Hull point repair cost

[JustEastOfTheEdge]

I have seen a few threads along similar lines here but can't get an answer to this:

Core Rules 2022 p.159 mentions 2 types of damage and goes on to talk about repairing critical hits.

It feels like there is a missing table to explain about Hull Point damage repair.

Any ideas?
Cheers

 

[Geir]

Ideas, yes, good answers...

Old book p. 150:
Hull Damage: Each lost Hull point can be replaced with a Routine (6+) Mechanic check (1 hour, INT or EDU), consuming one ton of spare parts for every 10 Hull points repaired.
New Book, p. 159:
Hull Damage: Each lost Hull point can be replaced with a Routine (6+) Mechanic check (1 hour, INT or EDU), consuming one ton of spare parts.

Now... I did get to review the update prior to its release, and at least on the draft I received, neither of those things where there, and I left the comment, "Hull damage fell off…".

Clearly it was fixed, but it may have been fixed by not completely restoring the old text. I would like to believe that the hull damage sentence is still intended to end with "for every 10 Hull points repaired." Especially since one ton of brand new starship costs only Cr50000 and a ton of spare parts costs twice that amount, and critical damage repairs cost a small percentage of the cost of the component (drives, weapons, etc).

So officially, it's Cr100000 per ton of hull damage to fix it. Unofficially, see Traveller Rule Zero (p. 4).

 

[JustEastOfTheEdge]

Cheers, very helpful.

That does make it very expensive to get into starship fights, even at 1 ton per 10 points. If my group's get shot once by a pulse laster they are going to be grounded a lot time .

 

[Fulcs]

There's a download which has a table for this, as well as several other items of errata that you can add to the Core Rulebook

 

[JustEastOfTheEdge]

Yeah but Geir is suggesting that even the update is wrong. Seems to be otherwise repairs will be a crazy price.

What surprises me is that no players seem to have taken any ship damage to make it worth asking

 

[Fulcs]

Yeah but Geir is suggesting that even the update is wrong. Seems to be otherwise repairs will be a crazy price.

What surprises me is that no players seem to have taken any ship damage to make it worth asking

Ah, I see! no worries, the table has some other updates which might be useful as well

Good point about the player ship damage, maybe everyone is just happily trading

 

[NOLATrav]

FWIW, we have been using 1 ton of spare parts per 10 Hull, Routine Mechanic check, 1 hour per Hull point repaired. We don’t do a lot of space combat but this seems to be fair and in the spirit of things.

 

[Arkathan]

I also apply the critical hit roll for effect reducing the amount of parts needed.
So on a critical success, oh, this came loose - <tighten>

 

[Garran]

This seems like the sort of thing where the roll should usually be handwaved since routine repair work isn't exactly dramatic. You put the time in, you get it done.

If there's actually some plot-relevant reason why it needs to be done NOW ("We have three hours before the technobabble malfunction blows up the planet!") - thereby also creating an incentive to bump up the difficulty to go faster - then there's a reason to roll it.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Ideas, yes, good answers...

Old book p. 150:
Hull Damage: Each lost Hull point can be replaced with a Routine (6+) Mechanic check (1 hour, INT or EDU), consuming one ton of spare parts for every 10 Hull points repaired.
New Book, p. 159:
Hull Damage: Each lost Hull point can be replaced with a Routine (6+) Mechanic check (1 hour, INT or EDU), consuming one ton of spare parts.

Now... I did get to review the update prior to its release, and at least on the draft I received, neither of those things where there, and I left the comment, "Hull damage fell off…".

Clearly it was fixed, but it may have been fixed by not completely restoring the old text. I would like to believe that the hull damage sentence is still intended to end with "for every 10 Hull points repaired." Especially since one ton of brand new starship costs only Cr50000 and a ton of spare parts costs twice that amount, and critical damage repairs cost a small percentage of the cost of the component (drives, weapons, etc).

So officially, it's Cr100000 per ton of hull damage to fix it. Unofficially, see Traveller Rule Zero (p. 4).

Just out of curiosity... How would you square the 100,000Cr per ton of spare parts with the piracy rules from Pirates of Drinax, Book 1 pg. 24 under "What is not nailed down"

"Fully stripping a ship of all easily transportable items takes 1D x 10 hours per 100 tons of ship. Every hundred tons of stripped ship produces 10 tons of spare parts worth Cr5000 each (or Cr50000/100 tons)"

 

[Vormaerin]

This seems like the sort of thing where the roll should usually be handwaved since routine repair work isn't exactly dramatic. You put the time in, you get it done.

If there's actually some plot-relevant reason why it needs to be done NOW ("We have three hours before the technobabble malfunction blows up the planet!") - thereby also creating an incentive to bump up the difficulty to go faster - then there's a reason to roll it.

The roll is about the cost, not about the accomplishment. It isn't "can this be fixed?" but "how much can I fix without dipping into my stores?"

 

[Nelphine]

Im personally a big fan of the 100k per hull point cost. I think its far more in line with ship costs. You arent just repairing the base 50k hull, youre fixing everything else that was damaged in that section. Is it completely accurate? No. But to me this is an excellent compromise between 'what actually got damaged and how much does every individual system cost to repair it'and playability. Where before, 10k per hull is just too cheap - its a tiny fraction of the ship cost, and feels like all youre repairing is the paint job.

 

[Arkathan]

Im personally a big fan of the 100k per hull point cost. I think its far more in line with ship costs. You arent just repairing the base 50k hull, youre fixing everything else that was damaged in that section. Is it completely accurate? No. But to me this is an excellent compromise between 'what actually got damaged and how much does every individual system cost to repair it'and playability. Where before, 10k per hull is just too cheap - its a tiny fraction of the ship cost, and feels like all youre repairing is the paint job.

I like a varied cost. Roll Maintenance. A result of 8 is a ton of ship's parts to fix. It goes down 20% for each successful point of effect (+5 is .1 tons), so that at Effect 6, you were able to weld, hammer and screw everything back into place. On a failure, you used that ton of ship's parts, wasted the time required for the action, and have to do it again to fix the hole/buckling.

 

[Vormaerin]

Im personally a big fan of the 100k per hull point cost. I think its far more in line with ship costs. You arent just repairing the base 50k hull, youre fixing everything else that was damaged in that section. Is it completely accurate? No. But to me this is an excellent compromise between 'what actually got damaged and how much does every individual system cost to repair it'and playability. Where before, 10k per hull is just too cheap - its a tiny fraction of the ship cost, and feels like all youre repairing is the paint job.

That does work well if your players are running around making the kind of money where half a million in repairs from a random low grade laser shot hitting them is just the cost of doing business. I've always been under the impression that the "everything else" was covered by the crits, because that's damage to systems on top of the general structure of the ship.

 

[Condottiere]

I'm guessing that hull configuration (and features) dictates actual repair cost, outside of local market prices.

 

[Geir]

Just out of curiosity... How would you square the 100,000Cr per ton of spare parts with the piracy rules from Pirates of Drinax, Book 1 pg. 24 under "What is not nailed down"

"Fully stripping a ship of all easily transportable items takes 1D x 10 hours per 100 tons of ship. Every hundred tons of stripped ship produces 10 tons of spare parts worth Cr5000 each (or Cr50000/100 tons)"

I can't square it, but there seems to be official reluctance to revisit this issue (hence my Rule Zero comment - btw my restatement of Rule Zero is "yeah, that's no good*, we're not doing that".)

*or some stronger language

 

[MasterGwydion]

I can't square it, but there seems to be official reluctance to revisit this issue (hence my Rule Zero comment - btw my restatement of Rule Zero is "yeah, that's no good*, we're not doing that".)

*or some stronger language

Fair enough. Thanks for the response Geir. Was looking over Pirates of Drinax from a not working for Oleg standpoint and thinking of starting off salvaging stuff on the surface and below the surface as a group of Vespexers. No real contact with the Floating Palace. Looking around for salvage rules and only found the ones for "salvaging" stuff from ships that were pirated. Specifically the "What's not nailed down" part. 1Dx10 hours to salvage 10Dtons of Spare parts. I thought, "Hell this whole campaign would turn into grinding." No reason to do anything else if they can make 1MCr per week salvaging spare parts.

Hence My curiosity...

 

[metlk]

Im personally a big fan of the 100k per hull point cost. I think its far more in line with ship costs. You arent just repairing the base 50k hull, youre fixing everything else that was damaged in that section. Is it completely accurate? No. But to me this is an excellent compromise between 'what actually got damaged and how much does every individual system cost to repair it'and playability. Where before, 10k per hull is just too cheap - its a tiny fraction of the ship cost, and feels like all youre repairing is the paint job.

If you look at the math and the numbers from 1e (not counting critical hits and system replacements,) to fully repair a ship including structure damage., it cost roughly 2% of the ship cost (I used the mercenary ship as a basis, so others may not be quite the same but should be close.) The Ship had very little health overall (8 and 8 for the mercenary) and cost 433 MCr. In the first edition of 2e, the ship cost 299 MCr (a 33% reduction.) Health was increased drastically (1900% to 320) but the entire damage system was overhauled to a new system.) A full repair would cost a little over 1% at the 10k price. In the 2022 update, the price went down slightly to 292 MCr, but due to repair costs, it's now 11% of the total value for a full repair. That's a substantial change and seems inconsistent with the overall reduction of ship costs.

 

[Nelphine]

That does work well if your players are running around making the kind of money where half a million in repairs from a random low grade laser shot hitting them is just the cost of doing business. I've always been under the impression that the "everything else" was covered by the crits, because that's damage to systems on top of the general structure of the ship.

Right, to me, thus us the wrong way to look at the problem. Why is mortgage obscenely expensive, but getting the same ship horrendously damaged.. is only 1 or 2% of the ships price? Ship expenses, of ALL sorts, should be obscenely expensive.

I think 11% makes way more sense. I dont want my players to think 'huh, repair one ship point or buy a new laser rifle'. I WANT ship expenses to be a different order of magnitude. 'Repair a few hull points, or buy a full suit of battle dress' shows that. It puts the ship in to the proper perspective.

If your players can't afford to drop a million here and there for the ship.. why are they doing things where the ship is the focus? If the only have 50k to spend, they're personal scale, not ship scale.

Having ship repairs in personal scale makes it harder to deal with the mortgage problem, because it 'feels' like ship expenses should be personal scale. Ship scale and personal scale should not be intermixable.


Stars without numbers goes the other way, and makes the whole ship personal scale. But unless traveller wants to embrace that, with free traders costing only a million brand new, i think it's better to make ALL ship expenses ship scale.

(And as per that comment elsewhere maybe CT had it right when most travellers couldnt start a game with a ship. Dealing with the difference in personal and ship scale is very hard. Mixing them, with things like 10k per hull repairs, makes it harder, by making ships feel personal scale.)

 

[Vormaerin]

If you want space combat to be a thing you don't do, then yes, you should make repairs cripplingly expensive.

A standard Type A free trader running full capacity with all crew positions occupied by unpaid PCs and no sweetheart deal on the mortgage clears about Cr18,000 a month. A random hit by a single turret beam laser will do 100 to 200k dmg to the ship (1d6 vs AV 2). (actually more than that because the +4 to hit probably means a solid effect level). Don't even think about a pulse laser or triple turret or anything like that. So any rational player group is going to be "hell to the no" on that whole idea. Which may be what you want.

A fair number of adventures have ways to take hull damage from poor rolls, with similar outcomes. It would certainly explain the number of CT adventure hooks of "your ship is broken down and this is how you come up with money to fix it" that exist.

Yes, I am aware that the speculative trade rules are painfully simple to maximize for fat revenues. Stupidly inflated repairs is one way to try to compensate for bloated speculation revenues. Not one I'm in favor of, personally.

I think that it is completely bass ackwards that in MgT2e, the crits are what's cheap and easy to repair and the random hull points are what kills you.


Edit: Overestimated Mortgage because I looked at the base price, not the price with standardization discount. So monthly revenues before wages are more like 40k. Don't think that materially changes the point, though.