High Guard 2022 example ships crew messed up?

[AnotherDilbert]

I understood that scouts traditionally undertook training while in jump. Given a scout ship is often single crewman I was assuming that there was nothing to do in Jump Space but to kill time (and deal with passenger induced issues).

I assume Engineers monitors, polishes, or maintains something (drives), otherwise they would be in port.

Pilots and Astrogators are only needed while flying in real space, in Jump space there is no rest of the Universe to worry about.


By T5, once a ship has entered jumpspace, it will emerge a fixed time later, whether the ship still has crew or drives or not.

 

[Condottiere]

If paying personnel is cheaper than automation.

To the point, that de automating the spacecraft saves a lot of money.

 

[swordtart]

Most ships only spend a few hours in real space, between port and jump.

In jump or port three people can easily keep nominal watch for beeping lights...

I would imagine that many of the tedious aspects of watches could (and should be automated). Computers don't get bored, sophonts do. It doesn't really matter if the computer alerts the bridge or alerts their cabins. Not all emergencies will require the crew to be at their bridge station to act and in some cases it might be better if they are not since their cabin might be closer to where the issue is.

Not all "emergencies" require immediate attention (i.e. within seconds). If the ship detects that there is an unexpected ship on an intercept course, that ship might not be in range for half an hour or more. You stand to with all hands, probably including those who were asleep. If that is the case then your effective watch time is 24 hours. If you are on call you might have an effective watch time that extends into your nominal 8 hours of leisure time.

If you are the poor slob who has been assigned watch duty when the rest of the crew are shore party you are probably spending most of that time playing with your plastic dinosaurs, cleaning your guns or making inventory of your medical supplies - and entertaining your crazy, psionic sister

 

[swordtart]

I assume Engineers monitors, polishes, or maintains something (drives), otherwise they would be in port.

Engineers need to activate the jump drive (in MGT2 at least) so they need to be on the ship. Since they are there they may as well conduct what maintenance they can, maybe on the promise that of all the crew they get to spend all of the portside time as shore leave. They probably have to spend a day or so in port if the pilot messes up the landing or there has been an incident, and a diligent engineer will want to run checks before the ship leaves, but they have a good case to get some quality downtime vs say the "space cadet that just operates a computer every once in a blue moon". I can see the engineers (especially those that deal with mechanical issues as well) being blue collar compared to the bridge crew and this creating that antagonistic "Alien" dynamic.

Pilots and Astrogators are only needed while flying in real space, in Jump space there is no rest of the Universe to worry about.

Astrogators are only needed in MGT2 just before jump. In that case I can see a good reason to revert to pre-recorded courses or even have freelance Astrogators hanging out in small craft out at the 100D limit to program up jumps for ships and then returning to their own vessels before the ships jump (they can charge less for their services than a dedicated crewmember as they can service many ships per week rather than just one). They may even guide ships through unusual planetary systems like some real-life ports.

Commercial vessels may be obliged to carry an Astrogator in the event of a mis-jump. Getting caught in an unknown system being forced to navigate by sensors would be a harrowing (and potentially expensive legal experience).

I would be surprised if the Astrogator wasn't generally the sensor operator as well since their duties are complimentary. Since Astrogation and Electronics are entirely sensible university pre-career options there is no reason for there to be a shortage of such dual skilled people (and often very skilled). An Astrogator/Sensor Op earns just under KCr7 per month (possibly more if crew with higher than Skill-1 get paid a premium) so it is a good job to hold. An alternative is an Astrogator/Engineer but this would tie the whole Jump activity to one individual which might not be sensible.

By T5, once a ship has entered jumpspace, it will emerge a fixed time later, whether the ship still has crew or drives or not.

That was also my understanding. You lay your course, jump and then just wait to see what happens. You may not even know you have mis-jumped until the emergency window expires or you are dumped out in a galaxy far far away. There is nothing to see or sense outside the jump bubble (with civilian sensors) so there isn't any chance to do any navigating anyway.

EDIT:
I notice that the number of engineers required is independent of the number of passengers / crew and the implied life support burden. Life Support falls under the engineers remit (and specialisms). I am going to use that as a justification for making that an in-port function. Whilst it may be possible to switch out filters etc. while travelling, the chance of a critical failure is probably best avoided while the system is actually needed. On that basis it may also be something that ship crews (particularly small craft) might subcontract to port-based specialists (as part of that monthly maintenance fee) and so an on-board engineer is only required for life support in the event of emergencies.

This needs to be considered if you are using Supply Units to offset your monthly maintenance cycle and saying it is done in transit to reduce the portside maintenance time. Inadvertently using the wrong gas-mix is less of an issue when you can conduct tests when not actually relying on the gas-mix at the time

 

[Vormaerin]

Right. The pilot and astrogator barely do anything if no tasking is required during jump. I'm not even sure why most ships have a pilot since they are just making a couple hour flight from the 100D limit to the port. Seems like the ideal autopilot/remote ops by the starport situation.

As written, STARships barely spend any time "in space". Maybe 5 hours a week on average. Astrogator plots a course every fortnight. Gunners probably never do anything. Probably the only people who actually have real jobs are the Engineer and the Steward if you take the rules as written literally.

 

[Vormaerin]

One of the uses of the Astrogation skill in the Core Rulebook covers navigation in normal space, but it is a niche use. Ships travelling extensively in system might use a navigator to plot a more efficient route (using the gravity wells of in system objects to slingshot up to greater speed), but given the Robot Handbook says astrogation is hard for synthetic brains due to some mysterious Jump maguffin which doesn't apply on normal space, an in-system ship could probably get by with a robot or an expert package.

I am now trying to explore what might drive those crew "requirements" with others in the community. I know I can just make it up, I was looking to see if people with more experience of other versions or access to other supplements have something that might allow us to hang some metrics off it (even if they are vague). There are specific occasions where rolls are required so they are touch points. There are some roles that have a defined level requirement (like engineer) that can be readily extrapolated.

The reason this is important to gameplay is that is there is no consequence then players can skimp on crew to cram in more paying passengers. If they are going to run that risk they need to know what the impacts are if that risk event occurs.

Yes, it says that Astrogation does that, but there is no guidance on what that means or what happens if you don't have one. And Astrogation is only necessary on the ships least likely to spend time in real space (starships) and are not required on the ships that DO spend a lot of time in real space (non jump spaceships). It makes no sense.

In Classic Traveller, the navigator wasn't necessary on small ships and didn't actually plot the jump path. That was done by the computer. LIkewise, the steward was only necessary if you had high passengers or a like 100+ middle passengers.

There are no editions that explain what crew do. If there was, I would reference those if they did. Like many folks here, I have played all the editions (except T4/5 and I've read those). I said you can make it up because there is actually no information anywhere. The articles in High Guard make an effort and there's a bit in SOM, but neither of them actually detail out full time jobs or give any guidance on what going short handed actually means. Unless you get in combat, in which case having extra folks around lets you do more actions.

In Classic Traveller, not having enough Engineers made it more likely you'd have an engine malfunction or misjump, but that is not a rule in MgT2e.

We can talk about what the equivalent crew do on marine vessels, but as you commented, those are different circumstances because the sea presents very different issues than space. We could compare to modern astronauts, but their role and the nature of space flight that they do is also very different from space opera.

Some months ago I started a thread trying to get some thoughts on what an astrogator PC might actually do, but there wasn't much result unfortunately.

I was hoping that SOM would go into detail on what ship's crew did and what it looked like doing it, but it focused more on other things. It has a little section on crew roles. It says that the commercial crew "requirements" are more industry best practice than any sort of regulation, much less a physical requirement. It does say that 1 person doing 3+ jobs is not cricket. And it puts the astrogator in the "ugh, double this role up with someone with a real purpose" category.

 

[Arkathan]

Some months ago I started a thread trying to get some thoughts on what an astrogator PC might actually do, but there wasn't much result unfortunately.

My players made the Astrogator PC the ship's Captain.
"Still worthless unless it is time to jump."

 

[Vormaerin]

Yeah. That's just so alien to any framework I have about how employment works, maritime or otherwise. One of the things I don't like about later editions of Traveller (like Mongoose) is that they decided that various things should be human crew roles, but then didn't actually do anything to fill out those roles.

Everyone knows what a space opera pilot does. They know what a starship Engineer does. Everyone knows what the Ship's Doctor does. Every sci fi show has these roles and almost anyone interested in playing a sci fi game will come to the game with a strong conception of what they'd be doing in that role that would be fun and interesting.

How many shows have an interesting navigator separate from the pilot/co-pilot? Star Trek had a navigator, but prior to Chekhov, his role was to be the problem on the bridge so Kirk could showcase whatever he needed to showcase that episode. And Chekhov's role was often to be the naive noob, just less of a problem than the navigator of the week assortment before him. His "actually do interesting stuff" moments didn't involve navigation that I recall. Uhura had the same problem. They had a communications officer, but they struggled to make it actually interesting. She was interesting because of other things she did away from her console. But it is easier to get players to imagine uses for comms hacking/jamming/signals analysis type things than a use for Astrogation besides Mongoose's johnny-come-lately "don't die on the way to the adventure" roll. (Which isn't even that because's its just a supporting task check for the Engineer's roll).

 

[CordwainerFish]

And Chekhov's role was

to rock that Beatles haircut.

 

[swordtart]

Right. The pilot and astrogator barely do anything if no tasking is required during jump. I'm not even sure why most ships have a pilot since they are just making a couple hour flight from the 100D limit to the port. Seems like the ideal autopilot/remote ops by the starport situation.

As written, STARships barely spend any time "in space". Maybe 5 hours a week on average. Astrogator plots a course every fortnight. Gunners probably never do anything. Probably the only people who actually have real jobs are the Engineer and the Steward if you take the rules as written literally.

Depending on where the planet is. I haven't calculated for all of chartered space, but certainly for the small bit of the Collace arm I am interested in presently only Collace is outside the stellar jump shadow. The rest need 20-35 hours at Thrust 1. That makes quite a difference to the amount of piloting and sensor ops needed and also puts them well out of remote ops from the starport. You could rely on autopilot (and indeed the automated lifeboat does) or a droid, but that is assuming nothing ever goes wrong.

You may actually want a game where the travelling part is glossed over and there is no "wilderness" encounter. That's the way we used to play D&D "You arrive at the dungeon...". Many Traveller scenarios are set in a specific system and the variety comes from the difference in the atmosphere, gravity, flora and fauna etc. How you got there is irrelevant. If that isn't interesting to your players, then you might as well just say the ship gets there by whatever means and start the adventure in the starport.

The only purpose of being a jump and a week away is to permit the characters to be isolated a little and so that help isn't just a phone call away (and to outrun the consequences of some of their more dubious actions if necessary.

 

[swordtart]

Yeah. That's just so alien to any framework I have about how employment works, maritime or otherwise. One of the things I don't like about later editions of Traveller (like Mongoose) is that they decided that various things should be human crew roles, but then didn't actually do anything to fill out those roles.

Everyone knows what a space opera pilot does. They know what a starship Engineer does. Everyone knows what the Ship's Doctor does. Every sci fi show has these roles and almost anyone interested in playing a sci fi game will come to the game with a strong conception of what they'd be doing in that role that would be fun and interesting.

How many shows have an interesting navigator separate from the pilot/co-pilot? Star Trek had a navigator, but prior to Chekhov, his role was to be the problem on the bridge so Kirk could showcase whatever he needed to showcase that episode. And Chekhov's role was often to be the naive noob, just less of a problem than the navigator of the week assortment before him. His "actually do interesting stuff" moments didn't involve navigation that I recall. Uhura had the same problem. They had a communications officer, but they struggled to make it actually interesting. She was interesting because of other things she did away from her console. But it is easier to get players to imagine uses for comms hacking/jamming/signals analysis type things than a use for Astrogation besides Mongoose's johnny-come-lately "don't die on the way to the adventure" roll. (Which isn't even that because's its just a supporting task check for the Engineer's roll).

Maybe the expectation is that in a society where things can be made by fabricators and computers and robots are so powerful the only actual jobs for sophonts are either where there are no computers or robots for some reason, or there is an emergency. Modern auto pilots are pretty good and we could probably fly commercial aircraft without pilots, but maybe people would be reluctant to use them. Driverless cars are on the way.

Most of the time it seems we have jobs just to give us something to do and a way of determining how much economic power we have and because wages are pegged at a level that makes replacing us with robots too expensive currently, but several industries have already gone that way. With AI even creatives are starting to feel replaceable.

Being a professional space taxi driver probably is too boring a job to actually be a player aspiration. When you are in a ship, the ship becomes the collective character for all the players. Some won't get much of a look in for many non-pirate space encounters (e.g. your gunners). Most others can get away with a couple of dice rolls. There isn't much player interaction or agency in "ok roll for your engineering check". I think that is why jump is glossed over and in normal space you don't actually do anything much.

Maybe the name of the game should have been Stranger rather than Traveller, because things only start being interesting when you arrive.

 

[Condottiere]

Make astrogation a requirement for ship's master.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Right. The pilot and astrogator barely do anything if no tasking is required during jump. I'm not even sure why most ships have a pilot since they are just making a couple hour flight from the 100D limit to the port. Seems like the ideal autopilot/remote ops by the starport situation.

As written, STARships barely spend any time "in space". Maybe 5 hours a week on average. Astrogator plots a course every fortnight. Gunners probably never do anything. Probably the only people who actually have real jobs are the Engineer and the Steward if you take the rules as written literally.

Stop and think how our spacecraft in the real world are flown, by onboard computers and remote telemetry. Even a crews ship rarely touch any flight controls.
Are the crew of a 57th century starship just playing a computer game while performing routine maintainance?

 

[Sigtrygg]

Back in the good old days.
You could buy a jump cassette for any world on a trade lane/xboat route.

To jump to a system not on the route you needed the generate program (or a bespoke jump cassette provided by a dodgy patron, and only when you get there do you find out it was one way only)

Both the jump cassette and generate program may require a real time model of every system within range at the time of jump.

So what if you go beyond the map?

That is when you need a navigator.

What has always been missing IMHO is the ability of a navigator to plot a jump without a cassette or generate program.

 

[Vormaerin]

Stop and think how our spacecraft in the real world are flown, by onboard computers and remote telemetry. Even a crews ship rarely touch any flight controls.
Are the crew of a 57th century starship just playing a computer game while performing routine maintainance?

Yes, that's certainly one vision of how things work. In which case the crew "requirements" are mostly some kind of welfare system for spacers. Traveller made a conscious decision to continue to require humans on the crew. Therefore, there should actually be work for them, especially given how much the rules talk about the need for profitability, etc. Businesses don't generally carry staff they don't need.

I don't have a problem with a 1 man Free Trader crew, but the rules do. Or the rules don't and the crew "requirements" are a fantasy page that should be ignored. Tbh, the Type S crew requirement should be Engineer, not Pilot.

According to Mongoose, "any astrogator wort their salt" can calculate a jump route without the computer's aid. But the rules make the astrogator's course just a modifier to the engineer's task. And, also, once you get into anything more interesting than jumping to the next planet on the main, the task check difficulties start to get pretty crazy for what the chargen produces.

 

[Vormaerin]

Depending on where the planet is. I haven't calculated for all of chartered space, but certainly for the small bit of the Collace arm I am interested in presently only Collace is outside the stellar jump shadow. The rest need 20-35 hours at Thrust 1. That makes quite a difference to the amount of piloting and sensor ops needed and also puts them well out of remote ops from the starport. You could rely on autopilot (and indeed the automated lifeboat does) or a droid, but that is assuming nothing ever goes wrong.

I haven't looked at the Collace arm in any detail, but it is rare for the habitable zone to be inside the star's jumpshadow unless the calculations have changed. But let's say that it is. What that means is that 1G ships aren't going to be a feature there under the rules as written. The economic structure makes spending 3 or 4 days in real space not practical. That reduces your profitability enormously. That's why Traveller has frequent references to being deep in a star's jump shadow being a reason why a world might be a backwater that is rarely visited.

Either the shipping rates would be increased to compensate, the ships used in those areas would have high thrust to keep on schedule, or there would be a tradeport that wasn't in orbit.

Traveller is written where space travel is too much "just get to the next planet" and not enough attention is paid to "doing things in space". There's little reason with jump drive to actually fly around in space and there is even less attention to making flying around in space interesting. I'm not advocating for teleport to the dungeon. I'm advocating for the rules to actually reflect the idea that being a spaceship crew is actually an interesting thing to do and not just a means to an end.

I do that in my campaign by having large amounts of content in star systems besides the mainworld and frowning on micro-jumps. But that's not the default for the game system or its setting presentations.

 

[swordtart]

I haven't looked at the Collace arm in any detail, but it is rare for the habitable zone to be inside the star's jumpshadow unless the calculations have changed. But let's say that it is. What that means is that 1G ships aren't going to be a feature there under the rules as written. The economic structure makes spending 3 or 4 days in real space not practical. That reduces your profitability enormously. That's why Traveller has frequent references to being deep in a star's jump shadow being a reason why a world might be a backwater that is rarely visited.

Either the shipping rates would be increased to compensate, the ships used in those areas would have high thrust to keep on schedule, or there would be a tradeport that wasn't in orbit.

Traveller is written where space travel is too much "just get to the next planet" and not enough attention is paid to "doing things in space". There's little reason with jump drive to actually fly around in space and there is even less attention to making flying around in space interesting. I'm not advocating for teleport to the dungeon. I'm advocating for the rules to actually reflect the idea that being a spaceship crew is actually an interesting thing to do and not just a means to an end.

I do that in my campaign by having large amounts of content in star systems besides the mainworld and frowning on micro-jumps. But that's not the default for the game system or its setting presentations.

I am going off Traveller Worlds. I don't know how canon the calculations there are (or even if I am using it correctly). I do know that it means I don't have to generate a whole raft of astrophysics that wont add much to my game.

Specifically, the setting book Tarsus for CT shows Tarsus to be both outside the optimal orbit for habitability (being somewhat cold) and also well within the jump shadow. It mentions nothing about Tarsus being at a disadvantage for trade or that only Thrust 2 ships bother to visit. It is on a main and that generally means Jump 1 ships and they tend to have Thrust 1 manoeuvre drives. There is no mention of a tradeport outside the stellar jump shadow.

Large freighters do not need to stick to a week in jump a week on planet to be profitable they stack the deck in their favour. Actually the majority of trade ships don't either. Players often equate profitability as being able to make more each month than you spend on all the outgoings, but this does not recognise that the single largest outgoing for small ships is the mortgage. A mortgage is only 50% profit sapping outgoing. 50% of the Mortgage is actually investment and that in itself is profit as you are converting income into a 240th of the ship per month. As ships hold 80% of their value after 40 years of trading you will own an asset worth 80% of what you paid for it from the mortgage. That pay off equates to KCr920 per year for those 40 years of graft.

A free trader with a KCr193 per month mortgage will have running costs in the KCr10's but possible income north of KCr130 per jump. Even if it is only running at 80% efficiency it should be earning over KCr200 per month. That is plenty to cover the expenses and the dead money part of the mortgage (especially as an owner operator can afford not to pay themselves wages). Jumping every 2 weeks rather than every 2 isn't going to kill your profitability. Failing to secure sufficient passengers and freight or overpaying your crew will.

 

[Vormaerin]

I would not recommend Traveller Worlds, but if it works for you, go for it. Not going to rehash 40 years of discussion on ship economics, either. If you want to delve into that, there's already endless discussions on it on this and every other Traveller forum ever.

Traveller is one of my two favorite games (the other being Ars Magica) that I run again and again. And I enjoy tinkering with it even when I'm not running a game. I love the Chargen and the 2d6 resolution mechanic. But one of its flaws is that it doesn't do very much to support the assumed playstyles. In my experience, either players don't care about space ships much and you do well just having them travel commercial. And Traveller is actually very good at doing that style of play. Or they come to the game with fantasies of being starship crew. And, frankly, Traveller by default gives little support for that. I don't think that most players with dreams of being Han Solo or Wash or Scotty envision it to mean playing galaga while they shuttle from the 100D limit to the port.

Of course, you don't have to play it that way. Traveller is, first and foremost, a toolbox. And the basic procedures exist to get you into actually playing asap and relies on the GM to fill out all the fluff on their own. Which has its strengths and weaknesses. And is why there are these endless discussions about basic facts like what space travel is like and who does what and why.

I have my own answers for these questions, but they are house rules. My campaign is based on an idiosyncratic vision of the Islands subsectors. Almost every one of those systems is heavily settled with lots of secondary colonies, outposts, space stations, and other destinations all throughout. Including sometimes distant companion stars with their own systems.

But in my campaign, one Jumps from star to star, not from planet to planet. The vast majority of shipping is interplanetary, not interstellar. You just need an Astrogation 0 to program the ship to jump to a known star from publicly available data (basically jump tapes), though accreditation requires Astrogation 1. The main function of the astrogator is tailoring the program to arrive at the closest point to where your destination world is. So, arriving where you are closest to Earth or Mars or Venus or whatever. Really skilled astrogators (Skill 3+ types) can do fancy plots that use the gravity wells of brown dwarfs and gas giants, but obviously that's not common. Jumping to a regular rocky planet is Evel Kneivel type stuff. Empty hexes are basically off limits unless you have a really good astrogator and specialized equipment.

And in my campaign, I have two versions of jump drive. The cheap "bubble" jump drives that are limited to J2 and 5000 dtons and the much more expensive "hull grid" jump drives that are not so limited. And there's only one shipyard in the Islands that can build the latter, so there are few ships (Outside of visiting Imperial ships) that are more than J2.

As far as crewing goes (the topic of this thread), for proper corporate commercial vessels I use the much higher crew requirements of 2300 because that makes more sense to me. My astrogators, aside from watch standing, also maintenance the astrogation systems, and need to regularly ensure that the ship is on course while in jump space.

I would like them to be plotting gravity slingshots and other fun things, but I don't personally have the knowledge base to develop those mechanics myself and Traveller provides no support for "fun things to do with Astrogation in real space."

For little indie free traders, if they wanna run with one dude with Engineering 1, Pilot 0, Astrogation 0, and relying on the computer to do most of the watch standing, go ahead. As long as nothing goes too wrong, you'll be fine

I do it this way because I want a lot of realspace travel in my games. It allows for all kinds of fun shenanigans on ship that the traditional planet to planet system doesn't. There are other ways to get that, but I like mine because it essentially keeps Charted Space history and stuff intact while creating the local conditions I prefer. That's not going to be important to everyone, obviously.

 

[Sigtrygg]

It is always worth clarifying with your players at the start the nearest model for ships you are using for the campaign/scenario.
If they are expecting Star Wars but you give them The Expanse there will be issues.

If they want Firefly and you give them Star Trek...

Maybe we should have a thread about different ship tropes, with examples taken from TV, cinema, literature, and grouped together for ease of description.

(big fan of Ars Magica too )

 

[swordtart]

I am still trying to evolve what I want the game to be (and I'll be the one selling it to my players and I'll have to do most of the running if experience is anything to go by). I have to love the system and setting I am putting it into to make that considerable effort worthwhile. Even if my players are "let's chuck a dice and see what happens" I need to know what is going on under the bonnet to make sure to get the "Oh Wow" moments when that thing they did 5 sessions ago comes back to haunt them in a credible and logical way that doesn't seem arbitrary.

There needs to be foreshadowing and consequence even if those consequences may take a while to build.

I am trying to cleave to the rules as much as possible (since you might as well if you can) and mine what I can from hints and asides in the rules to extrapolate where there are gaps. I am not wedded to a specific setting but I suspect that it will need to have Star Wars elements as my target group are most familiar with that setting (and all the goodness and awfulness that implies). Traveller is driven by random tables and I am happy to riff off of those, and bring logic to the craziness it sometimes produces, hence so many solo exercises. We are story telling apes and if we can conjure bears from the constellations we can justify almost anything. The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.

It will need maths driven outcomes as well, as then no-one can complain they were cheated. Players who bother to do the research should be able to predict with some confidence what the outcomes will be (and if they go all Leroy Jenkins then they should be able to predict the outcome of that as well - or at least retrospectively see that the outcome was fair).

I have seen a few You Tube videos on playing Traveller and I know what I want to avoid possibly more than what I want to be doing. I ma hoping it will work out, but you can never really tell until you bite down on it.