Simultaneous Starship Combat and personal Combat

[allanimal]

The PCs in the game I am running went poking around at a mining base that wasn't responding to any hails. When they arrived, there was an unexpected starship docked at the base, and decided to fire on it. They got a few good shots in on the ship and now have docked at the base as well.

Thing is, they didn't disable the starships... The session ended with the players intending to storm and liberate the base. There is still a gunner in the turret with a functional beam laser, who will have to deal with serious range penalties and cover (the dome of the base obstructs part of the PCs ship.) but it basically means we may have personal level combat and starship level combat at the same time.

Rounds are 6 seconds in personal combat while starship combat is 6 minutes. So the gunner will get a shot every 60 rounds of personal combat (6 minutes * 60 seconds/ minute * 1 round / 6 seconds)
How would you handle this - gunner is out of play for 60 rounds (effectively the whole combat) unless the PCs get to his turret?
Gunner's side space initiative was higher than the player's, so he gets a shot off in the combat phase of starship combat and PCs can't go in until the ship action phase (crew movement)?

Any ideas? When, if it hits, would the beam laser damage take effect?

Has anyone ever done this? Advice? Is this mentioned in a book somewhere that I have missed?

 

[Annatar Giftbringer]

Well, in mercenary 1st edition, starships weapons deal 50x their normal damage upon personal scale targets, but may only fire every three rounds.

In mercenary 2nd edition, the damage was scaled down to 10x, but capable of firing every round.

Both systems could work along side each other, representing different firepower settings or simply changing depending on what the GM finds suitable at the moment.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

The PCs in the game I am running went poking around at a mining base that wasn't responding to any hails. When they arrived, there was an unexpected starship docked at the base, and decided to fire on it. They got a few good shots in on the ship and now have docked at the base as well.

Thing is, they didn't disable the starships... The session ended with the players intending to storm and liberate the base. There is still a gunner in the turret with a functional beam laser, who will have to deal with serious range penalties and cover (the dome of the base obstructs part of the PCs ship.) but it basically means we may have personal level combat and starship level combat at the same time.

Rounds are 6 seconds in personal combat while starship combat is 6 minutes. So the gunner will get a shot every 60 rounds of personal combat (6 minutes * 60 seconds/ minute * 1 round / 6 seconds)
How would you handle this - gunner is out of play for 60 rounds (effectively the whole combat) unless the PCs get to his turret?
Gunner's side space initiative was higher than the player's, so he gets a shot off in the combat phase of starship combat and PCs can't go in until the ship action phase (crew movement)?

Any ideas? When, if it hits, would the beam laser damage take effect?

Has anyone ever done this? Advice? Is this mentioned in a book somewhere that I have missed?

I see this scene like it was an action movie I'm watching. So I role-play everything in real-time accordingly. Remember, Mongoose Traveller is not a simulator.

 

[allanimal]

I like both responses so far - just play it out as it feels right and everyone is having fun.
The Mercenary 2nd Ed rules sound great - the gunner still gets a go every turn, and can react as the situation evolves.

Now I just have to decide how bad of a miss he needs to make before the shot hits the dome of the base instead of the other ship...

 

[vladthemad]

Both ships are docked, and they are leaving their ship unattended? How hard it is to hit a stationary target the size of a traveller ship at point blank range! Even if partially obscured. Use the taking extra time rules if you feel he should roll at all, so he makes sure has the shot lined up. Is the powerplant off line? If so how's he firing? If not, he could undock and move his ship to a better position. If you want to be really devious, while they are storming the base he could don a vac suit (or any vehicle that might be on his ship) and head over to their ship and board it. Set an ambush on their ship or possibly sabotage it...or simply undock it and set it adrift. I'd say steal it, but traveller has noted a few times that it's not all that easy to get past the computer lockouts on the bridge to do so. He could also vent all their fuel, or any other number of things to make them think twice about leaving the ship empty. You could also have him autodestruct his ship before he evacuates in some sort of small craft. Throw that at them half way into some firefight. Klaxons are going off when an explosion rocks the mining base and all the power starts shutting down. There goes gravity and the lights. The firefight just got a lot more interesting...

 

[nats]

If you mean its an enemy NPC at the gun of the enemy ship firing at the players ship they wont know anything about it till they hear a large bang when he hits their ship assuming they can hear it from where they are. So it would be a matter of telling them of the bang and asking what they do - go back or carry on. Then tell them what has happened to their ship when they return.

Or alternatively he hits the dome and is decompression in the base. But I dont think a gunner would actually risk that kind of situation. He would probably stop firing once the players ship is obscured.

Either way its all done in role playing not combat phases. Only go to combat phase when meeting enemy soldiers in the base.

 

[Epicenter]

I always imagined that in Traveller, lasers do not actually just fire a single beam in a space combat turn. Instead, they're firing multiple times, even beam lasers due to the difficulties of hitting things at space combat ranges. The RoF instead represents the "best chance to hit" shots of the laser in question. So lasers can easily have RoFs like 1:3 or even 1:1.

While this might seem deadly for the players... there's solutions:

The starship cannot fire

The reason is that a starship's lasers are designed to fire at targets hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. At such a distance, exacting precision is required to track and pinpoint a target so absurdly far away as Traveller demands space combat to occur at. However, at such vast distances, the actual perceived delta-V to the laser is minuscule, even a ship moving at thousands of kilometers an hour meanders along fairly lazily at a range of a few thousand kilometers.

Over the years, starship weaponry manufacturers have taken this into account when designing their low-cost weapons-mounts that everyone wants: The actual tracking speed of the turrets is very bad at the ranges you're talking about in your scene, because lasers aren't intended to be fired at such a range. A person who is running at a perpendicular angle to the laser can easily outrun the tracking speed of the turret, which is designed to be a stable, super-precise aiming platform ... for fire against target hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.

The laser can fire but it has accuracy issues

The turret can be de-coupled from the long-range range-finder and stabilization gear of course, in which case it'd track much faster, but then the fire from the turret would most likely be cinematic - inaccurate as space combat lasers are unlikely to have "iron sights" on them for firing over the bore, since no starship combat ever takes place at such ridiculously short ranges. Even if you have space combat take place at Stupidly Short Range for Traveller (World War 2 visual range), starship lasers would be set-up to shoot down aircraft - they'd require firing solutions and tracking using sensors designed to target aircraft, not people moving around among ground clutter, constantly moving in and out of cover. So the gunner would basically be aiming this thing by hand, without any kind of aim assitance so his chances of hitting anyone would be very slim ... making it a cinematic threat.

Especially if the enemy gunner realizes after point that trying to hit players is pointless and starts doing things like aiming at that big, juicy hydrogen storage tank the players are near, or trying to chop through the roof of the place they're taking over in to make it fall on them, but that's more conventional threats that I think you as a GM (and as players) could deal with.

 

[SSWarlock]

I always imagined that in Traveller, lasers do not actually just fire a single beam in a space combat turn. Instead, they're firing multiple times, even beam lasers due to the difficulties of hitting things at space combat ranges. The RoF instead represents the "best chance to hit" shots of the laser in question. So lasers can easily have RoFs like 1:3 or even 1:1.

While this might seem deadly for the players... there's solutions...

Oh, I like this. Simple yet effective and provides material for Gunnery skill rolls in terms of laying the laser to cover the target or remembering/performing the decoupling successfully. Well done.