I barely touched T4 as a rules set so take things with a grain of salt, but I didn't think they actually did "distributed power" the way T5 does. The term fusion+ has been bandied about for a long time, but the idea of ships having individual F+ power for each system discretely has not afaik. But maybe this cold is just scrambling my brain.
Muster out with a scout ship - A question
- Thread starter 23Weasels
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MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
I wouldn't assume that.
SOM page 124
"Most power plants have multiple reactors, primarily to allow for partial function should damage or accident disable one, but this allows an engineer to shut one down for maintenance while the others remain active."
Bolding mine.
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
OK, so you would assume every ship in known space has exactly ten reactors, to account for the crit results?
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
It's the logical conclusion.
I believe GURPS did this conceptually by including the "power slice", the needed power production, into most components.
CordwainerFish
Emperor Mongoose
As I understand it, Fusion+ is just a fusion generator with a friendly user interface - plus DRM and fail-on-tamper systems.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
One thing you don't want to do is run out of power, in the middle of nowhere.
Your options shrink if it's in space, and drastically, in the middle of a transition.
Your options shrink if it's in space, and drastically, in the middle of a transition.
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
I would assume that most ships have multiple reactors, as stated in SOM, and that the writers wrote that 10% and 50% thing as a simplification. The same way that mortgage is a simplification for what in real life would be way more complicated and involved. Interest, proper paperwork, insurance, bills of lading, bills of sale, what is involved in getting your ship declared spaceworthy, etc. It is not a simulation so much as an approximation.
Hell, We don't even know for sure if any of these rules apply to NPC ships or just to PC ships, because the entirety of the CRB is player-focused, not world-focused. As far as I can tell, no rules in the CRB actually apply to NPCs. The Trade section doesn't. Apparently, the character creation section doesn't, since I have been repeatedly told on here that NPCs do not use Careers. Shall I go on or are these examples sufficient?
If you are looking for exacting detail within the rules, then Traveller may not be the game for you. Those kinds of specifics just don't exist in Traveller. It is one of the reasons most of us have to write so many house rules or use whatever We can find from other editions.
GURPS was GURPS. It was, overall, more concerned with being compatible with GURPS space than with Traveller's other rules.
This is what T5 says:
I can't actually grok how the damage system in T5 works, so I don't know what effect they think taking out the power plant compartment actually has. Nor is there any reason given why anyone would not be "dispersed." As far as I can tell, it isn't more expensive, complicated to maintain, or otherwise have any disadvantages compared to Centralized. Possibly just an option to be stupid?
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
You'd likely have an electrical grid, that connects them.
It could be broken, isolating one or more power sources.
It could be broken, isolating one or more power sources.
We agree on this, but I would point out that the core book speculative trading rules have always been a narrow focused system designed for small traders. The same rules probably should apply to any NPC small traders - but certainly not big shipping companies (either PC or NPC). Those are hauling large pre-contracted freight loads and well organised passenger services using their far better corporate resources instead of tramping from port to port hoping for a score.
It's a matter of scope. Important NPCs at the PC level can and maybe should be rolled up (it's always been a fun thing to do). But window dressing and spear carriers don't need that level of attention, while high powered ones *can't* be generated that way. Trillionaires and Sovereign Queens exist, but you can't just roll one up using the prior career sequence.
And yes, it makes absolute sense that drives that can be manufactured as several units would usually be installed that way. A few standard models with interchangable parts. Jump dives might be the exception there; just as you can't get the same penetration from twin cannons as you can from a bigger cannon of the same mass, you might actually need the core of the J-Drive to be one unit to get higher jumps. But parallel power plants and thrusters pass the pub test.
More importantly, the core book speculative trading rules were intended to drive adventures, not be a primary activity. Mind you, they did a terrible job of explaining that and it's only gotten worse over the decades. But the Traveller Adventure shows what they thought the trading system looked like in play.
You go to the world and find out it has oodles of fancy wine....but it's available because you have to get the permits on the downlow and load the stuff without competitors noticing.
You go to the world and the dice say "fancy wood" and you get to zip off to the dangerous hinterland to actually get it.
And so on. You don't just show up at the 'speculative goods shop' and buy stuff, ready to ship to the next planet over where no one but you realizes it sells for 400x what you buy it for here.
All the processes (check for legal harassment, check for ship encounters, check for patrons, check for random encounters, check for speculative goods, etc) are designed to drive ADVENTURE. They are intrinsically incomplete. The trade rules have no hassles, no competitors, no fog of trade, nothing if taken at face value. Because the original design assumed you were using them as prompts for generating stories, not as end goals.
But as gaming moved away from procedural processes as a core element of play, these became increasingly orphaned within the rules and came to just be instant fortune generation systems.
You go to the world and find out it has oodles of fancy wine....but it's available because you have to get the permits on the downlow and load the stuff without competitors noticing.
You go to the world and the dice say "fancy wood" and you get to zip off to the dangerous hinterland to actually get it.
And so on. You don't just show up at the 'speculative goods shop' and buy stuff, ready to ship to the next planet over where no one but you realizes it sells for 400x what you buy it for here.
All the processes (check for legal harassment, check for ship encounters, check for patrons, check for random encounters, check for speculative goods, etc) are designed to drive ADVENTURE. They are intrinsically incomplete. The trade rules have no hassles, no competitors, no fog of trade, nothing if taken at face value. Because the original design assumed you were using them as prompts for generating stories, not as end goals.
But as gaming moved away from procedural processes as a core element of play, these became increasingly orphaned within the rules and came to just be instant fortune generation systems.
