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I think the MT design sequence was a valiant attempt.
If it were done today with interweb feedback a lot of the problems could have been fixed.

Armour has to take up internal volume.

Starship powerplants having an additional scale efficiency.

You end up with FF&S - which is what happened when the GDW staff fixed most of the MT issues, jump fuel wouldn't be returned to normal until T4 FF&S.

If you want to see a simplified version of FF&S take a look at GT ISW ship design.
 
I think the MT design sequence was a valiant attempt.
If it were done today with interweb feedback a lot of the problems could have been fixed.
Yes.
Armour has to take up internal volume.
No. That's a design choice. But I gave you a way to do it in MegaT.
Starship powerplants having an additional scale efficiency.
As I showed, the only difference between MegaT and HG plants is fuel efficiency, not an overall scale efficiency, which can be added back if you want.
You end up with FF&S - which is what happened when the GDW staff fixed most of the MT issues, jump fuel wouldn't be returned to normal until T4 FF&S.

If you want to see a simplified version of FF&S take a look at GT ISW ship design.
I was unmoved by FF&S: it's even more complex than MegaT with even more tech hair splitting. I pass.
 
Remember the design sequence is supposed to scale from vehicles to starships.

Starship performance is volume limited not mass limited.

For vehicles yes, you can just slap more armour panels on the outside.

This makes the vehicle bigger, heavier, and cost more - MT ignores the volume increase.

A 100t starship has to have armour added to it "inside". A 100t ship with 10t of armour has 90 tons left. You can't take a 100t ship, add 10 tons of armour to make a 110t hull without changing the drives to scale with this.
 
I think the MT design sequence was a valiant attempt.
If it were done today with interweb feedback a lot of the problems could have been fixed.

Armour has to take up internal volume.

Starship powerplants having an additional scale efficiency.

You end up with FF&S - which is what happened when the GDW staff fixed most of the MT issues, jump fuel wouldn't be returned to normal until T4 FF&S.

If you want to see a simplified version of FF&S take a look at GT ISW ship design.
Yes, I do think the armoring sequence (not just in Traveller, but you see it in most games with detailed ship design sequences) ignores the fact that the heavier the armor factor is, the beefier the superstructure has to be in order to absorb the impact and channel the energy away. You get a little bit of 'free' armor factor just by the strength of your hull, but very quickly you'd need to start adding percentages of displacement for every armor factor. Or else your super-heavy plate armor collapses because your underlying superstructure cannot handle things.
 
I want to say that I appreciate the back and forth. Despite my view that the decisions made in MT are fine (in the sense that the game is still playable), I understand people not liking the deviations from what came before. Given that I have a lot of this stuff analyzed already, I am working on a way to put MT back to more compatibility with HG. I've already got some interesting results, and if they hold up I may go with these as my new ruleset.

But before I post anything, I want to ask a question of those very familiar with CT rules. Do you agree with the following:

1) Using CT Book 2 1981 and HG Book 5 1980, these do NOT use the same fuel formulas for power plants (not jump drives, those are the same)? Specifically, Book 2 uses 10 tons fuel per PP number (potential), and Book 5 1 ton fuel per energy point (EP), where EP = 1% of hull x PP number.

2) That GDW knew there was a difference and did not care? Multiple times in HG, they mention that ships can still be built using Book 2 but then the Book fuel requirements must be used.

3) That both these rule sets are a bit weird? With Book 2, the same power plant (A) requires 20 tons of fuel in a 100 D-ton ship but 10 tons of fuel in a 200 D-ton ship solely because the 100 D-ton ship can go 2G vs. 1G for the 200 D-ton ship. That's weird, and appears to be because CT doesn't use actual mass in ship rules. For HG, power plants have an unspecified amount of power to run the maneuver drive, and produce 1 EP (= 250 MW) per 1% of hull and times PPnum of excess power to run weapons and computers. This is less weird than Book 2 but the unspecified power running the maneuver drive seems unnecessary.

I'll wait to see if anyone weighs in on these points before I go any further. Thanks!
 
1. correct.
but every version agreed on 10% of hull per jump number
2. it's worse than that, in LBB2 the jump drive is big, while the pp and md are small
in HG the jump drive is small while the md is huge and the pp goes from huge to small over the TLs
3. the only way I can rationalise LBB2 pp fuel is that it is reaction mass, with the m-drive able to reduce the inertial mass of the ship
100t m2 20t of reaction mass
200t m1 10t of reaction mass
The type A drive reduces the inertial mass of a 100t ship by an IMR factor of two, while only reducing the 200t ship by a scale IMR factor of 1
100t m6 60t of reaction mass IMR#6
200t m5 50t of reaction mass IMR#5
100t m4 40t of reaction mass IMR#4
200t m3 30t of reaction mass IMR#3
100t m2 20t of reaction mass IMR#2
200t m1 10t of reaction mass IMR#1

For HG since left over power is used as agility and agility can not be greater than pp or m-d then it makes a bit of sense to say that if you have a pp6 md6 you get agility 6 so you can infer a full factor of EP output is needed per md number.

As it is I think the whole EP concept is a daft idea unless it is actually used during combat - SFB - rather than being something incredibly annoying to track.

Note that agility was another way the MT design sequence screwed up.

Don't ask about MT starship combat because it is so laughable - momentum, never heard of it.
 
OK, thanks for this as always. I'm translating the HG rules into MT and will explain all the assumptions I make.

As per your last 2 points:
Note that agility was another way the MT design sequence screwed up.
Believe it or not, the MT Agility formula is a completely faithful translation from HG that only makes the assumption that 1 D-ton of hull in HG weighs 13.5 tons on average in MT. I can show you the math. The problem between HG and MT is that MT requires you account for all MWs of power, and so you need more power plant in MT to obtain max Agility. This is one of the things I'll be showing in my examples, so don't worry about responding now. The results are pretty interesting!
Don't ask about MT starship combat because it is so laughable - momentum, never heard of it.
Yes, the way they describe tactical movement is just wrong, and my rules restore proper vectored movement. BUT! I can again show you the vector math that if your max acceleration is M Gs, then so long as your total velocity vector is 0.5M or less (i.e. slow!) then you can essentially "forget" the vector math and move in any direction 0.5M hexes or less each turn. This includes "circling in a hex" as MT put it, which sounds crazy based upon vector movement but turns out to be true so long as you are moving slowly enough. This is beyond what I am planning to post, but I can show the math if you'd like. In fact, I'll bet you can figure it out from the description!
 
Oh I know the math behind it, I just don't agree with it since they ignore mass or volume when it suits.

They should have gone with either mass based, volume based or better yet both, but not ignore one of them in one place and another in another place.

Armour - broken
Agility - broken
Power plant size, fuel use call it what you will - broken
Jump fuel - anathema

Each can easily be fixed, but some additional maths is required.
 
Oh I know the math behind it, I just don't agree with it since they ignore mass or volume when it suits.

They should have gone with either mass based, volume based or better yet both, but not ignore one of them in one place and another in another place.

Armour - broken
Agility - broken
Power plant size, fuel use call it what you will - broken
Jump fuel - anathema

Each can easily be fixed, but some additional maths is required.
Yes. Every single one of these will be fixed in my examples, and all acceleration will be mass-based as it should be. It's interesting that MT could have done this given that it has mass for everything but chose not to. Missed opportunity, as you noted.
 
TL;DR: Unless you are very familiar with MegaTraveller and CT High Guard starship construction rules, you can safely ignore all of this!

In preparation for some example starships I will be posting based upon MegaTraveller (MT) rules but modified to retain as much of the CT High Guard (HG) rules as possible, I am posting the conversion rules I am using. You will need to be familiar with both HG and MT. I would appreciate any commentary or error detection so that I may incorporate them into my examples.

HG to MT assumptions (note that ton always means 1000 kg; the volume D-ton will always be specified and equals 13.5 kl):

1) Maneuver Drives (MD) and Power Plants (PP): HG assumes that MDs consume a certain volume of hull per G rating, and PPs of sufficient size will both power the MD and supply excess energy points (EP), and Striker tells us that 1 EP = 250 MW.

In MT, PPs supply some fixed amount of MWs. MDs are constructed from maneuver units with fixed parameters, except for the actual thrust produced. This is because MT wanted to maintain the MD = % of hull logic. We will dispose of this, and by consulting the grav drive data for vehicles, it is easy to see that a maneuver unit (anti-grav or thruster) produces 675 tons of thrust. We will then compute Gs of thrust as (tons of maneuver thrust)/(loaded craft tonnage). This produces interesting results, particularly at high TLs. Note that under this construction, 1G MDs may not be able to land on worlds with gravity > 1G, though Agility would allow it.

1a) Agility: HG Agility (<= max Gs of acceleration) = excess EPs per 100 D-tons of hull. MT Agility = 5.4 x excess MW / loaded tons. While these may seem unrelated, the MT formula is a completely faithful translation of the HG formula assuming that 1 D-ton in HG = 13.5 tons on average in MT. Thus the move from HG to MT is from volume to mass, which is appropriate, and all acceleration calculations in my examples use mass. This produces different results from HG, but they make sense (e.g., lower TL craft require larger PPs to obtain maximum Agility).

1b) Minimum PP Size: In HG, the PP number had to be the larger of the MD number or Jump number. To replicate this, the minimum size of the PP that powers the MD is 67.5 MW per MT jump unit. The PP is assumed to run while in jumpspace and reinforces a 30 day fuel requirement. Such a PP may have excess MWs vis a vis the MD and thus might add to Agility.

2) Fuel Usage: MT PP fuel consumption is much higher than HG, and so jump fuel was reduced to compensate. For these examples, we restore the HG jump fuel requirement of 10% hull volume x jump number. It turns out that once a MT PP is at least 1 D-ton and gets the full 3x efficiency bonus, MT PPs and HG PPs are almost identical with respect to MW, tons, and D-tons. Only fuel consumption is different: MT fusion PPs consume 6.67x the fuel of HG PPs. Thus, all that is required to replicate HG is to multiply MT fuel consumption by 0.15. I'm still debating whether this should apply to all fusion PPs, including vehicles, but I might do so given the alternative of fuel cells produces interesting tradeoffs (this is otherwise beyond the scope of this exercise).

3) Armor Volume: There is a strong view that armor ought to take up hull space. I'm adding this back though honestly it does not matter much for adventure class ships. It is likely much more meaningful for capital ships, which may feature in later examples.

In HG, armor A is a factor starting at 0. Armor takes up V(1+A)% of hull volume, where V=4 for TL 7-9, 3 for TL 10-11, 2 for TL 12-13, and 1 for TL 14-15. For MT, the minimum Armor Factor is 40 for spacecraft, corresponding to a mass multiplier of 33.6 for hard steel in Striker (and MT). Let A be our Armor Factor >40 and M the corresponding mass multiplier. Then armor takes up the following percentage of the hull: [8 x Armor Type Mass Multiplier x M/33.6]%. The corresponding V values for MT are 3.5 for TL 7, 2.8 for TL 9, 2.5 for TL 10, 2.1 for TL 12, and 1.1 for TL 14, so rather close overall and more generous at lower TLs. The advantage of this MT method is we can compute armor density and perhaps use that.

4) Bridge: HG imposed a 2% of hull volume bridge requirement, 20 D-tons minimum. I am using a more flexible rule via Duty Stations. A Duty Station is 2 D-tons (like a small stateroom), and all starships require a minimum of (10/active crew) Duty Stations. The active crew requirement is based upon the MT rules for crew count and could produce deviations from the 2% of hull requirement, which I think is fine given the better model of Duty Stations. But for ships <=1000 D-ton, the bridge is always 20 D-tons (10 Duty Stations).

5) Computers: HG computers were gigantic, likely including other systems like control panels, comms, and sensors. In MT, the latter systems are explicit and computers are much smaller. We use the MT rules without modification, which likely results in lower overall volume than HG.

Are there any other conversions I am missing? Thanks!
 
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Looks interesting but I hate the MT displacement ton being based on deck plan squares rather than the volume of one ton of liquid hydrogen.
14 cubic metres or 500 cubic feet is the most common volume of one displacement ton across all Traveller editions.
 
Is it worth sticking this in a new thread?
Sure, next time I post I'll make it a new thread. As for the D-ton, 13.5 tons is too embedded in MT to change it. Even MWM uses it in T5. You are free to multiply all kl volumes by 14/13.5 = 1.037 ;)
 
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