Mercenary, Heavy Weapons.

[GamerDude]

Then that is the issue - this is not an equipment book. That comes later.

Cool, very cool.

I love what I've seen so far in Merc. Makes for a great mercenary based campaign, which is just what my players were wanting when I was trying to start up a GT campaign (we just couldn't get too many people to play GURPS).

 

[dlpulver]

Loren Wiseman and/or Frank Chadwick wouldn't be bad choices either...

Indeed, for the finished product as long as you don't get them to design a design system. FFnS was fundamentally unusable compared to, say, GURPS Vehicles or 3G3 or VDS ... and especially compared to Stuff.

Phil, you know The Gurps book and FFS are direct relatives, and both play/work out in very similar fashions, so saying one is broke while the other isn't is rather disingenuous. In many hays what Pulver did for Gurp:Vehicles is just as arcane as FFS.

We attempt to keep the arcane in vehicle design!

GURPS Vehicles was most inspired by Frank Chadwick's earlier Striker book (though I fondly recall Ground and Air Equipment for Space Opera as a gear book...) . I remember I was working on Vehicles about the same time FFnS came out and ran into Frank at GenCon, and we had a short but for me, interesting chat about the best way to do design sequences. I've always admired his work - the original Mercenary, even more than Trav itself, was probably the book that got me into science fiction roleplaying.

I haven't seen the new Mercenary book yet, but the tech does sound a bit disappointing in the "Traveller flavor". I always liked how CT's tech managed to feel `real' even when it wasn't (meson guns, etc.)

Does the Traveller Developer's Kit allow for third-party tech supplements?

 

[Infojunky]

Does the Traveller Developer's Kit allow for third-party tech supplements?

I believe it does, and it has been a hot topic around here.

 

[Shiloh]

...no SMG's!!

What were they thinking?!!

Perhaps they were thinking that the SMG was a very short-term niche weapon that within 50 years of its inception had largely been surpassed in usefulness by carbine-framed lower-calibre higher-velocity weapons using rounds with better armour penetration qualities; no one will make an SMG at TL10. And lower TLs will run into imported armour often enough that they'll prefer assault-rifle calibres too.

 

[simonh]

Perhaps they were thinking that the SMG was a very short-term niche weapon that within 50 years of its inception had largely been surpassed in usefulness by carbine-framed lower-calibre higher-velocity weapons using rounds with better armour penetration qualities; no one will make an SMG at TL10. And lower TLs will run into imported armour often enough that they'll prefer assault-rifle calibres too.

As long as handguns are made, people will want ones with higher rates of fire, and those are SMGs.

The only way I can see that assumption breaking is if you can have a handgun with an SMG-like ROF and not enough recoil to require at least the option of a foldable stock. In which case an SMG frame is irelevent. Laser weapons might meet that requirement, but Traveller laser weapons can't get the ROF. The other way would be to fire very light projectiles, for example a gauss pistol that fires flechette style darts. They'd be light enough that the recoil would be low and they'd penetrate armour nicely. Again, Traveller doesn't have such a thing.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Shiloh]

As long as handguns are made, people will want ones with higher rates of fire, and those are SMGs.

That's not the function that an SMG serves. An SMG has three main characteristics:

* Automatic fire, usually with a burst setting for control
* The Ammo capacity to support that RoF
* A compact format. Not pistol-compact, but more compact than an assault rifle.

Pistol-calibre SMGs are defeated by body armour that can stop handgun bullets, and with the proliferation of armour that can do that, they are falling out of use in favour of carbine-frame assault rifles and PDWs like the P90. These look like the Autocarbines of Mercenary.

A handgun's main asset is its portability/inconspicuousness. They are light and easily covered by normal clothing.

 

[Anonymous]

Are the Merc heavy weapons skill broken? Do we not yet have a ruling on what skill covers LMGs for instance? I just checked errata and nothing... 8(

 

[Anonymous]

Wow, not even the basics have been fixed for this product, huh?

 

[Jame Rowe]

Are the Merc heavy weapons skill broken? Do we not yet have a ruling on what skill covers LMGs for instance? I just checked errata and nothing... 8(

For me, an LMG is fired using the Rifles skill; GMPGs, MMGs and HMGs are fired with Heavy Weapons.

 

[Colin]

Central Supply Catalogue fixes most, if not all, of the weapon issues, and adds a whole load of more stuff. Should these weapons have been fixed as errata for Mercenary? Yeah, probably.

CSC has submachineguns, too.