Updated Vehicle Handbook in the works

[Vormaerin]

In T:NE, everything that was "Grav" had gravity negating lifters and some form of thruster, either an MHD turbine with thrusters or a Heplar system if there was a fusion plant involved. Lifters in that edition did not have any mobility function. It just let your thrusters only have to deal with your mass, not with also countering gravity.

Obviously, for space ships in the current rules the Heplar thrusters would be replaced with the M-Drive.

Aside from art issues, lifters are necessary if partially streamlined vessels are going to operate in a planetary atmosphere other than the very thin or the outer layers of a gas giant. Which is why partially streamlined couldn't land in the thicker atmospheres in CT, unlike in Mongoose.

 

[tytalan]

Thanks for the details there. I'd say that 99% needs to be 100% to allow for weak thrusters that one expects ships to use to maneuver to work. We know mass isn't eliminated, just counteracted in the game. Even negating 100% of your weight means your mass still needs power to turn and move. I'd say using your M-drive to maneuver out of a ground hangar would require massive control of thrust - not impossible, but why bother when you'd have maneuvering thrusters whose job is to literally make you turn? I like the engineering models to make practical sense, and practicality should be baked into the design system as much as possible. It doesn't take much other than a few extra thoughts and, sometimes, a sentence or two. Foresight can head off a great deal of future headaches that could/should have been resolved at the design stage.

The G-drives are a bit puzzling with their explantion of integrated power (or at least I'm assuming the FusionPlus is somehow an integral power source). Why they would be that way is a head-scratcher. Does the book explain more about what they are and why they would do such a thing? It sounds like it's a bit like a battery (the H.Beam Piper's universes utilized collapsium-plated batteries for small vehicles, but everything else used standard nuclear plants or mass-energy converters - and Miller cites Space Vikings as a source of ideas). Grav drives are currently fantasy, but until we can replicate gravity we can only speculate on the possibility. The question is why you would embed a power source in your drive. Why not just utilize an external power source? While technicall integral just means integrated into the power source, there is a very wide margin of interpretation here as to what the hell it means. And still, why?

The M-drive failing at the 1000D limit irks me in the fact that nothing is said that it's more effective the closer it is to the same field. So if it can fail without a field present, why isn't it more effecient the closer it is to whatever is generating the field? Sure, it's gravitics and thereby pure fantasy at this point, but if we use magnets as an example, there is a range where the field is stronger, at the optimal distance, and then when it's weak or non-existent.

So with the explanation provided, grav vehicles would have lifters and g-drives. Lifters apparently don't have mention of integral power sources, so another kind of miss there in the model in that it has explanatory gaps. Star and Space ships would have lifters and M-drives.

Argh, now I may be forced to go crack open the dreaded black book.

TYVM for the quotes.

I think you misunderstood the qoute G-Drive are an improvement on lifters they both give lift as well as thrust. There’s no reason to complicate Things by adding lifters to grav drive.
Lifters counter Gravity
G-drives counter gravity and create thrust
M-drives counter gravity, create thrust and have a much larger effective operating area.

There’s no reason to confuse things by adding lifters to ships or vehicles that function is already a part of G and M drives

 

[Geir]

The intent for lifters is something like the flying palace on Pavabid or on Drinax, not something that had a full G or M drive. It does make sense for spaceships to have lifters for a few scenarios, including landing and taking off on high g worlds and skimming fuel from large gas giants.

 

[Condottiere]

Before someone went and revisioned High Guard, customization was ambiguous enough to mix advantages and disadvantages.

Anyway, what's done is done.

We just expand the concept of high burn thrusters, to allow the operation of two manoeuvre drive simultaneously, one that more or less neutralizes local gravity, and the other that pushes the spacecraft.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Why? Ships use maneuver drive not lifters or grav drive there absolutely no reason to rewrite either Highguard or the CRB if you include both lifters and grav drive in the VH.

Because the presence of lifters alters the way in which ships can land and take off from a world. With lifters there is no reason any ship can not land, they just need to slow down to 200kph and then slowly descend to the surface. An hour later you are there.
Leave the lifters powered on and the ship doesn't need a landing pad.

 

[IanBruntlett]

Because the presence of lifters alters the way in which ships can land and take off from a world. With lifters there is no reason any ship can not land, they just need to slow down to 200kph and then slowly descend to the surface. An hour later you are there.
Leave the lifters powered on and the ship doesn't need a landing pad.

So... if there is no firm ground at all - say "landing" on the surface of a lake, would the lifters disturb the surface of the lake? If above a sea, how high above the waves will the ship be (assuming calm weather)? This might make adventuring on a water world a bit more interesting.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Argh, now I may be forced to go crack open the dreaded black book.

TYVM for the quotes.

Quick word of caution, there are lots of changes between the original monolith that is the T5 tome, the two interim electronic revisions, and the three book current version.

Who knows, by the next edition the problems that plague it may be fixed.

 

[Sigtrygg]

I think you misunderstood the qoute G-Drive are an improvement on lifters they both give lift as well as thrust. There’s no reason to complicate Things by adding lifters to grav drive.
Lifters counter Gravity
G-drives counter gravity and create thrust
M-drives counter gravity, create thrust and have a much larger effective operating area.

There’s no reason to confuse things by adding lifters to ships or vehicles that function is already a part of G and M drives

So m-drives include the functionality of g-drives which include the functionality of lifters, but you don't need them as separate systems.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Funny Marc has said it’s not a reaction drive fusion engine “ Maneuver Drives Are Gravity-Based. The theoretical underpinnings of Maneuver involve the strength of gravita- tional fields from stars and worlds. The practical result is that In-System Drives operate within specific distances of stars and worlds, and are essentially unusable beyond those distances.

Marc is misremembering his own rules:

Thrust: Ships maneuver using reaction drives, referred to as M-Drive or maneuver
drive.

LBB2 '77

Fusion Drives As Weapons: Any ship may use its maneuver drive as a weapon when at short range, provided the drive is operational, and fuel is available. When used, the ship attacks as with energy weapon...
Any ship may use its fusion maneuver drive as a weapon with a factor equal to its G rating.

LBB5 '79

Compensators. Integral to Maneuver Drives, Gravitic Drives, and Lifters is an inertial compensation component which counteracts the effects of acceleration on occupants of the ship.” T5. I would say that Marc trumps both Chadwick and Nilsen.

Marc has written T5 since TNE and changed things to give the fanon what it wants.

M-Drive was not a reaction engine in CT.

Yes it was I just quoted where it says so.

In fact TNE invalidated a lot of the core tech that Marc created for Traveller.

Frank was responsible for most of the tech side - LBB4, Striker. High Guard '79 was hastily removed and replaced with '80, notice the difference in the credits?
HG 79 Game Design ..................................................................................... Marc William Miller
HG 80 Second Edition. ..... Marc William Miller, Frank Chadwick, and John Harshman

Since one of the Goals of TNE was to try to do to Marc what TSR did to Gygax.

What evidence do you have for that? Marc left GDW to pursue a career that would pay the bills by his own choice.

I would say if any edition was invalid it would be TNE since they change large parts of Marc’s original game.

Now that I agree with except with regards to the technical architecture of FF&S which I consider to be a vast improvement on MT and Striker. I was not a fan of the d20 house system. The setting never bothered me all that much although I did enjoy the hope of TNE, exploring, rebuilding...

PGMP & FGMP using ammo instead of a portable fusion plant, lasers using cartridges instead of batteries the list goes on and on of things that were rewritten for TNE.

And carried forward to T4, T5, MgT in a lot of cases.

The fact it’s your main source for every argument just make your argument weaker.

It isn't my main source, my main source is always CT.

MegaTraveller which you hate was at least had the core books written by Marc according to Marc. Who has never once said he didn’t.

I don't hate MT, I have every print edition, everything done by DGP, Robots, Manhunt and consider Hard Times to be one of the best settings they ever produced.
If Marc wrote MT why did he write it on DGP computers that had a different file system to GDW's? Why didn't Marc just write it on the GDW computers in the first place? Why was it necessary to labouriously copy it across from DGP's computers to GDW's and introduce loads of mistakes in the process?
I know Marc had oversight of the MT project and discussed the nuts and bolts of it all, but the writing and editing were done by DGP.

One last point. I have long been an advocate for greater compatibility between T5 and MgT, espeacially for Third Imperium related stuff. I am not wedded to Traveller being the Third Imperium role playing game (which is something MT was and MgT is rapidly becoming), I prefer the original CT and MgT1e of Traveller being rules to design your own setting.

Vehicles is meant to be a setting agnostic book, not a Third Imperium book.

 

[Sigtrygg]

So... if there is no firm ground at all - say "landing" on the surface of a lake, would the lifters disturb the surface of the lake? If above a sea, how high above the waves will the ship be (assuming calm weather)? This might make adventuring on a water world a bit more interesting.

That is one of the questions often asked - do grav vehicles exert ground pressure? If they do then a grav tank should be able to crush buildings and infantry, but that raises the question of how close to the ground do they have to be to cause this pressure?

Can a fly a 200 tonne tank over a city and demolish all the buildings from a height of one kilometre?

Can the pressure wave be detected thus giving away the location of the grav vehicle...

 

[Condottiere]

That depends on the principle it operates on.

1. Rejection of gravity.

2. Repulsion of gravity.

 

[Sigtrygg]

That they are described as reactionless strongly implies Newton's third law is ignored so I would say there is no pressure. There still has to be a pressure wave as they displace the air though

 

[Vormaerin]

Now that I agree with except with regards to the technical architecture of FF&S which I consider to be a vast improvement on MT and Striker. I was not a fan of the d20 house system. The setting never bothered me all that much although I did enjoy the hope of TNE, exploring, rebuilding...



One last point. I have long been an advocate for greater compatibility between T5 and MgT, espeacially for Third Imperium related stuff. I am not wedded to Traveller being the Third Imperium role playing game (which is something MT was and MgT is rapidly becoming), I prefer the original CT and MgT1e of Traveller being rules to design your own setting.

Vehicles is meant to be a setting agnostic book, not a Third Imperium book.

T:NE is one of the clearest outlines of how tech works in Traveller. Other than the fact that it reduces jump fuel (J4 is like 25% of ship volume) to make space for reaction fuel for the M-Drive (Heplar), it is a great source for information that just generally doesn't get answered in other editions.

I didn't like the actual game play rules for characters either, but the tech stuff was great.

And, yes, there is a lot of stuff that I am very happy to have in the TRAVELLER rules (like all the empty hex exploration stuff) that I am less sanguine about for Charted Space. Always a fan of more clearcut separation between the two things.

 

[Sigtrygg]

It was MT that changed the amount of jump fuel needed, I changed it back to 10% per jump number and do the same for TNE.

With HEPLaR drives it means a jump 4 warship is going to also need a maneuvering fuel reserve - 10% is usually enough to get to a refueling point. For the civilian ships it doesn't really make much difference.

 

[MasterGwydion]

The intent for lifters is something like the flying palace on Pavabid or on Drinax, not something that had a full G or M drive. It does make sense for spaceships to have lifters for a few scenarios, including landing and taking off on high g worlds and skimming fuel from large gas giants.

My guess is that the Palace of Drinax has an M-Drive, not a vehicle drive system, but that is just Me guessing. Specially how they describe it reaching orbit on its ancient engines that haven't been properly maintained in centuries.

 

[MasterGwydion]

So... if there is no firm ground at all - say "landing" on the surface of a lake, would the lifters disturb the surface of the lake? If above a sea, how high above the waves will the ship be (assuming calm weather)? This might make adventuring on a water world a bit more interesting.

If it uses a "gravity drive", it is pushing against the field of the planet, not against the surface of the lake, so the surface of the lake shouldn't be disturbed. You can alter your altitude to land on the water, fly under it (just not that deep without leaking), or hover above it at whatever height the pilot wishes.

 

[Sigtrygg]

It is reactionless, it is not pushing against anything.

 

[phavoc]

I think you misunderstood the qoute G-Drive are an improvement on lifters they both give lift as well as thrust. There’s no reason to complicate Things by adding lifters to grav drive.
Lifters counter Gravity
G-drives counter gravity and create thrust
M-drives counter gravity, create thrust and have a much larger effective operating area.

There’s no reason to confuse things by adding lifters to ships or vehicles that function is already a part of G and M drives

So they are cumulative (or at least it sounds like G-drives and M-drives both inherently have Lifter capabilities built in)? If you lifted that quote from the book that's just another example of a glaring editing error - it's not stated.

Quick word of caution, there are lots of changes between the original monolith that is the T5 tome, the two interim electronic revisions, and the three book current version.

Who knows, by the next edition the problems that plague it may be fixed.

Ah, did not know that. I got my kickstarter book and the CD. I had such high hopes for T5 and found them dashed to the floor, stomped on and was given 14 new ways to interpret things. As a book of ideas it's not bad. As a game it's terrible (just my opinion on that).

Per Geir above (and I would tend to agree) the lifter is meant to provide hovering capabilities only. That makes sense. I think it would be safe to assume that any ship designer would add lifters to the design - by default - if that ship were ever envisioned to land on a planet. A ship that never enters an atmosphere would not require lifters. I'd think, for safety reasons at least, any ship that ever wanted to skim fuel from a gas giant would also be equipped with lifters.

I do hope a more clear and concise explanation of how they work is included in Vehicles. Only takes a few sentences to eliminate the guessing of the reader - just make it clear one way or the other. Leaving things up to interpretation is a terrible way to edit a rule book.

 

[MasterGwydion]

T:NE is one of the clearest outlines of how tech works in Traveller. Other than the fact that it reduces jump fuel (J4 is like 25% of ship volume) to make space for reaction fuel for the M-Drive (Heplar), it is a great source for information that just generally doesn't get answered in other editions.

I didn't like the actual game play rules for characters either, but the tech stuff was great.

And, yes, there is a lot of stuff that I am very happy to have in the TRAVELLER rules (like all the empty hex exploration stuff) that I am less sanguine about for Charted Space. Always a fan of more clearcut separation between the two things.

I am also a fan of Traveller being a ruleset and Charted Space being a setting. I do not like confusing them as the same.

 

[Condottiere]