CT Question: High Guard ship design

jwpacker

Mongoose
Before I go trying to use the Classic Traveller High Guard as a lens through which to upgrade MgT's ship building system, can anyone tell me if anything in there is spectacularly broken? It's been ages since I played CT, and don't recall any problems (other than the guy that built ships so large that the cargo hold could hold entire planets...) with the system.
 
Spectacularly broken as regards which specifically?

CT HG Ship Designs?

Yes, or not badly depending on your threshold for "spectacularly" broken :) All the canon designs seem to be at least slightly bent.

CT HG Design Rules?

Nothing comes to mind as broken. Bits of less than well defined elements that have been debated forever yes ;)

MG HG Design Rules?

Haven't used it a lot myself but nothing comes to mind. There are however BIG differences between CT HG and MG HG. You might be better off simply starting from scratch, or you'll have to ignore/fudge* certain aspects of the design options to recreate the CT HG builds.

* stealth for example, implied in CT but without specifics is defined in MG
 
Thanks! I was mostly concerned with your second answer, and it marches with my own memory of the ruleset. I would definitely be starting from scratch and using elements of both systems, modified by one another, and try to come up with a unified whole that is more robust than MgT's ship building rules without being alien to the rest of the system.
 
There were two editions of High Guard. One printed in 1978 and the second in 1980. The second one fixed a load of things with ship building and the changes were published in JTAS too. I can't remember what was wrong with the first edition, but I can dig out the old JTAS issues if it's important. I used the revised HG ship rules many times and I don't remember anything particularly 'broken'.
 
The main difference between the systems is in my view that
Classic Traveller used Power Points and Agility Ratings for the
ships' maneuver drives, and that in Mongoose Traveller small
craft can have more than 6 G of acceleration. There are also
a few differences concerning the possible weaponry and such,
but this is easy to deal with, I think. So, nothing really broken,
but sometimes a different approach.
 
The Classic HG ship design system is not broken. It's fairly simple, yet offers a nice range of options. In addition to what rust said, one thing to keep in mind: The sizes of maneuver and jump drive are basically switched when compared to MGT's system (which was derived from the original LBB2): Classic HG has small jump drives, big maneuver drives.

The Classic HG combat system, however, is a number-crunching, unimmersive dice rolling orgy. Then again, if you don't have battles with capital ships anyway, this does not matter much.
 
Back
Top