Tangential Rant - When New Canon Rules Break The Game

[alex_greene]

Just bringing this rant over from this thread here to where it belongs.

A recent update to the canon Traveller rules just broke the game. If you play the rules exactly as written, your Travellers' ships are going to have the hardest time trying to get from planet to planet within a star system. M-drives, every Traveller's constant companion for in-system travel since the 1977 LBBs, now no longer work past a 1000 diameter limit.

There are now workarounds, new kit to tack onto M-drives, but they add tonnage to small craft and Starships, and they now consume vast amounts more power, and so why didn't they just go into High Guard and change the rules to, I dunno, just double the percentage of the ship devoted to M-drives, and treble the power consumption?

OR, and this might hurt, admit an error and retcon that whole thing out, the way they retconned the Special psionic talent?

 

[Shadowblayde99]

Where does it say that the M drive no longer works past 1000D?

 

[IanBruntlett]

IMTU there is no way that is going to happen. I mean, I wrote a program to list times taken to reach 100 diameters for some diameters. There is no way I'm going to deal with 1000 diameter limits. I'm a Referee, not a space traffic control system.

 

[Condottiere]

The idea appears to have been around a while, since it's in Tee Five.

As to the feasibility, or maybe a way to adapt it to playability, the system sun should be large enough to extend it to minimum middle system, however that's defined, so maybe to twenty astronomical units.

 

[alex_greene]

Where does it say that the M drive no longer works past 1000D?

Page 33 of Deepnight Revelation, book 2, Campaign Guide - Deep Space Manoeuvring System.

 

[alex_greene]

The idea appears to have been around a while, since it's in Tee Five.

As to the feasibility, or maybe a way to adapt it to playability, the system sun should be large enough to extend it to minimum middle system, however that's defined, so maybe to twenty astronomical units.

Or you can decide it isn't implementable, and ignore the whole thing. You don't have to add a redundant "Deep Space Manoeuvring System" or reaction rockets to your Travellers' ship, or any NPC ships such as pirate or Naval ships, and just stick with the M-Drives and decide that all ships are fully capable of interplanetary travel, as much as all small craft designed for in-system travel are.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

M-drives, every Traveller's constant companion for in-system travel since the 1977 LBBs, now no longer work past a 1000 diameter limit.

1000D from any celestial object, such as a planet or star.

Most things happens within 1000D of a star...

E.g. the Sun is about 1.4 Mkm, so the 1000D is about 1.4 Gkm ≈ 10 AU ≈ the orbit of Saturn.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Just to add to that - for a star similar to our sun then the m-drive will work all the way to Saturn.

Personally I just ignore this 1000D limit anyway.

 

[wmarshal]

What is the purpose of the 1000D limit?

 

[alex_greene]

What is the purpose of the 1000D limit?

It was decided, at some level, possibly in Tee 5, that M-drives needed to be hobbled.

I'm ignoring this rule, in my books, articles, and stories. "Found Family" had the protagonists take a modular cutter out to the L5 point of Tureded. The big ships my Travellers travel in have a habit of Hopping into star systems somewhere around the Trojan points of planets, and then they send down fleets of small craft to do trading.

Nobody asks where these craft come from, and everybody assumes they're from some other part of the system - a colony on some moon, a space station, and so on. They only know that periodically, small craft arrive bearing trade goods from unknown points of origin.

 

[ottarrus]

IMTU, the '100 diameter rule' is strictly for safe jump distance. I think it's ridiculous to reduce a space craft's performance envelope to a paltry 1000 diameters when the game blithely ignores important things like shipboard water supply and sewage and the servicing thereof.
Consider: the average Human consumes roughly 1 gallon /3.7 liters a day. This is completely separate from washing and other liquid water usages. This means 1 quart /0.95 liters of liquid waste is expelled by every single human on board a ship every day. Obviously, this figure will vary a great deal depending on species and other factors. And there is NO tonnage allocated to life support at all in High Guard. It all is assumed to be part of the stateroom allocation.
It seems to me that if Charted Space can master life support to the extent that there are no water or sewage tanks aboard a spacecraft, it can also conquer the problem of an efficient in-system maneuver drive.
ESPECIALLY when the Deepnight Revelation has a maneuver drive that'll would completely absent of any gravitic field at all.

 

[Vormaerin]

What is the purpose of the 1000D limit?

My understanding is that it is a (wholly unnecessary) attempt to make relativistic strikes functionally impossible. If maneuver drives work anywhere, then supposedly you could launch an accelerating object (since M drives effectively require negligible fuel) that reaches a sufficient fraction of lightspeed to be kind of unpleasant to things it hits.

Of course, there's a wide range of other world destroying capabilities that are only a little more difficult to arrange, so its kind of an overreaction to a thing that won't actually be relevant in any rpg situation, because the referee will just tell the players to stuff it. However, a fair number of Traveller bigwigs are, or were, wargamers first. So the idea of cheesy wargame strats carries more weight than it ought to.

Obviously, the 1000D limit breaks a variety of things in the way Traveller works without really adding much of interest in its place, because pretty much all the interesting situations you can create with the limit can be created without it (just needing longer, but not unreasonable, distances). It is particularly useless as a ruling if they are just going to add another bit of gear to undo it.

I've never played with anyone who actually uses that rule. I certainly don't.

 

[phavoc]

Just bringing this rant over from this thread here to where it belongs.

A recent update to the canon Traveller rules just broke the game. If you play the rules exactly as written, your Travellers' ships are going to have the hardest time trying to get from planet to planet within a star system. M-drives, every Traveller's constant companion for in-system travel since the 1977 LBBs, now no longer work past a 1000 diameter limit.

There are now workarounds, new kit to tack onto M-drives, but they add tonnage to small craft and Starships, and they now consume vast amounts more power, and so why didn't they just go into High Guard and change the rules to, I dunno, just double the percentage of the ship devoted to M-drives, and treble the power consumption?

OR, and this might hurt, admit an error and retcon that whole thing out, the way they retconned the Special psionic talent?

This isn't the first time that this has been done (Grav scanners supposedly can detect objects in other star systems - and render hiding or jumping into a system undetected impossible). One culprit of this is that nearly all the versions of the game - like so many before it - are revisioning of the original game. The changes the different authors make are sometimes useful, and other times not. But change they must in order to sell essentially the same game to new and old players.

It does seem rather pointless to introduce such a thing. And it's even worse when you have people having to revert to the very sad phrase "IMTU" for something so basic. Games where you buy the rules for a setting aren't supposed to be GAAP-like. They are supposed to be consistent for the game setting. Otherwise why in the world would anyone purchase them in the first place?

 

[Vormaerin]

No game setting survives contact with an actual gaming group, so that's not that big a deal, imho.

The Deep Space Maneuvering System is actually kind of annoying because the 1000D limit isn't actually in the MgT core rules. I think it is only mentioned in one of the supplements? And then undone (sort of, by adding extra machinery) in another?

 

[JustEastOfTheEdge]

It's an RPG, not a simulation. If something seems rubbish to you, then bin it

 

[Condottiere]

Mechanics cause friction.

 

[alex_greene]

Mechanics cause friction.

They often do, especially when they tell you they can't get the parts in till next Tuesday.

 

[alex_greene]

On the Deepnight Revelation, in Book 2 - Campaign Guide, that DSM system occupies 1500 dtons, and adds 3.6 billion credits to the cost.
Ditch this rule, ignore page 33 of the book, and that's an extra 1500 dtons of cargo space and a ship that's almost four billion credits cheaper.

 

[Condottiere]

I don't really know how to resolve this, because I'd need to understand what the goal was meant to be.

But there was a clear hierarchy being demonstrated in having limitations on manoeuvre drive expressed in tens of diameters, and then the drop off the cliff.

It would explain why no one goes to empty hexes, because they'd have no traction, unless they had precise locations of large enough gravity wells.

It might force more microjumps, though at this point, you'd decrease that to five percent fuel usage, and maybe less time dilation.

 

[alex_greene]

I don't really know how to resolve this, because I'd need to understand what the goal was meant to be.

But there was a clear hierarchy being demonstrated in having limitations on manoeuvre drive expressed in tens of diameters, and then the drop off the cliff.

It would explain why no one goes to empty hexes, because they'd have no traction, unless they had precise locations of large enough gravity wells.

It might force more microjumps, though at this point, you'd decrease that to five percent fuel usage, and maybe less time dilation.

It adds unnecessary drama and paperwork to a game already laden with enough drama.