporal dimensions. Another point are the aliens, which fortunate-
ly are not the rubber suit furries of the Third Imperium setting.

 

[Vile]

What were some of the aspects of 2300AD that you all most enjoyed?

I liked the guns.

 

[Jame Rowe]

I liked the Beanstalk, and GDW's putting it in Gabon instead of in the US.

 

[TrippyHippy]

I'd actually keep it even more vague than that. For anything prior to 2100, I'd reference it as "in the first/last half of the 21st century".

Why don't you just say 'in the 21st Century'?

 

[Sturn]

It wasn't so far in the future that one couldn't relate to the setting. 3I is a "fantasy" far future, while 2300 AD still had some connections to our own real world (technology only a small step forward, nations of Earth in space, etc).

 

[Hionhurn]

My favourite was Bayern, hope to see some more exploration and contact style missions as well as more info on the encountered Xenoforms

 

[kristof65]

I'd actually keep it even more vague than that. For anything prior to 2100, I'd reference it as "in the first/last half of the 21st century".

Why don't you just say 'in the 21st Century'?

That works too - but using first half or last half allows things to be a little narrower without getting too specific.

Besides, for the last three centuries or so, there's generally been enough of a difference between cultures/technology/etc in the first half and last half of each century that they deserve to be broken apart.

 

[Pentapod earplug]

I hope it happens this time around! Please don't take too much silly stuff out! 2300 Ad equals the (near) perfect blend of Bladerunner and Alien aesthetic, which is sleek, but not incroyable until you top that with a charmingly naive view of world cultures. My (fairly old) memories of GM:ing 2300AD seems focused on patching things up as you went along, inventing all sorts of implausible rationales to cover up some of the funnier stuff in the setting.

Never too fond of the pure "twilight 2000-esque" military stuff, or the pure exploration type setting (which seemed boring), I hope most energy is devoted to civilian trouble shooting in a mix of core and colony.

 

[TC]

Well, if its running on the current Traveller Engine, I may well pick up a copy.

 

[Colin]

The plan so far is to create three campaign books, one for each style of play. There will be a military campaign book, an exploratory campaign book, and a troubleshooting/corporate campaign.

There are other books planned as well.

The rules system will be based on Mongoose Traveller.

 

[Pentapod earplug]

Three books sounds like a nice idea! Will it be an early 2011 release? I might just have to pick up a regular Traveller to check the rules out if it is going to be a while...

 

[Colin]

I'm not sure where it fits in the Mongoose schedule. I'm thinking 2nd or 3rd quarter, given that it is not even written yet, but that is not up to me.

 

[Jame Rowe]

I'm not sure where it fits in the Mongoose schedule. I'm thinking 2nd or 3rd quarter, given that it is not even written yet, but that is not up to me.

So get a-writin' it, instead of chattin' here with us! Sheesh! :wink:

 

[Bense]

From the 2300 AD rulebook:

The distance that an object can be moved is relatively short in comparison to stellar distances - each jump is only several hundred meters - but the cycling time is very rapid, on the order of
hundreds of thousands of times per second. Because of the nature of the jump, the cycling time is fixed, but the amount of charge built up can vary, allowing distances jumped to be adjusted according to the travel speed desired. Greater masses require larger charges to jump the same
distance as smaller masses, and more powerful engines are able to build these charges more rapidly. Therefore, a smaller stutterwarp ship will travel faster than a large ship with the same engine (its lower mass means that each individual jump is longer), and ships with more powerful
engines travel faster than ships of the same size with weaker engines (the higher charge means longer individual jumps).

Actual speed of a stutterwarp ship depends upon the output of the power plant, the amount of mass that is being moved, and the amount of gravity through which it is being moved. In deep space, where gravity is less than 0.0001 G, the warp efficiency is equal to light-years per
day. A warp efficiency-1 ship, for example, would require one week to travel between stars seven light-years apart. In the inner system of a star where the gravity becomes greater than 0.0001 G, the efficiency of the stutterwarp drops off enormously (by a factor of approximately 10,000).
Ships with stutterwarp in the inner system are still moving at enormous speeds, but no longer at multi-light speeds. Stutterwarp-powered ships travelling between worlds in the inner system can expect travel times ranging from hours to at most a couple of days. Finally, when gravitation
reaches about 0.1 G, the efficiency of the stutterwarp drops off once again. At 0.1 G, the stutterwarp has just enough efficiency to maintain orbit; above 0.1 G, it cannot overcome the gravitational attraction and some other means of propulsion must be used. The major effect of this
fact is that a stutterwarp drive cannot lift a vessel off of a world’s surface or even out of its atmosphere. Some other type of engine is required, or the vessel may carry a landing craft.

So, starship combat, which would nearly always take place in an inner system, doesn't occur at multi-light speeds - just really enormous speeds.

The scale in the main book is 600,000 km hexes and 1-minute turns. At that scale the really, really fast Kennedy-class cruiser (faster than everything in the book except the Kafer X-Ray missile) can manage 5,400,000 km per minute - 90,000 km per second, or about 30% of lightspeed.

At the order of "hundreds of thousands of times per second", say around 300,000 times per second for the sake of argument, that means the ship is jumping about 300 meters at each jump while in an inner system. If "hundreds of thousands of times per second" is more like 800,000 times per second, then it's only around 110 meters per jump in a system.

The same ship has a warp efficiency of 4.81. That translates to around 1,756 c at full speed in deep space, or 526.8 million km per second. At around 300,000 jumps per second, each jump would be around 1.7 km. A little bit more than "only several hundred meters".
At 800,000 jumps per second, though, it drops to 658.5 meters, which might well be "several hundred meters".

So, if the "several hundred meters" bit refers to interstellar journeys, then the cycle rate is probably somewhere over 800 kHz but below 1 MHz.

 

[Colin]

Be aware that there is a disconnect between tactical speeds as listed for Star Cruiser, and actual speeds as defined in the Director's Guide. The tactical speed listed is only used within the boardgame, and bears little relation to the ship's speed in RPG terms.