High Guard design options on standard ships

[Anonymous]

The design options are very commonly used in the Mongoose Traveller community - a lot of ships have decreased fuel requirement for jump.

I've never seen, for example, a Free Trader with such systems.

Is doing this to the standard ships considered heretical?

Is it just too easy to use the basic rulebook configuration?

Anyway, I'm working on the designs right now. I am surprised there is not a list of these already.

edit: I think one of the reasons this interests me is that commercial designs (vans, for example) these days are very highly optimised and specialised for economic reasons.

edit: Assuming just reduced fuel, you stand to save Cr 500 per jump for free/far trader, and earn 1000-1600 Cr per jump from additional freight fees, assuming full (which maybe doesn't happen). The drive will pay back in 100 jumps and we know Traveller ships are designed to last decades or longer.

 

[Linwood]

I don’t see why not. In fact I’d love to see a range of “standard” designs incorporating some of the HG options. Or maybe an options list for each standard design - “Free Trader with Decreased Fuel Usage costs X MCr more but requires Y less dtons fuel, reducing weekly operating costs by Z KCr.” Kind of like you see in sales literature for cars, etc.

Love to create that myself but don’t have time right now.

 

[Reynard]

The iconic 'standard' designs are the most common variant in charted space. There is no reason ship architects and shipyards wouldn't design a wide assortments of similar ships based on the needs of buyers. I see many ships out there that make great use of the Primitive and Advanced Spacecraft rules including and maybe especially the iconics. I use it when I boost the tech level of a ship with better, upgraded systems. It just means the mortgage is higher.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Anything beyond the basic chapters are basically optional rules. They are there for us gearheads to worry about. The added complexity should not be forced on anyone just to make a Free Trader.


Decreased Fuel may not be especially good for low-jump traders; it makes the jump drive more expensive, hence the mortgage more expensive.

Take the Empress Marava for example (HG, p116):

Basic:

Decreased Fuel:

Note that the mortgage increases by kCr 4, and the fuel cost decreases by kCr 0.2...


Budget drives are probably a better choice:

 

[AnotherDilbert]

With the full basic budget treatment it even approaches reasonable profitability:

 

[AnotherDilbert]

edit: Assuming just reduced fuel, you stand to save Cr 500 per jump for free/far trader,

With a purifier we can purchase unrefined fuel at Cr 100/Dt. No need to purchase refined fuel.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Ditch the air/raft, load some cargo in the cargo airlocks, and reduce the common areas a bit and we have a reasonably cheap, profitable ship:

 

[phavoc]

The design options are very commonly used in the Mongoose Traveller community - a lot of ships have decreased fuel requirement for jump.

I've never seen, for example, a Free Trader with such systems.

Is doing this to the standard ships considered heretical?

Is it just too easy to use the basic rulebook configuration?

Anyway, I'm working on the designs right now. I am surprised there is not a list of these already.

edit: I think one of the reasons this interests me is that commercial designs (vans, for example) these days are very highly optimised and specialised for economic reasons.

edit: Assuming just reduced fuel, you stand to save Cr 500 per jump for free/far trader, and earn 1000-1600 Cr per jump from additional freight fees, assuming full (which maybe doesn't happen). The drive will pay back in 100 jumps and we know Traveller ships are designed to last decades or longer.

There are many questions about the standardized designs. It's kind of sad, almost, that new versions of the game pretty much just re-hash previous designs over and over. While there are "iconic" designs, the reality would be that with the huge numbers of ships in use by humaniti there will be many variations on the 200 ton Free Trader. Yet we really just see the one version over and over unless you look to player-designed ships or smaller/niche publishers.

It seems to me that there is an untapped market here for a "Merchant Ships of the Imperium" supplement (to start with). Also, where are the in-system traders? Those ships that ply the routes between colonies, stations and such? All we see are basically jump-capable ships.

 

[Anonymous]

Testing some software for this. I don't think the Marava in High Guard is correct.

I get a discrepancy for the weapons, loading belt and final price. I have no idea what system "cargo airlock" is supposed to be.

It's very possible I've misread the rules or made a mistake with programming the formula.

edit: Loading Belts are 0.01 and cache invalidation is hard.

 

[AndrewW]

I get a discrepancy for the weapons, loading belt and final price. I have no idea what system "cargo airlock" is supposed to be.

A cargo airlock is just a standard airlock designed for cargo purposes, usually larger then one designed for personnel (though if you happen to be a K'kree...). No rule differences just use the standard additional airlock rules.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

I don't think the Marava in High Guard is correct.

Most ship's aren't.

I get a discrepancy for the weapons, loading belt and final price.

Turrets: 2 × ( 1 Dt, MCr 1.5 ) = 2 Dt, MCr 3. You, I, and HG p116 agree?

Loading Belt: Apparently the TL7 version is used.

The final price presumably is with the 10% bonus for standard design.

I have no idea what system "cargo airlock" is supposed to be.

Additional Airlocks (HG, p44).


Edit:

It's very possible I've misread the rules or made a mistake with programming the formula.

I think you are entirely correct.


I get:

I don't think any ship will be closer.


(Note that I hid a lot of rows in previous posts, allowing a default allocated Med Bay to sneak in instead of the turrets and low berths.)

 

[Old School]

Two things to know about the ships in High Guard:
1 - They are designed to be as close as possible to their Classic Traveller Counterparts, meaning they are in no way optimized for the MgT2 ruleset they are a part of.
2 - They are chock full of errors, and some design floorplans don't even match the spec sheet.

As much as I like the ruleset, High Guard is very poor product with a staggering amount of errata.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

2 - They are chock full of errors, and some design floorplans don't even match the spec sheet.

I think you are a bit harsh. Sure there are errors, but mostly relatively small problems with the example ship designs. The design system itself isn't all that bad. I've certainly seen editions of Traveller with more problems...

The deck plans are not perfect, but we have deck plans for most standard small ships, many in the Core book itself. I would call that quite a step ahead of the LBBs and even another recent edition.

 

[Old School]

The system is good. Mongoose's inability to follow it is bad. How it compares to prior editions, or to T5, isn't really relevant.

 

[Linwood]

.

It seems to me that there is an untapped market here for a "Merchant Ships of the Imperium" supplement (to start with). Also, where are the in-system traders? Those ships that ply the routes between colonies, stations and such? All we see are basically jump-capable ships.

You and I are on the same page - this would make for a great supplement!

Maybe we need a Ship-of-the-Month Club???

 

[AnotherDilbert]

... and cache invalidation is hard.

Set the Expire property to now to prevent caching? You never want your application output to be cached by the client, right?

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-14.21

 

[Anonymous]

... and cache invalidation is hard.

Set the Expire property to now to prevent caching? You never want your application output to be cached by the client, right?

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-14.21

Not the browser cache, the cached design results from the database.

I had entered the incorrect cost for the cargo belt system and fixed it in the data file, but because the ship component did not change by the normal means (the gui), it did not know to invalidate the cached total ship cost. Recalculating it all the time would remove this problem, but the whole point of caching is NOT to repeat an expensive calculation, therefore the hard thing about +good+ caching is knowing when something is the same and when it isn’t. [1]

Normally a system cost changing from underneath you (database edit) would only arise when Mongoose produce errata (haha) so it has a very low priority on the to do list, but it would need to be addressed eventually to allow people to house rule components.

Edit: [1] This calculation is not particularly expensive but it is the most taxing part of the game-related logic and some of us like to do things properly.

Edit: Don’t expect the app anytime soon. It’s a side project on a low priority and mainly so that I can experiment with some technqiues. Most of my side projects never get finished.

 

[Condottiere]

It's been a while since I looked at the cost benefits of customizing the Traveller engineering.

It tends to come down if you need more space or control costs, capital and/or operating.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Not the browser cache, the cached design results from the database.

I can certainly see why you don't want to touch a database or file system for every trivial calculation or redraw.

Edit: [1] This calculation is not particularly expensive but it is the most taxing part of the game-related logic and some of us like to do things properly.

In this particular case the calculation is utterly trivial and hardly worth the potentially error-prone code to avoid?

But if you are just trying out or demonstrating technique for a hobby-project, I guess it might be fun...