WBH Compatibility Rating

[rinku]

No worries. Which edition are you most familiar with?

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

No worries. Which edition are you most familiar with?

I had the LBBs but never could get my gaming group to play it though I did play around with various elements including High Guard, character generation and trade. Over the last couple of years I've begun getting what books I can find "locally" for Mongoose 2nd (very hard to come by). My gaming group is long gone so I have only being playing around with what I have been able to find, HG 2022 first and most recently CRB 2022 (2024 printing).

Lots of ship designs and repeated revisions of many of them as my thinking about them evolved and I gained access to more official designs for comparison. I do diverge significantly in my designs invarious ways including basing it on the fact that if I was to run a game in my setting it would start in a pocket empire where the dominant world was TL 10 with a few prototype J2 (the PCs would hear about but not have access to). This of course changes my equivalents of various ships quite a lot. I also don't like the low berths and so very few non medical designs would use them. Armed and armoured civilian ships are rare to non existent.

Work on my own setting mostly at the conceptual level with notes but very few rolled up worlds. As part of that made notes on adventure ideas including the beginning of a custom to my setting replacement for the Annic Nova.

I missed a chance to get the world builders handbook (and regret it). I like detailed solar systems but the only system I have access to for them is the LBB Scouts book and it really isn't up to date on discoveries since of course. No super Earths for example. I've played around with some custom modifications to the rules to get the super Earths but I'm not happy enough with what I have to generate whole sub sectors.

So my knowledge is old for LBBs then nothing till Mongoose 2nd Edition which I have limited books for and the one I know best is High Guard but I haven't been running ship to ship battles. I've begun slowly reading through the CRB and there I want to see how its ship to ship battles work for small (sub 1000 ton) ships.

 

[Dodo98]

That's definitely an artifact of Traveller's mainworld generation system, so it's less than ideal, but a way to think about it is to distinguish a surface ice sheet, like a glacier, from the world's bulk composition, which might be a mix of ice and rock at the surface. So for the hydrographics, it represents mostly pure ice chunks that you can toss into an onboard fuel refinery, where for icy crust, you'd probably need a mineral refinery to get to the water and then hydrogen without the rocky, dusty bits.

Ah, okay, yes, the explanation makes sense. But I've got one more question about this topic: why are rolls for the Hydrographic Code only allowed from HZCO+3 for Size S and Size 1 worlds, or between HZCO+2.1-3 for Size 1 worlds only, if you use the second alternative method? Surely an icy surface with pure water ice could also occur at HZCO+1.1, couldn't it?

 

[Geir]

Ah, okay, yes, the explanation makes sense. But I've got one more question about this topic: why are rolls for the Hydrographic Code only allowed from HZCO+3 for Size S and Size 1 worlds, or between HZCO+2.1-3 for Size 1 worlds only, if you use the second alternative method?

Ahh... because I didn't fully commit to the concept? No wait! See below...

Surely an icy surface with pure water ice could also occur at HZCO+1.1, couldn't it?

Yes, and don't call me Shirley... Okay, my thinking was that closer in, surface volatiles would have eventually sublimated off and reached escape velocity under the higher temperature conditions. So further out, colder, and less gravity would be required to allow water ice to freeze back to the ground at a rate higher than the ice water vapor (steam? Well, weird to call it steam when it's cold gas) would escape.

In our solar system the 'example' would be Ceres (Size 1) and though it may be half ice, the bright surface splotches are a briny silicate rich material, not pure - or even close to pure - water ice. Hate to argue from a single example, but that's all we got. Most of Traveller is based off the single example of Earth, and who knows how skewed that will turn out to be.