Maintenance issues and penalty caps

H

HalC

Banded Mongoose
Hi Folks,
Something has me bugged in the back of my mind as I look at modifiers for certain actions. One that leaps out at me is the modifier involving "months past maintenance due date".

My question is this: Shouldn't there be a cap on the maximum skill task penalty for lack of maintenance? Until something breaks down outright, suffering a -12 penalty for a task because you're one year overdue for your maintenance period - seems a bit um, extreme?

What I'm doing right now is reading the rules with an eye towards running my first Mongoose Traveller campaign online. I've run Classic Traveller, MegaTaveller, Traveller the New Era, GURPS Traveller, Traveller 4th edition, tried to run Traveller 5th and gave up on it QUICKLY, and am only now trying to run Mg Traveller. My first purchase from Mongoose was the first edition book for the main rules. I've since purchased 2nd edition, and with dismay, noted that the update is out and I'm thinking "As a retired individual, I need to conserve on spending a bit.

For now, I'm looking to read the rules and familiarize myself with them, but already I'm thinking of imposing house rules. Perhaps I'll find more in the companion rules set, or perhaps some of my more recent purchases - but for now, I'm opening up a discussion on things that should have a cap placed upon their penalty for modifiers.

Thanks,

Hal
 
The only "months past maintenance" penalty I am aware of is the one for starship engines and those should absolutely keep getting worse and worse until your ship falls through a hole in space and never returns. Because doing preventative maintenance on your ship's engines is so simple and cheap in the current edition of the rules that there's basically only criminal incompetence that makes that actually happen.

There used to be even more sources of penalty for that roll, but they've been nerfed out of existence even harder than bad maintenance.
 
On the subject of updates, don't stress too much about that. It is 99% errata and 1% changes. You certainly don't need to run around buying all the updates if that's not budget friendly. In most cases you won't even notice the differences unless you get deep into a forum argument over some bit of obscure mechanics.
 
Vormaerin said:
The only "months past maintenance" penalty I am aware of is the one for starship engines and those should absolutely keep getting worse and worse until your ship falls through a hole in space and never returns. Because doing preventative maintenance on your ship's engines is so simple and cheap in the current edition of the rules that there's basically only criminal incompetence that makes that actually happen.

There used to be even more sources of penalty for that roll, but they've been nerfed out of existence even harder than bad maintenance.
Click to expand...
Page 145 of Core 2nd edition rule book (ie, not the updated rules) page 145.

"If maintenance is skipped or skimped on, roll 2D each subsequent month, with a DM equal to the number of months skipped. On 8+, the ship suffers a critical hit. Roll 2D on the Poor Maintenance table and apply the effects.

To repair this damage, see page 161."

The point I'm questioning here is that unless you want to state that ships are truly fragile systems, as the number of months without maintenance exceeds say, 4 months, then 5 months etc - each subsequent penalty to the die roll of +1, will automatically result issues. To make matters worse, after 7 months of lack of maintenance, you will accrue a critical hit automatically once per month. It seems to me that this rule should have had a cap to it to preclude automatic maintenance related issues.
 
If you think that flying through space and alternate dimensions in a ship that has a crew that completely refuses to do any maintenance should be just fine, you can do so. But that seems unlikely to me.

I mean, I don't work on spaceships, but I do work on construction equipment and power tools. And they require constant maintenance to clean them, grease bearings, replace oil and other fluids, clean/change filters, and assorted other maintenance. I would not expect them to be running properly if I used them every day for six months without doing any of that.
 
It potentially could happen if the ship is stuck in one system without an Engineer. Or if they are truly lost in space with no source of parts or expertise other than the crew - standard Traveller rules assume docking at a starport a couple of times a maintenance period. That's where the cash spent goes. At some point, they'll run out of something, and fabricators are only going to be good so long before they need more input materials for some critical component than you have left.

But even in those situations, the Referee should be working with the players to avoid the maintenance penalty. It becomes part of the adventure.
 
There are rules for how that works if you want to go that way. Just not actually useful to track "supplies" in most campaigns. If you are going to deliberately put the ship out of normal operating parameters in a major way, you just do those extra steps. Then you are still doing the maintenance and you can, as you pointed out, take steps to maintain the maintenance. You have to be completely out of contact with civilization for a months before you even start getting "past due".

Obviously, if you somehow have a ship with not one person on board with Engineering or Mechanics, that's a problem. But you aren't likely to successfully jump anywhere without an Engineer in the first place. So if you are in a wilderness system with no engineer, you are probably having bigger problems than maintenance failures three months down the road.
 
Maintenance isn't just the jump drive. Maintenance in CT could adversely affect any drive system, as well as trigger misjumps. And in Mongoose, it's ship systems wide risk instead of just affecting power plant, M-Drive, and J-Drive.

As for "only six minutes every fortnight", so what? It's apparently an extremely stressful six minutes that requires the active involvement of a trained Engineer to avoid going badly wrong. Which wasn't always true in CT.
 
You have an engineering roll, but that could be just ensuring that the settings are correct.

Current rules say that you need, default, an engineer for every thirty five tonnes of engineering, though legacy indicates that for the smaller starships, you can have a single crewmember look after everything.
 
Condottiere said:
No, but that maintenance could be based on actual usage.

At least, for jump drives.
Click to expand...
If you want you could split that maintenance activity into separate systems. It will still need to be 0.1% per year and you might need to bundle some systems together so anything you skimp on is represented in the critical table, you couldn't skimp on the hull component for example as there is no critical that represents it (unless you ignore the table on CRB p154 and make up your own table).

You might for example allow discrete maintenance for every system on the critical hit table on CRB p170. Instead of either paying all or nothing and randomising the impact, you could instead decide to skip a specific system and if you get the failure, just apply a severity 1 critical to that system instead. You would need to check for failures on every system you skimp on, but it might get you over a cashflow crisis.

Of course repairing that critical hit might be more expensive (especially Hull damage) than just paying for the maintenance. However a good (or lucky) mechanic/engineer might be able to fix stuff with spares for less than the maintenance cost if you are willing to gamble. For small craft with only a few hull points, you probably want to at least keep up to date on that as losing D6 of them will make your ship fall apart.

I have been ruling that if you miss maintenance periods, you need to pay for those missing maintenance periods to fully reset the clock e.g. if I skip 3 maintenance periods I am rolling 2D+3 trying to avoid an 8. If I pay for this months maintenance I don't reset, I still need to roll at 2D+3 next period. Only if I conduct the current maintenance plus pay to catchup on the 3 I missed do I stop rolling for failures. I could pay double and reduce the DM by 1 each time, or pay 4 times the normal maintenance cost and clear the deficit entirely.

I'd also like to see the chance of developing a negative quirk on systems but I am not sure there is anything in the rules to use as a guide rail. Also these things failing at maintenance time is a bit convenient, it might be more fun if they failed at a random time after missing the maintenance, likely when the system is being stressed.

"Sorry Captain, that worn jump capacitor has blown. Were stuck out here until we can get it fixed."
"We can't be sitting out at the jump point wasting time and money. Why didn't you warn me this could happen?"
"I did, two months ago, remember, during the last maintenance period. You wanted to get that speculative cargo instead".
"Well, why didn't you fix it before now?"
"You told me to fix it when it was broke. I don't get broke sitting on the pad."
"How long would it take you to fix it?"
"Oh a few hours... if we had the parts."
"... Do we not have the parts?"
"Remember that speculative cargo last month?..."
 
Last edited:
Each use of the jump drive could require you to break down the engine, check the structure of the lanthanum coils, ensure there are no flaws in your zuchai crystals, ensure none of the power conduits have degraded due to the current flowing through them, the liquid hydrogen hasn't caused degradation of valves, pumps etc. etc.

The engine is on for six minutes but then requires hours of maintenance to be safely used again, such maintenance mostly being done while in jump space....
 
Sigtrygg said:
Each use of the jump drive could require you to break down the engine, check the structure of the lanthanum coils, ensure there are no flaws in your zuchai crystals, ensure none of the power conduits have degraded due to the current flowing through them, the liquid hydrogen hasn't caused degradation of valves, pumps etc. etc.

The engine is on for six minutes but then requires hours of maintenance to be safely used again, such maintenance mostly being done while in jump space....
Click to expand...
How about Xpress boats?
 
Sigtrygg said:
Each use of the jump drive could require you to break down the engine, check the structure of the lanthanum coils, ensure there are no flaws in your zuchai crystals, ensure none of the power conduits have degraded due to the current flowing through them, the liquid hydrogen hasn't caused degradation of valves, pumps etc. etc.

The engine is on for six minutes but then requires hours of maintenance to be safely used again, such maintenance mostly being done while in jump space....
Click to expand...
I thought the drives was on throughout the jump so you worked on the M-Drive then. On the in-system leg and on the ground was when you worked on the Jump drive.

Not saying you are wrong, this may have been covered in a book I don't have?
 
swordtart said:
I thought the drives was on throughout the jump so you worked on the M-Drive then. On the in-system leg and on the ground was when you worked on the Jump drive.

Not saying you are wrong, this may have been covered in a book I don't have?
Click to expand...

Yes, the jump drive maintains the jump field bubble during the jump. This maintains a bubble of "normal space" around the ship, keeping the strange physics of jumpspace at bay. Should the jump drive's lanthanum grid fail during jump it all goes "Event Horizon."
 
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