Traveller High Guard 2.0

[phavoc]

I would love to see a book out there that combined the different ship systems into a single manual that corrects many of the problems with ships and their underlying technologies.

High Guard / Billion Credit Squadron was orginally released for people who wanted more detail, bigger ships and bigger battles. And for those people who just liked to design stuff - just like Striker rules appealed to a certain crowd.

It would be great to see not only all of this under one book, but also for someone to finally create a canonical reference. Lets fix the rules so they make sense, to a TL6 missile isn't equivalent to a TL15, where a ship that's kissed by a nuke actually takes some real damage. It would also be nice to revamp the ship combat tables so missiles can be used as a swarm with a real chance of damage, where you can have point-defense lasers that are designed to target small craft and not ships.

I'd buy it!

 

[barnest2]

TL6 missile doesn't have to be the same as a TL 15 one. Use the upgrades

Nukes... less effective in space yada yada.

Missiles can do damage... you just have to roll real well. They don't have much warhead, so penetrating full cap ship armour isn't exactly their job. Buy torpedoes.

 

[BFalcon]

I think I'd like to see a unified ship design system - where you could actually build a ship that is, for example, little more than a spinal mount, engine and cockpit if you wanted, but that spinal mount could be any size from a laser up to an asteroid-throwing railgun, as long as you have the hull to take it - give us a reason to build those super-large ships for one thing, but also have a more graduated approach to ship design. Being able to build a Jump-3 100dt ship would be nice too - since the Jump-3 drive is on the chart... (we worked out that you could do it if we borrowed the cockpit from the small craft rules, I think and had no stateroom).

 

[barnest2]

That would be cool. A ship that was mostly spinal mount I've wanted to build for a while... I suppose you could do it, but you would have to ignore some stuff, or put it exactly the right size. You can probably do a small ship... maybe 2500 tons. Maybe a bit less (2400 or 2300), with crew for the drives and the spinal mount... That would be the closest you could get I think...

Also, did you mean J-6?

 

[BFalcon]

Erm yeah.. J-6...

just general rules for spinal mounts would be cool - a starship with a normal battleship (bay) meson would be a laugh (although a bit pointless) but a small craft built around a larger anti-spaceship weapon than it could normally carry would class as a spinal mount, so have the same basic rules, but also make a great deal of sense if it's a fast patrol vessel designed to stop fleeing pirates or smugglers, once alerted by the customs ships. Being able to overtake the fleeing ship long before it could reach the 100d mark would be an excellent use for a squadron of small craft which can accelerate far faster than a jump-capable craft... much more economical on manpower in some cases too.

But uniform and combined rules would be an excellent idea to allow a ship designer to know exactly how to go about designing a ship, regardless of the size class they're designing for... Obviously there'll be some differences, but they'd be the special cases rather than entire sections.