Should maned small combat crafts be deleted from chartered space?

[Maxijohndoe]

I think people don't realise how quickly meatbag pilots can be turned out.

During WW2 around 1.5 million aircrew with around 500,000 pilots were trained, and more pilots died during training that were in service prior to the war.

The USA had 450,000 aircrew in the pipeline for 1945 but cut back the numbers once it appeared that the war would end and they wouldn't be needed.

Fighters are small craft and can be made at any A-C Starport assuming you have supplies, although fabricators probably mean you can make most part in situ.

This makes fighters a quickly produced local defense option.

In part I think the issue is that the people writing the source books have never really looked in depth at fleet combat or what would actually occur during an event like the FFW.

I could see a lot of Imperial systems quickly making fighters and putting drafted pilots into them to defend against raiders like the Vargr. A SDB might be more capable but it needs more resources to manufacture and more crew.

Also given the vast differences in TLs, population and resources different systems can have you can't easily apply a standard across the board.

So a TL 15 system with a lot of industry might be churning out a mass of craft with ship brains, robotic crews and swarms of unmanned drones, while a TL 11 system might be fabricating fighters and torpedo boats.

Fleet battles are rare compared to facing off against raiders and Travellers are unlikely to be part of a fleet battle (POD's final battle might count), so going into great detail about how fighters could be used in a fleet engagement is more of an academic pursuit.

 

[Sigtrygg]

It’s called space that’s the factor. Capital ships with J4 M6 are already under gunned and light on defense you want to make them even weaker? Yea you can make a capital ship with M9 but what are you sacrificing to get that? Defenses? Weapons? Jump? It has nothing to do with legacy and everything to do with space costs?

A capital ship has a lot more available volume for drives than a fighter, the grandfathered designs are just very poor compared with what you could do with the construction rules in HG2022. Imperial TL15 warships could all be built with M9 and a much better weapon load out going by the rules as written.

I think another point needs to be made. There’s been a big push by some people to robotize everything in Traveller, robot crews that do everything, robot troops, robots stewards. Can you do this sure but it’s not Traveller it’s Robots in Space and if that’s the game you want to play have at it but my players actually like having to do things instead of sitting back and letting the Robots do it. There comes a point when you have to say this is a RPG and having things that are not quite optimized is a good thing because in Traveller it’s possible to optimize your PCs out of the game.

Then the rules need to be kept separate from the setting. As things stand Matt has said anything iin any MgT book is allowed in the Charted Space setting. I think that destroys the setting integrity and introduces problems especially in light of the Robots book. But then there are cybernetic enhancements, biological augmentation, all sorts of PC scale upgrades which should be routine within the Imperial military.