Jump Precisions

Untrained is lvl -3.

Basically trained is 0. The same page you quoted says "If a Traveller has a zero level in a skill, then they are competent in using that skill, but probably have little experience." That's the level you are looking for.

Skill 1 is several years' experience beyond completing training and being basically competent. You are interpreting "skilled professional" to mean basic competence. It doesn't. It means "highly skilled". Someone with 5-10 years of independent work.
 
Untrained is lvl -3.

Basically trained is 0. The same page you quoted says "If a Traveller has a zero level in a skill, then they are competent in using that skill, but probably have little experience." That's the level you are looking for.

Skill 1 is several years' experience beyond completing training and being basically competent. You are interpreting "skilled professional" to mean basic competence. It doesn't. It means "highly skilled". Someone with 5-10 years of independent work.
I hear what you're saying but disagree. The statements are clear about the line where a professional is. Like I said, I see skill level 1 is a baby professional and needs seasoning. The book is clear that skill level one is trained with a few years of experience. They can likely do the work but fall short of being a skilled professional.

Others are free to do as they like. I'm not arguing for the sake of it. Just putting out one man's opinion.
 
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And because this conversation virtually demands it...

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Which is why jump plots are to places in relation to a gravity well, not to a point in space. In fact, jumping to a specific point in space is described as being more difficult than jumping to a gravity well.
You miss my point. When you jump, you jump to where your target planet will be in one week. But it won't be one week exactly. The target gravity well is moving through space, and so you will miss it by the distance the object traveled in the difference between your prediction of your arrival time, and the actual arrival time. Meaning, depending on the size of the gravity well, and the speed it is moving at, you could miss it and NOT emerge at 100D from the objective. This doesn't have to do with jump difficulty for targeting empty space, because 1) you are not targeting empty space, but rather a gravity well, and 2) it is not something that better astrogation skill can help with. It is a by-product of jumps lasting a variable length of time.
 
Journeyman is a competent professional tradesman expected to be able to handle all normal tasks associated with the job without supervision. That's what Skill 1 means in Traveller. You should be able to do all normally expected tasks. If rank 1 isn't sufficient to do the task, it is not within the scope of normal operations. Jumping into weird jump space or targeting a barely surveyed rock in empty space or other out of the ordinary tasks. Making a jump 2 in a free trader is not such a task.

The vast majority of craftsmen you meet are journeymen.

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Journeyman is not a phrase used in the rules and is a straw man argument.

Skill level 1 in traveller means that on an average task you will fail 40% of the time. Surgeons don't kill 40% of their patients, Pilots don't crash their plane 40% of the time. You were complaining that 10% failure was intolerable.

Even with skill level 2 you fail 30% of the time. How do these people stay in a job??

If they also take their time they only fail 8% of the time. It's much better, but still likely to get them fired eventually.

If they also use specialist expert software or tool kits to help them they fail about 3% of the time. That doesn't seem to bad.

The smart ones (+1 INT or EDU) manage to eliminate even that and don't fail at average tasks. Yes, we'll employ that one.

That is how the probability curve works for all skills in the game and that is why I assume you need 2 skill, you need to take your time and you take advantage of wikipedia to fill in the gaps. If you have years in the trade (skill 3-4) and are clever or well educated you might be able to stroll through an average task without second guessing yourself or remember where you saw a similar case in a paper once and won't have to work it all out from first principles.

Use whatever words you like, it won't alter the probability. The numbers tell the truth.
 
If they don't--and they are not required to by any means--then they take their chances with someone who isn't quite up to being a recognized professional. I'd wager that a commercial ship won't have a skill level 1 as the lead in their field. That's my opinion and others are welcome to do what they want, of course, but jumping from basically untrained to professional leaves a gap. Level 1 fills that gap.

No Skill: Untrained and will suffer DM-3 when trying to use that skill.
Skill 0: Competent in using that skill but have probably had little experience in actually using it. (Smells like book learning.)
Skill 1: Trained. (But not a professional yet. Likely needs seasoning.)
Skill 2-3: Skilled professional in their field.
Skill 4-5: Both well-respected and well-known in their field.
For me level 1 is Mate. You do the task the chief gives you and he will complain that you are doing it wrong. he trusts you with routine tasks and he'll even let you work on more complex tasks but he will ask you how you intend to go about it first and you won't be starting until he is satisfied you are not going to create more work for him. You are smart enough to learn from his experience in lieu of your own as you have been caught out in the past and he sorted it out (and cussed you something fierce).
Level 0 is apprentice you know plenty of theory but most of the time you are working on things for the first time. You get easy jobs to build your confidence and you might help out on routine tasks if you can remember to stop larking around. You make plenty of mistakes but as long as you are smart enough to holler for help they will only call you a useless 'erbert, They won't actually dock your wages or sack you.
Level 2 you have lots of experience so you have usually already made the mistakes at least once and now know what to avoid. You still get caught out occasionally, but you have confidence enough to limit the damage and find a work around rather than panic and make it all worse.
Level 3 you have made so many mistakes over the years that nothing is new. You can do routine stuff in your sleep and can do rush jobs with some confidence.
Level 4 you are so experienced that you can predict mistakes before they happen and head them off at the pass. As a hobby you try to invent new mistakes to catch apprentices out.
Level 5 You cant make mistakes any more so you just rearrange the universe so it looks wrong so that people still let you get your hands dirty fixing things rather than doing all that management crap that they keep suggesting you might graduate to. People call you Mystic Dave as you have fetched the first aid kit before the apprentice calls out. You tea mug is filthy and has a half inch thick layer of tannin. You throw your newspaper at them when they ask what an inch is.
 
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For me level 1 is Mate. You do the task the chief gives you and he will complain that you are doing it wrong. he trusts you with routine tasks and he'll even let you work on more complex tasks but he will ask you how you intend to go about it first and you won't be starting until he is satisfied you are not going to create more work for him. You are smart enough to learn from his experience in lieu of your own as you have been caught out in the past and he sorted it out (and cussed you something fierce).
Level 0 is apprentice you know plenty of theory but most of the time you are working on things for the first time. You get easy jobs to build your confidence and you might help out on routine tasks if you can remember to stop larking around. You make plenty of mistakes but as long as you are smart enough to holler for help they will one call you a useless 'erbert, They won't actually dock your wages or sack you.
Level 2 you have lots of experience so you have usually already made the mistakes at least once and now know what to avoid. You still get caught out occasionally, but you have confidence enough to limit the damage and find a work around rather than panic an make it all worse.
Level 3 you have made so many mistakes over the years that nothing is new. You can do routine stuff in your sleep and can do rush jobs with some confidence.
Level 4 you are so experience that you can predict mistakes before they happen and head them off at the pass. As a hobby you try to invent new mistakes to catch apprentices out.
Level 5 You cant make mistakes any more so you just rearrange the universe so it looks wrong so that people still let you get your hands dirty fixing things rather than doing all that management crap that they keep suggesting you might graduate to. People call you Mystic Dave as you have fetched the first aid kit before the apprentice calls out. You tea mug is filthy and has a half inch thick layer of tannin. You throw your newspaper at them when they ask what an inch is.
I can live with this.
 
Skill level 1 in traveller means that on an average task you will fail 40% of the time.
That's because Mongoose has borked their task system. Those task values are supposed to be for an average task in a highly dramatic situation. It is not meant to be an average task for just doing what the job is. There shouldn't even BE a roll to do the equivalent of crossing the street in your starship. Jump 2 in a far trader is the definition of what the ship does for a living, week in and week out. Making it that difficult and then stacking on further complexities after that is bad design. I showed in the opening post that none of this was true before MgT2e.

And it would be fine to pump up the numbers IF they changed character generation to reflect that. But they didn't. Characters have basically the same skill totals as they did in earlier editions of the game where the task difficulties were not this inflated.

You make a Merchant with 16 years in the service and he's going to have 9 skills @ 0 and between 3 and 7 skill rolls (depending on his promotion rolls. They are fairly easy, so let's call it 6 rolls. Plus Persuade 1 as a rank skill. And his 4pts of "I'm a PC so I get some extra skills" stuff from the crew packs and connections. 2 of which are fixed at lvl 1.

He's pretty unlikely to be able to compete with those bloated task difficulties. Might be able to use Connections to pump one skill up to your definition of competence. But that's about it unless he ends up hyper specialized. You'll essentially have to min/max your character to compete with these stupidly high difficulties.

Or heroically take extra time and get a expert system's advice every time he needs to tie his grav boots.

The skill system doesn't matter against some abstract theory of reality. NPCs aren't making die rolls. PCs are. So the skill system has to match what the PCs are gonna be like. And that system was designed with the idea that Skill 1 meant you were good at your job. And ranks higher than that were for being really good at it.

So, actually yes, the Mongoose system is that Doctors fail 40% of the time. Because a Doctor is skill 2 according to your reading of that quote. And average medical tasks are 8+ per your viewpoint. And you can patch it over by saying Dr. McCoy's salt shakers give him big bonuses, so he only screws the pooch 10% of the time or whatever. Or you can rewrite the chargen to produce higher skill levels to account for the reduced value of the skill ranks. It's your game and your table.
 
You miss my point. When you jump, you jump to where your target planet will be in one week. But it won't be one week exactly. The target gravity well is moving through space, and so you will miss it by the distance the object traveled in the difference between your prediction of your arrival time, and the actual arrival time. Meaning, depending on the size of the gravity well, and the speed it is moving at, you could miss it and NOT emerge at 100D from the objective. This doesn't have to do with jump difficulty for targeting empty space, because 1) you are not targeting empty space, but rather a gravity well, and 2) it is not something that better astrogation skill can help with. It is a by-product of jumps lasting a variable length of time.
This assumes you are actually moving in jump space in some linear parallel of realspace. And, admittedly, that is true of the straight line occlusion concept for jump travel that's the current hotness.

Personally, I can't stand that concept for reasons just like this one. Personally, I prefer that jump space you travel along a vector of time until your distance merges with the realspace location you wanted. So you arrive at the desired location at whatever time it takes to get you there.

But, that theory lost the wars in favor of "oops, I tripped over an asteroid en route, guess I'm in this empty hex now". So I'll concede your point for the 'how it works in canon'.
 
This assumes you are actually moving in jump space in some linear parallel of realspace. And, admittedly, that is true of the straight line occlusion concept for jump travel that's the current hotness.

Personally, I can't stand that concept for reasons just like this one. Personally, I prefer that jump space you travel along a vector of time until your distance merges with the realspace location you wanted. So you arrive at the desired location at whatever time it takes to get you there.

But, that theory lost the wars in favor of "oops, I tripped over an asteroid en route, guess I'm in this empty hex now". So I'll concede your point for the 'how it works in canon'.
Personally, I hate the occlusion concept and ignore it. My view in this aligns with yours.
 
I don't think jumpspace astrogation is targeting a spot in realspace. I think they are targeting a relationship to another object and the lack of understanding of jumpspace mechanics means that we can't reliably predict how long that transit takes more accurately than "about a week". But the transit continues until you are in that relationship to the desired object and then you precipitate out of jumpspace.

But that was based on old rules with reliable jumping if you didn't intentionally do something stupid and other things that have gone away in the most recent publications.
 
Untrained is lvl -3.

Basically trained is 0. The same page you quoted says "If a Traveller has a zero level in a skill, then they are competent in using that skill, but probably have little experience." That's the level you are looking for.

Skill 1 is several years' experience beyond completing training and being basically competent. You are interpreting "skilled professional" to mean basic competence. It doesn't. It means "highly skilled". Someone with 5-10 years of independent work.
Medical: The individual has training and skill in the medical arts and sciences.
Medical science is capable of great feats in preserving and maintaining the health and welfare of individuals. The services of medically trained individuals are in great demand.
The levels of medical skill represent steps in increasingly better ability and knowledge.
Medical-1 is sufficient to qualify a character for the position of medic on a starship crew. An expertise of medic-1 or better allows a DM of +I when reviving low passengers (each normally throws 5+ to revive after a trip; otherwise the passenger dies).
Medical-3 is sufficient for a character to be called doctor, and assumes a license to practice medicine, including writing prescriptions, handling most ailments, and dealing with other doctors on a professional level. A dexterity of 8+ is required for a doctor to also be a surgeon.

The above is from the1982 edition of the GDW Traveller Book.
Here Medic-1 could be a qualified first aider. It is good enough for ships medic as it will be emergencies only.

If you want the professional qualification, the license and to be treated as a professional by your peers you need skill 3.
 
I'm confused. How does that contradict anything I said?

My statement was that Skill 1 is experienced individual competent to handle all normal tasks for their position without needing a supervisory person watching over them. Someone with proper training and some years of work experience. Skill 3 is a very experienced person with lots of training and time on the job. It is far more than is necessary to do normal shipboard jobs. Your "doctor" has 12-16 years of job behind him.

You don't need a PhD in astrophysics plus 4-8 years in a astronomy lab to move a free trader to the next star system. A character at Skill 1 has had significant training and on the job experience. They aren't noobs. Skill 0 is "I finished my classes but I don't have any experience, someone better keep an eye on me."

Just to stick with the medical field.. EMTs have professional certifications to practice. RNs have professional certifications to practice. They are professionals. They are good at their jobs. They don't need someone watching them when they do that job. And a paramedic doesn't fail on 40% of his average tasks either, no matter what Mongoose says.

And your own quote agrees with me. Medic 1 is enough to be certified as a ship's Medic and be qualified to do the job.
 
That's because Mongoose has borked their task system. Those task values are supposed to be for an average task in a highly dramatic situation. It is not meant to be an average task for just doing what the job is. There shouldn't even BE a roll to do the equivalent of crossing the street in your starship. Jump 2 in a far trader is the definition of what the ship does for a living, week in and week out. Making it that difficult and then stacking on further complexities after that is bad design. I showed in the opening post that none of this was true before MgT2e.

And it would be fine to pump up the numbers IF they changed character generation to reflect that. But they didn't. Characters have basically the same skill totals as they did in earlier editions of the game where the task difficulties were not this inflated.

You make a Merchant with 16 years in the service and he's going to have 9 skills @ 0 and between 3 and 7 skill rolls (depending on his promotion rolls. They are fairly easy, so let's call it 6 rolls. Plus Persuade 1 as a rank skill. And his 4pts of "I'm a PC so I get some extra skills" stuff from the crew packs and connections. 2 of which are fixed at lvl 1.

He's pretty unlikely to be able to compete with those bloated task difficulties. Might be able to use Connections to pump one skill up to your definition of competence. But that's about it unless he ends up hyper specialized. You'll essentially have to min/max your character to compete with these stupidly high difficulties.

Or heroically take extra time and get a expert system's advice every time he needs to tie his grav boots.

The skill system doesn't matter against some abstract theory of reality. NPCs aren't making die rolls. PCs are. So the skill system has to match what the PCs are gonna be like. And that system was designed with the idea that Skill 1 meant you were good at your job. And ranks higher than that were for being really good at it.

So, actually yes, the Mongoose system is that Doctors fail 40% of the time. Because a Doctor is skill 2 according to your reading of that quote. And average medical tasks are 8+ per your viewpoint. And you can patch it over by saying Dr. McCoy's salt shakers give him big bonuses, so he only screws the pooch 10% of the time or whatever. Or you can rewrite the chargen to produce higher skill levels to account for the reduced value of the skill ranks. It's your game and your table.
It becomes most obvious with skills like engineering. To be a competent enough at your job to get by as it stands, you need 3 level 2 skills to do the usual tasks, and that doesn't even make you qualified to work on life support.
One solution that popped to mind, was to start all routine tasks a level easier, but only on a ship/piece of equipment the player is familiar with. It won't work on the alien ship they just stole.
 
I think it was mentioned up thread, but I think the accuracy of a jump has to be relative. In space everything is in motion, so that hyper-accurate n-space point you plotted in relation to your target is just not gonna be all that accurate because you cannot predict your time in jump space. Say your Navigator with skill level 3 plotted a jump to emerge exactly on the 100D line of the planet. For further arguments sake let's say it was on the trailing edge of the planet's orbital path, so you are entering n-space "behind" it. One part of the rules says that's entirely within the realm of possibility. Bravo!

And now the other part that says jump travel is always 148 + 6d6 hours. Our planet has an orbital velocity of ~107k km/hr. Which means your plotted jump is going to put at least 600k distant from the planet using the scenario above. And since you cannot predict how long you are going to be in jump you will never be able to accurately predict your emergence point in relation to your target. Using the travel time table from the core rule book, that puts you about 135hrs additional hours away from the planet at 1G.

Obviously that's not a good thing, so you'd want to potentially shorten your additional travel time by trying to emerge closer - except that little time variable cannot be predicted, thus your emergence point MAY be known, but the distance to your destination cannot be.

So if you can't predict it any better, then what about simply plotting your course to intersect with your target, and thus having the laws of jump space force you out at the 100D limit? That's covered in the rules too, though it's rather hazy on what exactly the implications are for ships that are yanked out of jump space. I believe somewhere in the later rules there is mention that you cannot exit in a deep space hex without a significant gravity well, which would imply that you need it to emerge (and since basically all jump travel is system to system, well, it works out). There's that other little problem of the jump bubble collapsing, but hey, just one rule paradox at a time...

Assuming there is no untoward problem to a ship that is forced out of jump space at the 100D limit, then you'd think that would be the way for ships to always emerge on the 100D limit, right? For Earth the 100D limit is about 1.25 million Km, so as long as your time in jump space was 12hrs or less, you'd be able to hit the 100D limit. Otherwise you could miss if your jump space time variable was more than 12hrs due to the orbital velocity and the planet simply not being where you thought it was gonna be.

All of this complicates the rules as listed, and most players probably don't care about orbital velocities, or the laws of physics. Some do and will use it as part of the plot points in their adventure. In my mind the easiest way to sort of hand-wave this out of the picture is that since jump space is, essentially, somewhere not quite in N-space, then the time you travel in jump space is outside normal time-space, and your travel time is based on the ships' clocks and not the universe's clock. That sidesteps the accuracy of the jump issue, and you can, for the most part, simply ignore the time dilation issue for crews and passengers. It doesn't quite handle the idea of some of the other issues related to jump space travel, but maybe this whole thing will be correctly addressed in a v3 of the rules eh?
 
And now the other part that says jump travel is always 148 + 6d6 hours. Our planet has an orbital velocity of ~107k km/hr. Which means your plotted jump is going to put at least 600k distant from the planet using the scenario above. And since you cannot predict how long you are going to be in jump you will never be able to accurately predict your emergence point in relation to your target. Using the travel time table from the core rule book, that puts you about 135hrs additional hours away from the planet at 1G.

In addition to the Earth moving ~30 km/s it’s easy to forget the Sun is in motion too, and is faster at ~225km/s. Oh, and the Milky Way is trolling along at ~583 km/s.

An hour at the last one would be 2.1 million kilometers, but maybe the assumption is that it’s accounted for as you’re jumping to and from inside the galaxy. An hour at the star’s speed would be 810,000 kilometers.

This might be one of those things it’s best not to look at too closely.
 
In addition to the Earth moving ~30 km/s it’s easy to forget the Sun is in motion too, and is faster at ~225km/s. Oh, and the Milky Way is trolling along at ~583 km/s.

An hour at the last one would be 2.1 million kilometers, but maybe the assumption is that it’s accounted for as you’re jumping to and from inside the galaxy. An hour at the star’s speed would be 810,000 kilometers.

This might be one of those things it’s best not to look at too closely.
Oh yeah, I didn't get into the angular velocities of the two different systems you are in. That ports over as well if you hold to the original article about heading and velocity carried through. If you take ONE thing it's "ok, that seems to work...". But when you put all the concepts together you'll see another classic Traveller core rule conundrum that has been retained in every version.

That's actually why I had backed T5, with very high hopes that a lot of these inconsistencies would be addressed. Now I sadly have a very nice and very large paperweight.
 
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