Fuel Dumps

[MonsterX]

An asteroid doesn't need high speed to decimate a planet, it just needs size. If I have players that want to do it, I tell them that I don't run games that include the players committing genocide. So, don't do it, or find another table. lol

As far as the map goes? This is the Traveller Universe, not our universe, so in the TU, the galactic plane is flat. lol. Stating this when people ask gets Me a lot of confused faces. lol

If you want to do this with a 100-ton ship, for example, you'll want to get a lot of velocity. The more velocity, the bigger the crater. And succeeding isn't just about making the big boom, but more importantly getting past defenses. This you do by arriving at relativistic speed, preferably 90+% of light speed. If the light from the image of your ship arrives in the defenders' fire control sensors at basically the same time as your ship hits the planet, there is no defense. Large close in asteroids could be very destructive, but the defenders would see them coming, and so it would result in a conventional engagement. The defenders would just have to knock it off course, probably by smashing it with their own asteroid, which is trivially easy with Traveller tech.
It's not just about PCs doing it; it is about consistent world building - if doing this is possible, it is good to have an explanation for why it isn't happening and why Naval doctrine isn't focused around it, when there are clearly lots of wars happening in which relativistic weapons would be useful. All these Ancients' weapons that are supposed to be so impressive suddenly become much less special when even a small civilian ships could easily take out a major city .

Consistent world building is a good goal to have, but I just don't think the juice is worth the squeeze, in this particular case. I recognize the problem the rule is trying to solve, and it is a problem I would like to have solved, but in this case I think it is just better to paper it over rather than tackle it head-on. As Referee I can just avoid talking about relativistic weapons being used, and unless the players have some use for one in play, which I will try not to give them. Therefore the topic will never come up.

Except of course in DNR

Spoiler: DNR SPOILER

I can see how the situation might arise, given the nature of the big baddy.

cross that bridge when I come to it, if the players go this route.

 

[Condottiere]

It's about reaction time, and the capability of destroying the incoming object, if not slightly diverting it to skim the atmosphere.

Probably the reason you couldn't do it to a heavily defended system.

Less defended, would depend on how much ordnance you can send to speedbump it.

 

[MasterGwydion]

a bog

yep. Better analogy. You can get out of a bog, but it is difficult. If you gallop on horseback into a bog though... SPLAT!

 

[MasterGwydion]

If you want to do this with a 100-ton ship, for example, you'll want to get a lot of velocity. The more velocity, the bigger the crater. And succeeding isn't just about making the big boom, but more importantly getting past defenses. This you do by arriving at relativistic speed, preferably 90+% of light speed. If the light from the image of your ship arrives in the defenders' fire control sensors at basically the same time as your ship hits the planet, there is no defense. Large close in asteroids could be very destructive, but the defenders would see them coming, and so it would result in a conventional engagement. The defenders would just have to knock it off course, probably by smashing it with their own asteroid, which is trivially easy with Traveller tech.

20 Billion Hull Points on that 10km asteroid. Use your fleet to screen it from anything meant to change its course. Stop following before you are in weapons range of the planet. Then you just have SDBs to deal with for a max of 29 hours depending how soon they realize that there is an asteroid headed at them. lol

It's just too easy. That is why I have the no genocide rule at My table. Makes this whole problem go away.

 

[MonsterX]

20 Billion Hull Points on that 10km asteroid. Use your fleet to screen it from anything meant to change its course. Stop following before you are in weapons range of the planet. Then you just have SDBs to deal with for a max of 29 hours depending how soon they realize that there is an asteroid headed at them. lol

It's just too easy. That is why I have the no genocide rule at My table. Makes this whole problem go away.

That's my point: with a slower than relativistic speed attack you need a fleet to screen it, which means against defended planets it is limited to those who have fleets at their disposal. The fleets already have as many WMDs as they want, so asteroid bombardment is just one more potential tool in their arsenal, but the requirement for a fleet restricts this to state-level actors, not rando terrorists. Which means it isn't a universe-breaking problem, any more than nukes are. Relativistic speed attacks on the other hand can be carried out by anyone with access to an M drive ship.

 

[phavoc]

Starfire has a straightforward system for determining that.

Star is in a hex, everything gets placed in a hex or on a line between hexes, and things move one hex per time period, so you determine a start point, and then you just count how many time periods its been (and more accurately, depending on which orbit you're in, you figure out how many time periods is a full rotation, and then you just need to figure out how many time periods you are from the full rotation value.)

While Starfire does this with a map since its based around tactical space battles, you could just give everything a coordinate value, and do the same thing. And for the coordinates, you'd do something like the first number indicates how many hexes is one rotation (which orbit you are in), and the second number is which coordinate you're currently in, and you'd have a straightforward conversion for which set of numbers in one orbit is in the same arc as another set of numbers in another orbit.

Starfire had some interesting ideas on drives (and I quite liked them). Military ships were faster tactically, but slower than merchant ships strategically. This really wasn't an issue as most of the books/game portions had all the military ships using military drives for tactical advantages. However the Bugs (or Bahwgs in Orion used merchant drives for their fleets.

Jump points in Starfire could be spread around a system, and rarely were closer into the primary than further out - though there were exceptions to the norms. It was nice to see some variability that could/did make players have to think about things from time to time (example - a key warp point link had a tonnage limit on it, so you couldn't build a killer fleet of SDB's and MT's and smash your way to your enemies homeworld since there was that one little chokepoint your super-fleet couldn't pass). The fiction of the universe ain't half-bad either.

 

[phavoc]

Making standard M-drives fail to operate at some system heliopause offers nothing to the game. This was something inserted for a supplement that, I bet, sounded "cool!" at the time with no thought about how it affected the game or all the previous canonical information out there. This is similar to another suspect "cool!" idea - the gravity detector that can track tiny objects beyond the oort cloud based upon their gravity distortion (even light years away in another system). It renders any stealth movement or even hiding a ship anywhere in a system since movement will expose it on the detector. The only saving grace here is that the detector was limited to light-speed, so objects at a distance could have jumped before you could make it out to them.

MT at least offered other types of drive technology that were baselined to the game. Making jump drives only really operable by having to exit jump space near a gravitational object is another concept that's been shoe-horned into things. For those who argue about changes coming from T5 into regular Traveller, what about the Hop, Skip and Jump drives? Or the four different types of jump fields? Why are we being so picky about what's being pulled into the classic game mechanics? If we are going to do some, might as well as do them all since they work together in T5.

There's no reason to implement a specific deep-space drive rule because it's not offering anything in return - and there's not enough thought process behind offering alternative drives and how they fit into the tech line. A CT adventure had players jumping out into the deep to find a very old pirate base (Legend of the Sky Raiders) that wouldn't work today since small player-operated ships don't have the tonnage to add these extra drives to the ship. Since this is a player-driven game, changes to the game setting need to keep this near-and-dear to their heart.

If it ain't broke, why try to break it and use duct-tape to fix it?