Mongoose Traveller - Aurora-class Starfury

[pasuuli]

I'm going to push against the borders of design a little.

Egads this is an expensive fighter. A good chunk of the cost is from software. I presume EarthForce subcontracts out to have it written once and installed everywhere. I also assume it's not "Windows Vista 2240" or whatever.


Vehicle: Aurora-class Starfury
TL: 10
Skill: Pilot(spacecraft)
Agility: +2 (??)

                Volume   Cost(MCr)    Notes
Hull Volume      50        1

Crystaliron 16   10        0.25       Reflec, Self-sealing
M-drive A         2        4          1000G (see notes), pow req = 1
P-plant J        28       72          5/60 pow 
P-plant fuel      1        -          12 hours 100% load (see notes)
Model/3           -        3          Hardened
- Evade/1                  1          r10
- Evade/2                  2          r15
- FC/1                     2          r5
- FC/2                     4          r10
- Auto-rep/1               5          r10
Basic Military    2        1
Pulse laser-10    1        0.75       Fixed fore.  x1+1, pow req = 3 (see notes)
Pulse laser-10    1        0.75       Fixed fore.  x1+1, pow req = 3
Pulse laser-7     1        0.5        Fixed aft.  x1, pow req = 3
Pulse laser-7     1        0.5        Fixed aft.  x1, pow req = 3
Cutting laser     1        0.5        Fixed.  x1, pow req = 1, contact range (see notes)
Missile Rack      1        0.25       x1, Fusion
Cockpit           1        ?

TOTAL COST            MCr 98.5

NOTES:

Volume should actually be ??

From some websites, B5 Starfuries appear to have Space Operatic performance;
therefore, I multiply acceleration by 100.

If the power plant is allowed to throttle back when not firing lasers,
fuel duration extends to a maximum of nearly 1 week.

Oodles of fixed emplacements. This is how the Starfury is done.

I decided to require 1 ton for each fixed gun. Seems to easy to make it bristle otherwise.

I'm banking on the idea that the power plant will have a full charge by
the time it begins an engagement. That gives it maybe 30 combat rounds
of maneuver + firing any two guns nonstop before it starts to "show fatigue". If we need more than that, we'll add a bigger power plant, all right?

The "cutting laser" is an innovation.

A real issue is that the weapons I think are supposed to be plasma.

 

[Valarian]

Nice start, but a bit off in terms of the B5 design.

The hull/armour should be standard military grade, it's anything but self-sealing. That's why the pilots wear pressure suits. Crystal-Iron sounds like something the Minbari would have, not the Earth Alliance.

The acceleration comes from afterburners. These are limited use and consume fuel quickly if used a lot.

The weapons are two heavy Plasma Cannons (forward arc and fire linked), and two lighter rapid fire Plasma Cannons (again forward arc and fire linked) for point defence. The lighter cannons are located above and either side of the cockpit, on the wing junctions. The heavy cannons are below the pilot's feet. There are no aft firing weapons, the 'Fury can easily pivot to fire in the aft arc. The engine placements (on the ends of the wings) allow the 'Fury a high degree of maneuverability.

There's no cutting laser, but there is a grapple.

There are no missiles on the Aurora, the StarFuries with missiles are the Badgers and Thunderbolts (twin cockpit jobs).

 

[pasuuli]

Nice start, but a bit off in terms of the B5 design.

The hull/armour should be standard military grade, it's anything but self-sealing. That's why the pilots wear pressure suits. Crystal-Iron sounds like something the Minbari would have, not the Earth Alliance.

The acceleration comes from afterburners. These are limited use and consume fuel quickly if used a lot.

The weapons are two heavy Plasma Cannons (forward arc and fire linked), and two lighter rapid fire Plasma Cannons (again forward arc and fire linked) for point defence. The lighter cannons are located above and either side of the cockpit, on the wing junctions. The heavy cannons are below the pilot's feet. There are no aft firing weapons, the 'Fury can easily pivot to fire in the aft arc. The engine placements (on the ends of the wings) allow the 'Fury a high degree of maneuverability.

There's no cutting laser, but there is a grapple.

There are no missiles on the Aurora, the StarFuries with missiles are the Badgers and Thunderbolts (twin cockpit jobs).

Thanks for this! That's extremely helpful!

I also noticed an error in my M-drive assumptions - this craft was originally 20 tons, and I never upgraded the drive. Thanks to your afterburner explanation, maybe I can just use Traveller rules plus an afterburner rule to get the desired effect.

The revised version:

Smallcraft: Aurora-class Starfury
TL: 9
Skill: Pilot(spacecraft)
Agility: +2 (??)

                Volume   Cost(MCr)    Notes
Hull Volume     (50)       1
Titanium-8       10        5.2        Reflec
M-drive-A         2        4          4G, pow req = 1
Afterburner-A     1        4          1000G, pow req = 4 (see notes)
P-plant J        31       80          5/66 pow
P-plant fuel      1        -          12 hours 100% load (see notes)
Model/3           -        3          Hardened
- Evade/1                  1          r10
- Evade/2                  2          r15
- FC/1                     2          r5
- FC/2                     4          r10
- Auto-rep/1               5          r10
Basic Military    2        1
Triple Turret     1        1
- Twin plasma cannon-10    3          x1+4, pow req = 6 (see notes)
- Twin plasma cannon-9     2          x1+2, pow req = 4 (see notes)
- Grapple                  0.1   (see notes)
Cockpit           1        ?
Spare             1

TOTAL COST           MCr 118.3

NOTES:

Volume should actually be ??

New equipment:

   Afterburner:  
      Volume: half that of the maneuver drive it serves.
      Cost: same as the maneuver drive it serves.
      Power:  four times that of the maneuver drive it serves.
      Effect: Multiplies acceleration by 250.
      Rationale: A feature of Starfuries.

   Plasma weapons:
      I've postulated two plasma cannons, at relatively low TLs.  The
      damage and power requirement is basically like hopped-up pulse
      lasers, so there's work needed to make them distinctive, I think.

   Grapple:
      This is a total wild guess.  It's packaged into a gun slot so it won't
      take up extra space.

Power plant fuel use:
   If the power plant is allowed to throttle back when not firing lasers,
   fuel duration extends to a maximum of nearly 1 week.

Fire-linked weapons:
   I decided the way to do this close to Traveller is to list fire-linked
   weapons as a single gun, when in reality it's a battery of two guns.
   This allowed me to preserve the single-double-triple turret motif of
   Traveller and still have a Starfury.
   
Power:
   I'm banking on the idea that the power plant will have a full charge by
   the time it begins an engagement. That gives it at least 30 and as many 
   as 60 combat rounds of maneuver + firing any two guns nonstop before it 
   starts to "show fatigue". If we need more than that, we can try to 
   squeeze in a bigger power plant, but I dunno...

 

[pasuuli]

The "new equipment" are arguably all military.

They should therefore go into Mongoose High Guard.

However, the Afterburner might have to be noted as non-standard. I'm not sure. I know Traveller never intended 1000G bursts of speed for fighters like this, and even though this is a generic ruleset, there are implied rules.

What's the best way to handle this, assuming I want Starfuries in my Traveller game, but don't want to have to explicitly state that afterburners don't work there? How can default assumptions work when we've got multiple settings???

 

[pasuuli]

How about this: make Afterburners a modifier of M-drives, just like /fib is a modifier on the computer.

Yeah, that works!

* Afterburner. For settings which support this, improves drive performance x250, with x5 power, +50% volume, and x2 cost.

Yep, that's the solution.

 

[hdrider67]

Cool stuff.

I'm going to try to find some time this weekend to put together a LAC and maybe the mother Q ship that would carry it.

One of the things I would like to do is create some Honor Harrington-esque big ships for local color.

That reminds me. I wonder how hard it would be to star out some Mazers and Grazers.

 

[pasuuli]

Cool stuff.

I'm going to try to find some time this weekend to put together a LAC and maybe the mother Q ship that would carry it.

One of the things I would like to do is create some Honor Harrington-esque big ships for local color.

That reminds me. I wonder how hard it would be to star out some Mazers and Grazers.

Similarly the SST carrier ships.

But, what I really want to see is a Vorchan Cruiser.

B5 is an acid test for Traveller starship design, because there are many differences. Making sure that Traveller can accommodate them on some level shows that it can be generic without losing its identity.

Honor Harrington might be similar in that regard?


But SST's RPG is very light on spacecraft, so very few assumptions would have to change, and those probably on how the maneuver drive and jump drive behave. But that might be trivially easy. When it's not easy, then you might need a rule added to Mongoose High Guard as a least-intrusive adapter. Usually such things would not make the rules harder to use, either - they'd usually just add to the variety of options, which is good for a generic game to have, and a flag stating that this is an optional rule I guess.

 

[pasuuli]

And remember, the key to all this is to change as little as possible. What I really want is to port a ship design from one universe to another. Pit a squadron of Vorchans against a squadron of Plankwells, for example.

 

[hdrider67]

Honor Harrington might be similar in that regard?

HH is a personal preference. It's a series of novels that amount to Horatio Hornblower in space. There's no RPG for it (though Ed Astra had an abortive attempt at it) so I can write the design from the ground up.

The big differences are the acknowledgment in the HH series that space is big, really big. Large missiles are launched from light minutes away and energy weapons, though devastating are used in knife fighting range (which is still far by traveller standards).

I won't need *that* many changes. Just to weapons and tactics. Traveller is well suited to the ship model I'll need for ships of the wall.

If you're curious, the first several books in the series are on Baen. David Weber is the author and "On Basilisk Station" is the first book.

Careful, though. I know people who got addicted to reading about Honor.

 

[Valarian]

I think the afterburner is perhaps a little overdone. Possibly a doubling of the M-Drive rating for short periods, so the 4-G would become 8-G for three rounds or so. In the B5 game, they allow the ship to move forward or back two range increments rather than one.

 

[Deniable]

A human can tolerate 8G without compensators for a short time, but 1000G may be painful.

 

[Valarian]

A human can tolerate 8G without compensators for a short time, but 1000G may be painful.

... not to mention messy. There's no way I want to clean that cockpit out.

The afterburner is still reaction thrust. It's not a gravitic technology. The pilots wear pressure/space suits while in the cockpit. An afterburner effect of 1000G without the effects of a gravitic sump (inertial compensator), would turn your pilot in to mush.

This is the trouble with thinking of technology in the terms of the Traveller game. Usually in Traveller, all spacefaring races have gravitics. From this the Traveller ship gets artificial gravity and the ability to compensate for rapid change of direction. In the B5 universe, only the Centauri and Minbari (among the younger races) have full use of this technology. The other races use either a primitive form (e.g. Vree / Narn) or have to use other means (e.g. Brakiri use of acceleration and Earthforce rotating sections).

 

[pasuuli]

Valerian,

I was taking my afterburner data from a fansite, so it might be wrong. I don't know the actual numbers. If someone could help out here, I'd appreciate it.

And I decided that the "afterburner" should be just built-into the maneuver drive on fighters. That makes the ship 100% transportable between a Traveller setting and a B5 setting.

 

[pasuuli]

Revised version, tweaked to remove explicit afterburner (it's implicit to B5 Starfuries, or something like that) and reduced its effect.

Smallcraft: Aurora-class Starfury
TL: 9
Skill: Pilot(spacecraft)
Agility: +2 (??)

                Volume   Cost(MCr)    Comment
Hull Volume     (50)       1
Titanium-8       10        5.2        Reflec
M-drive-A         2        4          4G, pow req = 1 (see notes)
P-plant J        31       80          5/66 pow
P-plant fuel      1        -          12 hours 100% load (see notes)
Model/3           -        3          Hardened
- Evade/1                  1          r10
- Evade/2                  2          r15
- FC/1                     2          r5
- FC/2                     4          r10
- Auto-rep/1               5          r10
Basic Military    2        1
Triple Turret     1        1
- Twin plasma cannon-10    3          x1+4, pow req = 6 (see notes)
- Twin plasma cannon-9     2          x1+2, pow req = 4 (see notes)
- Grapple                  0.1   (see notes)
Cockpit           1        ?
Spare             2

TOTAL COST           MCr 114.3

NOTES:

Volume should actually be ??

New equipment:

   Afterburner: BUILT INTO STARFURY M-DRIVE.
      Power:  Needs four times that of the maneuver drive.
      Effect: Doubles acceleration.
      Rationale: A feature of Starfuries.

   Plasma weapons:
      I've postulated two plasma cannons, at relatively low TLs.  The
      damage and power requirement is basically like hopped-up pulse
      lasers, so there's work needed to make them distinctive, I think.

   Grapple:
      This is a total wild guess.  It's packaged into a gun slot so it won't
      take up extra space.

Power plant fuel use:
   If the power plant is allowed to throttle back when not firing lasers,
   fuel duration extends to a maximum of nearly 1 week.

Fire-linked weapons:
   I decided the way to do this close to Traveller is to list fire-linked
   weapons as a single gun, when in reality it's a battery of two guns.
   This allowed me to preserve the single-double-triple turret motif of
   Traveller and still have a Starfury.
   
Power:
   I'm banking on the idea that the power plant will have a full charge by
   the time it begins an engagement. That gives it at least 30 and as many
   as 60 combat rounds of maneuver + firing any two guns nonstop before it
   starts to "show fatigue". If we need more than that, we can try to
   squeeze in a bigger power plant, but I dunno...

 

[Lorcan Nagle]

There are no missiles on the Aurora, the StarFuries with missiles are the Badgers and Thunderbolts (twin cockpit jobs).

As a slight nitpick, Auroras are shown using missiles in Thirdspace, so there's some evidence to support mission-specific missile loads.

 

[Da Boss]

Wanders over from other parts of the forum

interesting reading...............can the space ship building system cope with something so out there as a Shadow Ship.........? Do you want to be able to do this?

just casual questions - no agenda

 

[pasuuli]

There are no missiles on the Aurora, the StarFuries with missiles are the Badgers and Thunderbolts (twin cockpit jobs).

As a slight nitpick, Auroras are shown using missiles in Thirdspace, so there's some evidence to support mission-specific missile loads.

Hmmm, perhaps some of these ships replace the grapple with a missile launcher.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Wanders over from other parts of the forum

interesting reading...............can the space ship building system cope with something so out there as a Shadow Ship.........? Do you want to be able to do this?

just casual questions - no agenda

Biotech is WAY beyond what Traveller was originally envisioned for. My guess is that when the B5 book comes out, advanced (TL 16+) design sequences will exist for Vorlon and Shadow ships. Minbari and all the other Younger Races, should be able to be designed with the basic Traveller system with some minor tweaks (like to CG for some races).

It will be very interesting to see how Mongoose maps a Biotech ship using the Traveller rules. The idea of needing a human pilot interfaced with the ship directly is not something that Traveller has needed before, but a BIOcomputer might be a nice addition that would cover that topic.

 

[pasuuli]

Wanders over from other parts of the forum

interesting reading...............can the space ship building system cope with something so out there as a Shadow Ship.........? Do you want to be able to do this?

just casual questions - no agenda

I most definitely want to do this.

Yes, the system can certainly cope with bio-design; it's basically a high-tech add-on. As Rikki-Tikki mentioned, a "biological components" rule would help facilitate this, probably replacing the computer and its programs with a bio-computer, and alternately swapping in a character and his skills.

Heck, characters in MGT already have the equivalent of datajacks available. Wouldn't take much to plug someone into a ship if it had an adapter.

Shall we discuss how tech levels map to B5?

Earth Alliance covers low tech levels. I'm thinking TL10 or 11.
Narn and Centauri are perhaps TL11 and/or TL12.
Minbari of course would be TL15.
Vorlon and Shadows would be TL20 as a guesstimate.

At TL20 you can do marvelous things. Startling agility. Cheap, clean antimatter power and weapons. Disintegrators, tractors and pressors, lots of fun stuff. White globes, too, I think.

 

[AKAramis]

No... by standard TL's, the Earth Alliance is TL9. TL 10 has artificial gravity.

Neither Minbari nor Vorlon have matter transporters nor disintigrators, so they're not much above 16.

I'd put season 1-3 EA at 9, Vorlons and shadows at 16, Minbari at 14-15
Narn at 10-11, Centauri at 11.