This is quite a nice book, with a good, playable system. I have now used it to design five vehicles at TL10 to TL 14 and they all came out reasonably well. A definite improvement on the older system. The range of sample vehicle is also good.
In using the design system my only real criticism was with the weapon list at higher TLs. In old Mercenary and Striker it was given that things like the TL 10 fusion A gun got smaller or faster firing at higher Tls so at TL 14-15 you could put small rapid pulse fusion A guns on your grav APCs while having a large fusion X-gun as a main weapon and the Z gun on your heavy lumbering artillery vehicle. Here, while you get RF weapons all the plasma and fusion cannon are stuck at 16 spaces (that's A LOT) regardless of TL and that means it is hard to build classic traveller grav APC analogs that had lighter versions of the TL10-12 plasma guns at TL13-15.
Instead you are stuck with hunting for other weapons to "fill the gap" like autocannon or gauss.
Aside from that quibble, however, the weapon list is pretty good - you get a page and half of hardware plus lots of accessory and turret options.
However, there a few bits that seemed a bit odd.
Range statistic. This is not in the Traveller Core Book and appears not to be defined here in terms of units. I assume km. "Normal circumstances" is a bit vague (cruising speed? Max speed?)
Speed. The rules for heavy ground vehicles seem to screw tracked vehicles. You gets +3 DM to drive offroad, which is nice, but you lose lose half speed. Since any wheeled vehicle can buy "off-road" and get full speed off-road for only -10%, this lets you build off-road wheeled vehicles that whip along over the mud and desert sands at almost twice the speed of the tracked brethren. I'd recommend giving wheeled "off-road capable" 40-50% speed off road, so that on roads they're 2x faster but off-road a tracked and wheeled vehicle are about the same with the tracked having the useful +3 DM as well to reflect it's obstacle-climbing abilities.
The Equipment
Communications: It seems odd that at TL4 (19th/early 20th century) you can get a small radio that will fit in a battle dress type suit. This should really be TL 6 or higher for suits. I've seen radios from the early 20th century - they won't be going in any suit helmets...
Laser Anti-Missile System and Projectile Anti-Missile System
These really need an option for using them to engage people as well - a "switch to manual" or something. Even it just said "can also work as a laser pistol / SMG" or whatever.
Sample Vehicles
Air/Raft: the price quoted is Cr. 263,464. First off, congrats to the design team for getting this close to the cost (275,000 ) in the Traveller Core Rules of the "iconic" grav vehicle. Nice that we don't have to retcon this much.
This just stood out to me as it's such an iconic design. It might have been cool if there was a standard rule of "Round off about three digits" so we'd get Cr. 265,000 or whatever.
Pick Up Truck: This looks a bit problematic. At TL6 (1950s-60s or so) a Speed of only 62 mph (100 kph) is not too awful for a loaded truck, but a range of only 200 kph? If it has a 20 gallon gas tank, that would be 6 miles to a gallon. Seems a bit inferior... Maybe a Vilani design, no wonder the Terrans beat them...
The small family car and sports car are a bit wimply by TL8 (near future/today) standards but are serviceable designs.
Civilian Helicopters
Here we run into some issues. Most of the helicopters here have ranges of 1,000-2000 km, compared to about 500-700 km for most real-life designs. Seems a bit much: I'll buy it for the TL8 Behemoth but not for the TL7 police helicopter or small TL8 unicopter; you can squeeze 2000 km out of a latest-generation Blackhawk (TL8) but only with special add ons like stub wings and external tanks. These ranges beat a lot of the conventional propeller aeroplanes, which is just odd.
Airliners: the conventional and supersonic airliner both have no or minimal cargo capacity. This would seem odd to people who have flown airliners. However this is Traveller and we can explain away: perhaps, again, this is probably a Vilanii design - perhaps they have a rule that ALL cargo and baggage must go in a separate dedicated cargo jet - no stowed luggage for passengers! Again, we see why so many Vilani worlds gave up to the Terrans without a fight. If you hate air travel on Earth imagine being a terran or subject race in a Vilani airport....
Steam Ship: again, no cargo is standard (I guess you can throw out the seats, but the description says it is used for carrying goods...
But in general, there's a nice mix of civilian vehicles here and surely enough for most campaigns. Good job. The non-jet military aircraft are quite well done, with speeds and ranges that seem very reasonable. Probably Terran. I also like the G/AV as a good , much neded lighter-weight and cheaper alternative to the g/carrier.
The g/carrier is described as a "effectively a flying tank" but this is hyperbole: it is an infantry fighting vehicle, not a tank, and if you try and use it as a tank you will be shot to bits in short order. Probably text written by a civilian journalist. The variants are good.
The grav tank is a nice base design, though arguably a more reailstic build would have some extra frontal armor at the expense of rear; this has the simple "80 all round" armor design.
Although that will make it nice for urban warfare where the enemy can hit you anywhere it is less fun in a game to have to monolithic armor-tanks (and the g/carrier as well). The reason is that for PCs some of the fun is to use tactics to outflank or ambush the enemy and you lose this option if your tanks are designed with the same armor everywhere! Not as fun to play.
The TL12 AFV from the core rulebook returns and again we see the design team have successfully managed to closely match the original price in the core rules. I do find this a problematic design (who builds a wheeled AFV at TL12?!) but it can be used for settings like, say, Aliens (although I would rate the vehicle there as more like TL 10). Like the grav tank it has 20 armor all around, again limiting the ability to use tactics against it, which is annoying.
A variety of fanciful ground vehicles also appear that seem very dubious. The All Terrain Gun Transport has pathetic armor for TL 8 for a tracked self-propelled missile vehicle, even for artillery, that won't even stop an assault rifle.
The Armored Personnel Carrier, Armored Car, and Assault Tank are nice in having variable armor by location, which makes them feel more realistic. The assault tank, however, squanders this by being a weird twin turret design with two 120mm cannon - it feels a bit Games Workshop and I've preferred something a bit more Leopard, Challenger or Abrams-ish.
The ATV again follows the core book in being a tracked design at TL 12, several TLs after the appearance of grav vehicles in most settings. It would be more logical if this one had been retconned to TL8 to TL10 (which seems about right for a design like the ATV in "Across the Bright Face").
The Battle Tank again is a TL8 (present day) design and again a "two turretted monster" like the assault tank, and again this feels a bit silly; a few multi-turreted tanks were fielded in the real world by the French and Russians - that would be TL5 in Traveller terms - and they did very poorly. I can believe remote multi- secondary turrets at high TLs for something like a secondary weapon, or on a huge vehicle like an Ogre or Bolo, but as the standard on two different heavy tanks it just seems like a weird quirk that should have been noticed in playtest. One maybe. Two? I dunno. It really makes no sense: the tank has three crew, rather than four, so if you have one guy manning the 120mm top turret, another manning the 75mm turret, and a third driving, there's no one to really act as tank commander. The rules seem to assume autoloaders.
Military Jets: These are nice enough. The stealth bomber seems to be a tactical design. All are TL8 though: I'd like to see a TL7 jet or two. It makes me wonder if the system would have problems building TL7 jets.
Military Submarines. The term "battle submarine" feels a bit off - I'd have preferred the "real world" attack submarine or fleet submarine.
The nuclear submarine is problematic. It has a 1,500 km(?) range, which seems to be an error if it is nuclear powered, with a fusion plant no less. Otherwise it is a nice design though appears totally lacking in any kind of stealth or the sophisticated underwater sensor suites that real nuclear subs have at TL8+.
Aslan Tank: Perhaps a bit over the top for a TL 12 design, and something that should have been reconsidered. A shipping size of 37.5 tons seems high (if these are ship tons, that's perhaps about 200-300 tons in real size). With 150 armor everywhere it's not really fun to use or play, and I fear for it causing an arms race in tank design that leads to silliness when compared to the standard grav tank, Vargr plasma tank, etc.. Indeed, it matches the Darrian "sphere tank" at TL 15.
Quiknavra Grav Tank: Now this is much better! A nice zhodani design, with armor realistically varying on all faces, and while it is potent, it is logically so for a TL 14 tank. Quite good. The Zho vehicles are really rather nice throughout.
There are lots of other military vehicles, and I think they will all be very welcome.
Judge Dredd vehicles: It was a pleasant surprise to see these appearing and give a sense of material outside the Imperium setting and something for Dredd fans. A very large range of 20 vehicles appears (including iconics like the Lawmaster) but many will be useful in other settings as well. This is a good thing considering the space devoted to them.
Strontium Dog and Hammers Slammers also get designs; it is amusing to see the Hammer Slammers tanks will eat the Traveller designs for breakfast, which is pretty unrealistic by Classic traveller "Striker" standards (in CT: Striker the grav tanks were huge and massively armored even in comparison to giant hovertanks of hammer slammers designs). but reasonable for the inferior designs of Megatraveller and New Era (which were far smaller and weaker). Still, the inclusion of the Hammers Slammers material may lead, again to "arms race" issues in the tank designs as Traveller Third Imperium designers develop inferiority complexes and try to match them...
My niggling aside most of the vehicles look fairly plausible (as long as you don't look too closer at shipping size, which, as the rules say, is rather approximate and optional anyway). I am concerned that the designs make it a bit too easy to super-armor the tanks in exchange for spending a big budget - and that is not even including the new things like ERA and electrostatic armor -- which is a problem when you can't do the same for the weapons, which are more space than cost limited. But a good Referee can resist the temptation to overkill and overall the simplicity of the design process is something to be commended.
In using the design system my only real criticism was with the weapon list at higher TLs. In old Mercenary and Striker it was given that things like the TL 10 fusion A gun got smaller or faster firing at higher Tls so at TL 14-15 you could put small rapid pulse fusion A guns on your grav APCs while having a large fusion X-gun as a main weapon and the Z gun on your heavy lumbering artillery vehicle. Here, while you get RF weapons all the plasma and fusion cannon are stuck at 16 spaces (that's A LOT) regardless of TL and that means it is hard to build classic traveller grav APC analogs that had lighter versions of the TL10-12 plasma guns at TL13-15.
Instead you are stuck with hunting for other weapons to "fill the gap" like autocannon or gauss.
Aside from that quibble, however, the weapon list is pretty good - you get a page and half of hardware plus lots of accessory and turret options.
However, there a few bits that seemed a bit odd.
Range statistic. This is not in the Traveller Core Book and appears not to be defined here in terms of units. I assume km. "Normal circumstances" is a bit vague (cruising speed? Max speed?)
Speed. The rules for heavy ground vehicles seem to screw tracked vehicles. You gets +3 DM to drive offroad, which is nice, but you lose lose half speed. Since any wheeled vehicle can buy "off-road" and get full speed off-road for only -10%, this lets you build off-road wheeled vehicles that whip along over the mud and desert sands at almost twice the speed of the tracked brethren. I'd recommend giving wheeled "off-road capable" 40-50% speed off road, so that on roads they're 2x faster but off-road a tracked and wheeled vehicle are about the same with the tracked having the useful +3 DM as well to reflect it's obstacle-climbing abilities.
The Equipment
Communications: It seems odd that at TL4 (19th/early 20th century) you can get a small radio that will fit in a battle dress type suit. This should really be TL 6 or higher for suits. I've seen radios from the early 20th century - they won't be going in any suit helmets...
Laser Anti-Missile System and Projectile Anti-Missile System
These really need an option for using them to engage people as well - a "switch to manual" or something. Even it just said "can also work as a laser pistol / SMG" or whatever.
Sample Vehicles
Air/Raft: the price quoted is Cr. 263,464. First off, congrats to the design team for getting this close to the cost (275,000 ) in the Traveller Core Rules of the "iconic" grav vehicle. Nice that we don't have to retcon this much.
This just stood out to me as it's such an iconic design. It might have been cool if there was a standard rule of "Round off about three digits" so we'd get Cr. 265,000 or whatever.
Pick Up Truck: This looks a bit problematic. At TL6 (1950s-60s or so) a Speed of only 62 mph (100 kph) is not too awful for a loaded truck, but a range of only 200 kph? If it has a 20 gallon gas tank, that would be 6 miles to a gallon. Seems a bit inferior... Maybe a Vilani design, no wonder the Terrans beat them...
The small family car and sports car are a bit wimply by TL8 (near future/today) standards but are serviceable designs.
Civilian Helicopters
Here we run into some issues. Most of the helicopters here have ranges of 1,000-2000 km, compared to about 500-700 km for most real-life designs. Seems a bit much: I'll buy it for the TL8 Behemoth but not for the TL7 police helicopter or small TL8 unicopter; you can squeeze 2000 km out of a latest-generation Blackhawk (TL8) but only with special add ons like stub wings and external tanks. These ranges beat a lot of the conventional propeller aeroplanes, which is just odd.
Airliners: the conventional and supersonic airliner both have no or minimal cargo capacity. This would seem odd to people who have flown airliners. However this is Traveller and we can explain away: perhaps, again, this is probably a Vilanii design - perhaps they have a rule that ALL cargo and baggage must go in a separate dedicated cargo jet - no stowed luggage for passengers! Again, we see why so many Vilani worlds gave up to the Terrans without a fight. If you hate air travel on Earth imagine being a terran or subject race in a Vilani airport....
Steam Ship: again, no cargo is standard (I guess you can throw out the seats, but the description says it is used for carrying goods...
But in general, there's a nice mix of civilian vehicles here and surely enough for most campaigns. Good job. The non-jet military aircraft are quite well done, with speeds and ranges that seem very reasonable. Probably Terran. I also like the G/AV as a good , much neded lighter-weight and cheaper alternative to the g/carrier.
The g/carrier is described as a "effectively a flying tank" but this is hyperbole: it is an infantry fighting vehicle, not a tank, and if you try and use it as a tank you will be shot to bits in short order. Probably text written by a civilian journalist. The variants are good.
The grav tank is a nice base design, though arguably a more reailstic build would have some extra frontal armor at the expense of rear; this has the simple "80 all round" armor design.
Although that will make it nice for urban warfare where the enemy can hit you anywhere it is less fun in a game to have to monolithic armor-tanks (and the g/carrier as well). The reason is that for PCs some of the fun is to use tactics to outflank or ambush the enemy and you lose this option if your tanks are designed with the same armor everywhere! Not as fun to play.
The TL12 AFV from the core rulebook returns and again we see the design team have successfully managed to closely match the original price in the core rules. I do find this a problematic design (who builds a wheeled AFV at TL12?!) but it can be used for settings like, say, Aliens (although I would rate the vehicle there as more like TL 10). Like the grav tank it has 20 armor all around, again limiting the ability to use tactics against it, which is annoying.
A variety of fanciful ground vehicles also appear that seem very dubious. The All Terrain Gun Transport has pathetic armor for TL 8 for a tracked self-propelled missile vehicle, even for artillery, that won't even stop an assault rifle.
The Armored Personnel Carrier, Armored Car, and Assault Tank are nice in having variable armor by location, which makes them feel more realistic. The assault tank, however, squanders this by being a weird twin turret design with two 120mm cannon - it feels a bit Games Workshop and I've preferred something a bit more Leopard, Challenger or Abrams-ish.
The ATV again follows the core book in being a tracked design at TL 12, several TLs after the appearance of grav vehicles in most settings. It would be more logical if this one had been retconned to TL8 to TL10 (which seems about right for a design like the ATV in "Across the Bright Face").
The Battle Tank again is a TL8 (present day) design and again a "two turretted monster" like the assault tank, and again this feels a bit silly; a few multi-turreted tanks were fielded in the real world by the French and Russians - that would be TL5 in Traveller terms - and they did very poorly. I can believe remote multi- secondary turrets at high TLs for something like a secondary weapon, or on a huge vehicle like an Ogre or Bolo, but as the standard on two different heavy tanks it just seems like a weird quirk that should have been noticed in playtest. One maybe. Two? I dunno. It really makes no sense: the tank has three crew, rather than four, so if you have one guy manning the 120mm top turret, another manning the 75mm turret, and a third driving, there's no one to really act as tank commander. The rules seem to assume autoloaders.
Military Jets: These are nice enough. The stealth bomber seems to be a tactical design. All are TL8 though: I'd like to see a TL7 jet or two. It makes me wonder if the system would have problems building TL7 jets.
Military Submarines. The term "battle submarine" feels a bit off - I'd have preferred the "real world" attack submarine or fleet submarine.
The nuclear submarine is problematic. It has a 1,500 km(?) range, which seems to be an error if it is nuclear powered, with a fusion plant no less. Otherwise it is a nice design though appears totally lacking in any kind of stealth or the sophisticated underwater sensor suites that real nuclear subs have at TL8+.
Aslan Tank: Perhaps a bit over the top for a TL 12 design, and something that should have been reconsidered. A shipping size of 37.5 tons seems high (if these are ship tons, that's perhaps about 200-300 tons in real size). With 150 armor everywhere it's not really fun to use or play, and I fear for it causing an arms race in tank design that leads to silliness when compared to the standard grav tank, Vargr plasma tank, etc.. Indeed, it matches the Darrian "sphere tank" at TL 15.
Quiknavra Grav Tank: Now this is much better! A nice zhodani design, with armor realistically varying on all faces, and while it is potent, it is logically so for a TL 14 tank. Quite good. The Zho vehicles are really rather nice throughout.
There are lots of other military vehicles, and I think they will all be very welcome.
Judge Dredd vehicles: It was a pleasant surprise to see these appearing and give a sense of material outside the Imperium setting and something for Dredd fans. A very large range of 20 vehicles appears (including iconics like the Lawmaster) but many will be useful in other settings as well. This is a good thing considering the space devoted to them.
Strontium Dog and Hammers Slammers also get designs; it is amusing to see the Hammer Slammers tanks will eat the Traveller designs for breakfast, which is pretty unrealistic by Classic traveller "Striker" standards (in CT: Striker the grav tanks were huge and massively armored even in comparison to giant hovertanks of hammer slammers designs). but reasonable for the inferior designs of Megatraveller and New Era (which were far smaller and weaker). Still, the inclusion of the Hammers Slammers material may lead, again to "arms race" issues in the tank designs as Traveller Third Imperium designers develop inferiority complexes and try to match them...
My niggling aside most of the vehicles look fairly plausible (as long as you don't look too closer at shipping size, which, as the rules say, is rather approximate and optional anyway). I am concerned that the designs make it a bit too easy to super-armor the tanks in exchange for spending a big budget - and that is not even including the new things like ERA and electrostatic armor -- which is a problem when you can't do the same for the weapons, which are more space than cost limited. But a good Referee can resist the temptation to overkill and overall the simplicity of the design process is something to be commended.
