Would a far/free trader ever use missiles?

Condottiere said:
The pirates would have to use a commercial or civilian ship type.

They might have to submit a flight plan, and get permission before taking off.
Click to expand...
You can be armed and still be a civilian (unless you chose otherwise in YTU).

Yes they might submit a flight plan. They may LIE - Pirate :)
 
Vormaerin said:
This is the core problem of all these discussions. We don't agree on what space infrastructure actually exists. The default assumption seems to be that despite centuries or millenia of space faring, there's less stuff in space than we've managed to put up with a few decades of primitive by Traveller standards spaceflight. Because no sourcebook has addressed the issue.

Right now we have permanent sensor stations (The James Webb Telescope) at the L2 point. Plus assorted space stations, orbital telescopes, satellites, and other crap.

But with interstellar travel for centuries and 3000+ years of scientific progress, we can't manage to keep an eye on the immediate environment of an inhabited planet?
Click to expand...
Currently we only need to look after one planet. We have the resources and taxes of billions of people to support its infrastructure. Regardless of our petty squabbles we are at least able to grasp that it is the only planet we have at the moment and that does forge a degree of cooperation internationally.

In traveller we have planets that have populations in the 1000's and might have the technology of the 17th century. The Empire to need to keep an eye on the immediate environment of EVERY inhabited planet at all times for there to be no piracy. They also have to keep any eye out for a number of traditional enemies that lurk on the borders but also infiltrate their territory legitimately in peacetime on diplomatic/trade grounds. They also have to keep an eye on warring merchant clans to ensure their squabbles do not disrupt the overall trade in the universe. They have to retain strict hierarchies to ensure there isn't another decade of Admiral Emperors. They have had to maintain that level of resourcing sustainably for Millenia despite extensive warring and disruption.

Rather like Rome in the later years of the empire, I don't believe they have the resources or the people to do it effectively. I don't believe they ever could. I suspect if you plug the numbers into the World Builders Guide (or Gurps Far Trader or any other reasonably argued economic model) you will find that the IN would have to be either ubiquitous and tiny or present in force in far less than 100% of the systems in chartered space.

I don't believe that even in the systems with a sizeable naval presence that they have the time to devote to all their mission objectives or that the empire has a clear idea of what is happening in most of its subject worlds to even set those mission objectives in anything other than very generic terms.
 
Again, this isn't something that can have a consensus reached on. We can't even agree on the accuracy of jumps, the level of infrastructure that exists, or anything else.

If jumps are pretty accurate and traffic control does expect inbound and outbound traffic to use certain "lanes" as some Mongoose products state, then having some sensors along the route and a few armed fighters/revenue cutters isn't that unreasonable on any C+ starport.

On the other hand, if ships are appearing anywhere within millions of km of the planet and you can't even tell they are there until the last 20 minutes of their approach, as certain other elements of the Mongoose rules suggest, its crazytown.
 
Vormaerin said:
But with interstellar travel for centuries and 3000+ years of scientific progress, we can't manage to keep an eye on the immediate environment of an inhabited planet?
Click to expand...

Just some thoughts:

Real life Earth has different countries putting all kinds of things in orbit.

In the Charted Space setting, worlds with...

Low to mid tech level.
Low to mid population.
Small to mid industrial base.
Small to mid tax base.
Environmental issues that make air and aerospace travel not the best option, like insidious atmospheres, high winds, or relatively close settlements connected by high speed rail.
No specific need for aerospace research and development.
A unified world government or no military necessity for space assets.
Little interest in space science, since they can get the research from other worlds.
Not enough trade to require a highport.

...wouldn't have much in orbit.

What would a world without those disadvantages need or probably have?

Communications satellite network.
Weather observation satellite network.
GPS satellite network.
One robust satellite network could probably handle all of these requirements.
Deep space tracking / early warning satellites.
Traffic control satellites.
Probably a highport.
A military highport / drydock / shipyard.
Military assets like system defense boats, monitors, planetary navy vessels, customs vessels and orbital defense platforms and associated tracking satellites.
 
Something else is that the planetary government might be working with the pirates, and allow them to take a score every so often in return for a cut.
 
Obviously, it is very different outside of the organized states. Stopping havens is actually what the Imperial Navy primarily worries about, not stopping individual ships. Because piracy is only really feasible if you have places you can sell your prizes. That's why if you read the articles like "Piracy in the Spinward Marches", it's pretty much all about ports outside the Imperium.

Regarding what worlds have in orbit...

Please keep in mind that every world except the 2% or so that are someone's 'homeworld' were colonized and the first settlers were spacefarers. So folks with TL 10-12 stuff showed up to set up that world, regardless of what the local maintenance level is. Those 2% of worlds were met by spacefarers and all the activity in space is by those space farers. And the planetary population and the any commercial traffic they get have access to higher technology if it is important.

We have no idea how expensive it is for a TL 12 colonization effort to automated space sensors about relative to the overall cost of colonization. Maybe its super cheap at TL10. Maybe it's crazy expensive. I don't think there's any rules on it anywhere.

Yes, there are backwater worlds with low tech and tiny populations. You know what that means? There's no commercial traffic there to actually pirate. That 1000 inhabitant TL 6 world probably gets a paranoid free trader every week or so and maybe a quarterly supply ship if its corporate or science colony.

So, yeah, pirates can hang around for weeks on end for an opportunity to nail that tiny free trader with its small cargo. Doesn't sound very profitable.

Maybe space piracy is totally different, but in the real world, pirates happen where there is 1) lots of trade 2) a nearby lawless territory they can refit and sell stuff.

That doesn't describe the the Imperium in the GURPS or Mongoose versions. It could have applied to original 1970s/early 80s vision of the Spinward Marches, but they tightened that all up over time. It may describe the Trojan Reaches, Reaver's Deep, or various other sectors with assorted small or non existent governments.
 
Yes. I know how you’ve been getting along; chicken-stealing on planets like Set and Xipototec and Melkarth. Not making enough to cover maintenance expenses; that’s why your ship’s in the shape she is. Well, those days are over. Both ships ought to have a full overhaul, but we’ll have to skip that till we have a shipyard of our own. But I will insist, at least, that your guns and launchers are in order. And your detection equipment; you didn’t get a fix on the Nemesis till we were less than twenty thousand miles off-planet.
 
Condottiere said:
Yes. I know how you’ve been getting along; chicken-stealing on planets like Set and Xipototec and Melkarth. Not making enough to cover maintenance expenses; that’s why your ship’s in the shape she is. Well, those days are over. Both ships ought to have a full overhaul, but we’ll have to skip that till we have a shipyard of our own. But I will insist, at least, that your guns and launchers are in order. And your detection equipment; you didn’t get a fix on the Nemesis till we were less than twenty thousand miles off-planet.
Click to expand...
Space Viking for the win!
 
Vormaerin said:
Obviously, it is very different outside of the organized states. Stopping havens is actually what the Imperial Navy primarily worries about, not stopping individual ships. Because piracy is only really feasible if you have places you can sell your prizes. That's why if you read the articles like "Piracy in the Spinward Marches", it's pretty much all about ports outside the Imperium.

Regarding what worlds have in orbit...

Please keep in mind that every world except the 2% or so that are someone's 'homeworld' were colonized and the first settlers were spacefarers. So folks with TL 10-12 stuff showed up to set up that world, regardless of what the local maintenance level is. Those 2% of worlds were met by spacefarers and all the activity in space is by those space farers. And the planetary population and the any commercial traffic they get have access to higher technology if it is important.

We have no idea how expensive it is for a TL 12 colonization effort to automated space sensors about relative to the overall cost of colonization. Maybe its super cheap at TL10. Maybe it's crazy expensive. I don't think there's any rules on it anywhere.

Yes, there are backwater worlds with low tech and tiny populations. You know what that means? There's no commercial traffic there to actually pirate. That 1000 inhabitant TL 6 world probably gets a paranoid free trader every week or so and maybe a quarterly supply ship if its corporate or science colony.

So, yeah, pirates can hang around for weeks on end for an opportunity to nail that tiny free trader with its small cargo. Doesn't sound very profitable.

Maybe space piracy is totally different, but in the real world, pirates happen where there is 1) lots of trade 2) a nearby lawless territory they can refit and sell stuff.

That doesn't describe the the Imperium in the GURPS or Mongoose versions. It could have applied to original 1970s/early 80s vision of the Spinward Marches, but they tightened that all up over time. It may describe the Trojan Reaches, Reaver's Deep, or various other sectors with assorted small or non existent governments.
Click to expand...
Actually it seems we do have numbers for all this in the World Builders Handbook. It is a heck of a lot of maths and I suspect a lot of it is fairly spurious (but then so is real world economics and politics), but as it at least bases things on the planets importance and population and tech etc. it has some internal consistency.

You can generate the overall military budget from taxation. And you can break down the relative importance of Navy, System Defence and Planetary forces etc. and once you know those, you know who much the planet contributes to the IN as its colonial flotilla contingent, how much it spends on in-system craft and ground facilities for its own protection. You know how much you are paying in wages and other staff costs which indicates how may people you have doing the job and even your planets attitude to defence to say how much you are actually investing vs how much you are just letting sit there as a visible but deteriorating deterrent. You know how much traffic you get and your overall trade level so you can work out how attractive to pirates your traffic is and extrapolate from that the level of threat they present (since effective pirates will go for the largest haul they can comfortably grab and they will push out the small fry).

I did a lot of this once with Far Trader so it is nice to see the book references that stuff as well as T5. I don't know how all this gels with the Imperium, but I also don't know which Imperium we are talking about any more. It has changed between settings and editions and the flavour of specific regions may have changed (Small craft used to be so much more expensive and aren't the marines looking young these days). To be honest I am not wedded to any of it. I prefer my worlds to be fully in my head when I run them, not partially in some else's. I find it easier to remember stuff that I have made up (or ripped off from a specific scenario) rather than be tied to a supplement that I don't have or that was revised behind my back a week ago and now is all different.

I am happy that other people have other views, things in YTU work the way you want them. I am happy to explore those views as it might lead me to a revelation. I am less happy to be told something is a fact of the rules without supporting evidence especially when it turns out to be just a fact of a particular setting, or a particular setting at a particular time or even a fact of a totally different game system. I can see the appeal of older versions of games. I like AD&D 2nd edition, I don't like 5th edition especially as it keeps changing (my 2nd edition stuff is entirely stable), but I won't be on any D&D forums discussing it as that isn't the way the game rolls anymore.
 
If you talk about the Traveller "rules" about this stuff, like encounter tables or whatever...those are exemplars, not "rules". Here's a sample encounter table. These are some sample critters. These are some sample ships. But all of it is couched in "you need to massage these to suit what your setting is intended to be."

If you talk about the Imperial Navy, you are talking about a setting and its specific conceits. That setting has 50 years of development. So the 'facts' of the setting are one thing. Any specific rule in the CRB isn't necessarily designed to model those facts. For instance, the ship encounter tables. They are exactly the same whether you are in the Imperial Capital or a class A starport of a solitary world in the back of beyond. You aren't expected to extrapolate from them for "facts" about the world. You are expected to use them as examples of how to make ones that suit the world you are using.

If you are modelling star wars, that will look different than if you are modelling Star Trek. Or the Expanse. Or 2300. Or Mindjammer. Or Charted Space. The game RULES are intended to allow you to model any or all those. It does some better than others, but it can do all of them fairly well.

Charted Space is so popular that there's often editorial slippage in keeping the rules and the setting distinct, but they are. Just because something is "in the core rules" does not mean it is true in Charted Space. And some things about Charted Space don't make sense because they changed the rules that applied when those things were originally written.

For example, Mongoose Traveller's sensors are, by far, the weakest of any edition of Traveller. The way they talk about Charted Space working practically breaks if you use those rules literally. Classic Traveller didn't have sensor rules at all. At least not in the main books. Probably in one of the boardgame sidelines. Using Traveller: New Era's version of Fire, Fusion, & Steel, you can build EMS sensor arrays that have a 480,000km "short" range if you have sufficient space. And 1000 AU communicators are normal. IIRC, T5 is pretty similar. 2300's TL is much lower than Charted Space, but its sensors are far better.

So, yes, if you use MgT2e's mole-like visual capability for starships and spacestations, then Charted Space is very different than it has been described.

This has been my point for several pages now. There are no details about these topics. Because the rules don't know what what setting you want to use and the settings don't know what version of the rules you want to use. Charted Space is designed to work with Classic Traveller, Megatraveller, GURPS, HERO, T20, T4, T5, MgT1/2e. There's not very much crunch in any setting material for Charted Space, though there is some in the adventures that are written for a specific ruleset. And the rules are designed to help you make a homebrew setting. Not to specifically explain any of the published ones.
 
Vormaerin said:
If you talk about the Traveller "rules" about this stuff, like encounter tables or whatever...those are exemplars, not "rules". Here's a sample encounter table. These are some sample critters. These are some sample ships. But all of it is couched in "you need to massage these to suit what your setting is intended to be."
Click to expand...
If it were then it would not be an issue. Instead p155 states in pretty bald terms that it is the space encounter table. It has explicit reference to the Spinward Marches in its list of modifiers so to argue that it doesn't apply to charted space is directly refutable (assuming you agree that the Marches are in charted Space. The tactics of pirates is also explicitly mentioned on p156. There is no indication that it needs to be tuned.

Now I understand that this may contradict 50 years of development (but as TNE took a fire axe to it, Mongoose isn't the first game company to do this). It may even contradict how the Third Imperium works in MGT2 source books (I haven't read them all, but even the Third Imperium Book makes it clear that some core sectors are hot-beds of privateering) but that is a different argument and I haven't yet seen a revised ship encounter table (other than maybe Pirates of Drinax but this is from the other end of the telescope so not necessarily equivalent) or information on how I might logically create one.

In older editions encounter tables were definitely the responsibility of the referee. But in older editions everything was the responsibility of the referee. They game gave explicit instructions on how to create the creature encounter tables. Later those old editions acquired supplements (of vary degrees of quality and relevance) from a wide variety of authors and publishers to fill in the gaps as it was all too hard for one person to develop an entire universe (and you can't make money out of saying "core books and we're done, over to you boss"). Those that defined worlds or sectors started to define "Charted Space" but it is no more homogenous now than it was then. It wasn't all loving crafted by a single individual to intermesh consistently, some of it was a grab-bag of random thrown together by people who didn't have the internet to check each others homework.

Each planet having it's own encounter table makes sense given the variety of planet types. The few planetary source books (Like CT Tarsus) gave you prepopulated ones (though the majority of entries used generic names for the creatures). Most subsector guides give a few paragraphs of the planet to give you a flavour of it and maybe a single characteristic species, but as otherwise it is back to the rules to hand crank it. When it comes to starship encounters though Tarsus refers you back to the table in the main rules (since presumably space encounters are a bit more homogenous). In those CT rules you would only encounter pirates in systems with class C or lower starports (so in Tarsus you will never encounter a pirate).

Also many of these "sample critters" are canon (Kian), these are also not "sample ships", they are core ships and have been since CT. The "Type A trader" might have wobbled a bit between editions, but the look of that ship and it's broad capabilities have been consistent and canon. Those things are in the core book for a reason, they are a start point, but the start does not vanish because you have moved on a few steps. You can design your own custom trader, but the encounter tables are geared to the vast majority that are standard designs (and you even get a price break on the architect).

If you want to chuck out all the "samples" and run (say) Star Wars using MGT2 Traveller you can of course but you could as easily run one of the games dedicated to Star Wars and save yourself work (a lot of work).
 
Vormaerin said:
Classic Traveller didn't have sensor rules at all. At least not in the main books.
Click to expand...
<pedant mode on>
DETECTION
Starships can detect other ships at a range of approximately a half million miles
(500 inches). Military vessels and scouts have detection ranges out to two million
miles (2000 inches).
Ships which are maintaining complete silence cannot be detected at distances of
greater than 100,000 miles; ships in orbit around a world and also maintaining complete
silence cannot be detected at distances greater than 10,000 miles. Planetary
masses and stars will completely conceal a ship from detection.

DETECTION
Ordinary or commercial starships can detect other ships out to a range of about
one-half light-second; about 1,500 millimeters. Military and scout starships have
detection ranges out to two light-seconds; 6,000 mm or 6 meters.
Ships which are maintaining complete silence cannot be detected at distances of
greater than half detection range; ships in orbit around a world and also maintaining
complete silence cannot be detected at distances greater than one-eighth detection
range. Planetary masses and stars will completely conceal a ship from detection.
Tracking: Once a vessel has been detected, it can be tracked by anyone up to
three light-seconds (about 9,000 mm, or 9 meters).
</pedant mode>

CT didn't have detectable jump emergence or transponders mentioned in core books.
 
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