[House Rule] armour adjustments by dton range

[phavoc]

Tank vs ship armament could be refined to power plant size? But fighters break the paradigm. Missile tanks as well, a missile is a missile. Yes, I'm not a fan of the 50:1 rule. Granted, in Traveller, starships are tough, they dive into gas giants. But a lot of it is a game-ism, as 90% of the time the Type-A is the player's ship. I agree that the 20ton tank should pose the same level of threat as a 20ton small ship.

With the baseline game system we don't really know about power plant output, it's kind of unlimited. And lots would come down to just how much power is required for a weapon to be fired, and of course if you put capacitors into the mix you'd be able to fire and charge the weapon at the same time - up to the point your usage exceeded your charging. Who knows how many megawatts you could potentially cram into a future superbattery!

It's funny that you mention diving into gas giants. That should be, potentially, rough. But we've got really nothing on the hazards and failings of that, at least in the main rules. I've tried to come up with reasonable and plausible things. Not sure how close I am though. I'd assume though that since starships only skim the upper atmosphere that the pressures shouldn't be much different than what they would encounter in landing on a planet. The bigger thing with armor, I think at least, would be the ability to ignore micrometorite damage while travelling for long periods under even just 1G.

 

[dragoner]

One of the players had an idea of the ship deploying some bussard style scoops for fuel skimming, which is an interesting idea, then the ship wouldn't necessarily be in the atmosphere itself, and is pretty sci-fi. It affects the idea of streamlining though, c'est la vie, the cascade of effect in changing rules or design concepts.

PP rating by size is about all we get without going back to calling out power points. I'm not really suggesting that, and any energy weapons would attenuate at range, it can get fiddly. The engineer in me says there should be a difference, but game-wise, and most definitely combat wise, there shouldn't be a difference. One of the big differences is also the combat turns, going from six seconds to six minutes. In the old days, we just used LBB2 for vehicle combat, it was very simple.