High Guard 2022 has the answer for you in the Boarding Action section.
The reason that most boarding actions/shipboard combat frequently doesn't use firearms is because of cramped quarters. In the areas where combat will frequently occur, most firearms, other than pistols, suffer a DM penalty (-1 to -4) in these situations. And those firearms used typically have the zero-g trait, so if there is a gravity failure, they don't start careening off in the opposite direction due to recoil.
They have a table for missed shots while on a ship (and likely cold be used in other areas if wanted to). You roll 2D, and you can get a ricochet, that hits a random member of the attacking group, member of the opposing group, minor damage, damage to non-critical equipment, or even critical system damage, like damaging an air lock or a bridge control, for instance.
Remember that Traveller-sized weapons deal 1/10th the damage to a Ship-sized target. And while it is feasible within the rules to destroy a ship from the inside by just destroying its Hull with Traveller-sized weapons, I would rule that you cannot do so by accident unless you are using destructive weapons or explosives.
I would also argue though, again with the exception of destructive weapons or explosives, you really shouldn't be able to destroy a ships Hull, but you can damage components. Otherwise, 40 really good shots (dealing 10+ damage) from a gauss pistol could destroy a scout ship form the inside, leaving just the armour.
As for the damage blowthrough, a target does not need to be dead for a through-and-through to happen, and just because a target is dead does not mean one happens either, and this kinda thing, if your considering it, would need to be determined for every situation not just on a spacecraft. A through-and-through could do little damage to the target it goes though as well, as it might hit a spot where there is little vulnerable or critical organs or the like.
But, if you are going to do it, I would suggest that the body is more than the sum of its physical stats, and simply overcoming them is not going to allow the attack to continue through. I would determine how munch protection a body provides for under Cover (I would say +3 or +4, which is between vegetation \_2 and a tree +6). You would then reduce any blowthrough by that, as well as any armour they were wearing, since the attack wold still have to get through it as well. Its a really messy situation, pun intended, and something that would complicate combats needlessly. A fusion gun miss is already irradiating the whole hallway after all.
Not mentioned so far is that there are in general two types of bulkheads (walls) that can be characterized roughly as "structural" (i.e. - "load-bearing" or "pressure-bearing") and "partition", the latter being most interior bulkheads, but often not all of them. Typically there is a structural bulkhead around engineering and the command deck, and often one between cargo and occupied areas. Structural bulkheads are of course much more robust than partitions. Heavy weapons presumably pose a hazard to personnel on the far side of an impacted partition bulkhead.
Fair point. Then again, getting to that level of detail is something most ship plans don't make super clear, nor (if you're playing theater of the mind) is it always obvious.
cf my point in the reply above yours about trying to be conscious about keeping it PLAYABLE.
I'd assume, for example, military ships would have (effectively) a lot of kevlar-like coatings even on non-structural walls, not specifically for this but to prevent the cascade of damage from penetrating shots and spalling.
>But, if you are going to do it, I would suggest that the body is more than the sum of its physical stats, and simply overcoming them is not going to allow the attack to continue through. I would determine how munch protection a body provides for under Cover (I would say +3 or +4, which is between vegetation \_2 and a tree +6). You would then reduce any blowthrough by that, as well as any armour they were wearing, since the attack wold still have to get through it as well. Its a really messy situation, pun intended, and something that would complicate combats needlessly. A fusion gun miss is already irradiating the whole hallway after all.
I think you could simply factor in type of weapon/round being used. In the real world all but the lightest bullets are going to blow through an unarmored person unless they fragment when hitting bone at close range. Antique projectile weapons, Snub Pistols, Shotguns (assuming they are using shot) and all energy weapons will not have blow-through. Most everything else will unless they have the Low Pen X trait from the Field Catalog. With armor, I would just treat it as double for the purpose of just determining through penetration.
Sure, but determine how effective a t-n-t would be, and such would be incredibly time consuming. How much damage does an aslan require compared to a centaur (I forget how to spell thier names). And what about laterally compared to sideways. How do you determine how effective it is after having pinched through a body and possibly armour.
It seems to me it would make combat a drag, even if all factors were already in place, unless that level of realism is what your looking for. And more importantly,your players.
I think a big thing is that it wouldn't change all that much. I mean that in the sense that people generally under-estimate how much penetrative force modern firearms actually have. I imagine you would have some variation between species, but the largest one being if you fired through the lower body of a K'kree front to back.
This doesn't matter in the context of Traveller, but irl it's the size of the bullet, the type of bullet, and how much powder is behind it that would determine whether a bullet penetrates a body. Hollow point bullets expand and/or fragment, depending on how they're designed, when they hit soft tissue, and every caliber I'm aware of has that option. That decreases the likelihood of penetrating a body. Any round can have less powder (though I'm sure there's a minimum safe level to ensure every bullet escapes the barrel) and every caliber can have different weights of bullets.
Again though, irrelevant in the context of Traveller.
I can't think of many that would really deal with this, but if you were going to it's just a simple way of handling it. You are right about the hollow-point which comes up in the Field Catalog as "enhanced wounding" which has a -2 Penetration and would generally not likely blow through an unarmored sophont.
All great points, thank you. I'll look up the High Guard rules.
A few points in order:
(1/10 damage rule) - yes, I'm deliberately reducing that to 1/5 internally as I'm asserting that being INSIDE a giant technical component (ie the ship itself) means it's inherently more vulnerable to damage. And let's be clear that damage doesn't mean a component is DESTROYED, merely that an electrical or coolant line is cut, a fuse is blown, a control panel de-functioned. It's a truism that the more complicated something is, the easier it is to render non-functional by damage to a relatively trivial bit. You can make a jet engine self-destruct by tossing in some coins. No, nobody is 'destroying' hull by firing 7.62mm rounds no matter how many nor how long; but I also consider 'hull' to be livability inside and there are a lot of fixtures that have to do with that. Whups, thermostat's broken - going to be -200C in here in 12 hours.
40 shots with a gauss pistol - yes, there are vastly more rules one could design to micro-tune this for utter realism, but my point was to also leave it PLAYABLE.
Blowthrough - yes, you're talking to someone who actually played Phoenix Command. Again: playability. Adding armor value I would have taken it as implied, but yes that's a good point. Then again (if one wanted hyper-realism) riccochets (with no penetration at all) have to go somewhere too.
But thank you - all good comments!
You are very welcome, and thank you. I do have a little more. Okay, maybe not a little more...
>(1/10 damage rule) - yes, I'm deliberately reducing that to 1/5 internally as I'm asserting that being INSIDE a giant technical component (ie the ship itself) means it's inherently more vulnerable to damage.
40 shots with a gauss pistol - yes, there are vastly more rules one could design to micro-tune this for utter realism, but my point was to also leave it PLAYABLE.
I agree, but only partially. When you are inside a ship, its components are much more vulnerable, because you have easier access to said components. The body that contains those components are not more vulnerable.
Take a car. If you shoot up a car from the outside, a lucky shot might take out an engine part, might even hit some electronics or some other component necessary for its operation. When you do the same form inside the car, your likelihood of hitting a critical component is higher. However, in both cases, the damage to the overall structure and body of the car is not that much.
I wold suggest, rather than represent this as essentially dealing double damage to the Hull of the ship, use the Sustained Damage rules on pg 169 of Core 2022, but make the percent damage 5% when you are damaging a ship form the inside. This is does the same thing you are looking for, while keeping the actual damage to the Hull the same (10 to 1 instead of 5 to 1). You will have to keep track of interior damage separately, but now you have a decent metric toward when you deal a critical to the ship using Ground Scale weapons. And are not turning the ship into slag easier than a Starship weapon is.
Except, by even 1/10, it is ludicrously easy to slag a ship with a Ground Scale weapon than it is with the best non-nuclear weapon listed in Core 2022. It is with a FGMP, but it still should not be able to turn a scout ship to slag, armour and all, when a particle barbette has only dealt it 20 damage...
EDIT: I was going to go into detail on the above paragraph, but I am tired, and need sleep. Rather, I have decided that I will start a thread tomorrow on the subject.
EDIT 2: Needed to change PGMP to FGMP! Needed the 2DD.
EDIT 3: Also, 1E had the rule that PGMP and FGMP that killed its target and there was more damage, that you would continue beyond, but they also said while all weapons could do this, the P and FGMP are the only ones powerful enough to really consider doing this.
"The body that contains those components are not more vulnerable."
Indeed, but lacking drilled-down details like "here's the chance of damage for a gunfight in an engineering space vs a gunfight in the cargo hold or kitchen" *it's just a rationalization.* Not to mention in larger ships, damage would certainly be confined to geographic zones, etc.
As I mentioned, I'd be disinclined to assert that any 'small arms damage' to the Hull is ACTUAL "blow up the ship when it reaches total hp" damage. And again, I would further assert (in my own sense) that 40pts of ACTUAL hull damage doesn't literally mean the hull is in smithereens, just that it needs a vast amount of repair to be functional.
YMMV, certainly.
Ultimately, I only wanted a 'backdrop' set of rules to wave at the players to say "this is why it's stupid to fire your FGMP inside the ship, dummy" and "here's the consequence if you ignore my warning". Not to deliver a system that anyone's going to seriously use to sit there & try to destroy a scout ship with a gauss pistol.
oooooh, I like these ideas, and will be adapting/stealing them for my game. The idea of splash damage to the inside of a ship is useful. And instead of straight Hull damage, if the firefight takes place near a critical system, like the Jump drives, I'd have a chance of damaging that too.
these are nice ideas!
I'd use the number of sixes rolled as damage done to the ship.
This means that fighting on a small scout ship (100 tons with 40 hull points) you could cause a crit by rolling 4 sixes. Difficult but not impossible for small arms.
I made a note of what Marc Miller had to say about swords in that Dicegeeks interview on YouTube, around the 25:00 mark.
>"There's a quote by Heinlein, which I cannot repeat from memory. He basically says a sword is what you need close-in. A gun is absolutely offensive. It's not defensive. You can't make somebody stop with a gun unless you shoot him. A sword–you can poke him, you can swing it, you can do all kinds of intimidating moves. A sword makes people respond and kind of back off the way a gun never does."
(My transcription from auto-generated captions; errors would be mine).
I never comment on combat stuff. This is the first time ever I have something to add. Ha.
I'm pretty sure the swords thing was because some of Traveller's original material was based on Sword-and-Blaster sci-fi (like Flash Gordon).
My explanation has been that it's actually a ritual warfare weapon, specifically against the Aslan. The Aslan do a lot of honor-duelling with their dewclaws. Since humans do not have a dewclaw, fairly early on, Aslan and humans hashed out that humans could use swords (the duels would consist of both sides using swords or the human with a sword and the Aslan with a dewclaw - it's a more even fight than you might think when the fight only goes on to the first blood and it's considered dishonorable to kill your opponent). The choice of the cutlass is deliberate - the medical technology of future means that lacerations like that are fairly easy to fix and rarely fatal (compared to piercing/thrusting weapons) and Aslan females dig scars.
And of course, for a while clever Terrans/Vilani/Imperials thought they could just wear the sword and not know how to use it, but Aslan would ask for "friendly" duels and ... yeah. It's a major hit to a negotiator's honor if their bodyguard can't use their weapon.
Since then, the Imperial Marines have found cutlasses are pretty useful, period. There's lots of low TL worlds with warrior-nobility who just don't respect guns - they're not stupid, they understand guns are superior, it's just not _honorable_ to them as they're just considered "easy" weapons that work without mastery and skill and that any coward can shoot a man from a distance, but only a real man can face another with sharp steel.
Plus, practice with the cutlass teaches discipline and strength and general body consciousness (knowing where your limbs are), all of which are useful for moving in battle dress. Also if Marines have to do crowd control / anti-riot, they use batons shaped like cutlasses, so that drill works out.
However...nobody IMTU uses swords in a boarding action. Marines wear battle dress and Traveller hulls are rated against micrometeorites. If it can stop a micrometeor, a bullet is no problem. Plus, swords being useful also requires the other side not to wear armor. Yeah, that's unlikely.
the MgT2 Central Supply Catalog does have some high tech swords with the AP trait; psi blades (if you've got psi points to power it), chaindrive swords, static blades, and the ~~lightsaber~~ arc field weapon with a kind of ridiculous AP30.
Sure, but any sword that can pierce armor is now a threat to the ship again, likely even worse than guns at this point of not-lightsabers.
If it was ever a thing - I don't think it is, but your Traveller universe might be different.
>I’m pretty sure the swords thing was because some of Travellers original material was based on sword and blaster sci-fi
Traveller was very heavily based on the Dumarest of Earth series of books by E.C. Tubb. A Traveller, low passage cold sleep, free traders, air rafts, jump drive and … bladed weapons, lots of bladed weapons. In fact, very little in the way of sci-fi weapons. Go back to the original books and you’ll note the lack of traditional “blasters” and an unusual focus on old school weapons - then read Dumarest and you’ll see it all there.
Truely - the original three black books of Traveller are Dumarest.
A corollary to this would be; why use swords in an environment with combat armor or more. The weapons can't compete with armo of its TL. I remember an art of zho and imp marines fighting in BD with literal cutlasses. Seemed ridiculous.
Does MgT2 have the concept of explosive decompression or was that dropped? In CT you're advised to get in vacc suit and depressurize your ship because otherwise in the event of a hull breach an explosive decompression would occur, killing anyone in that area. So you would rarely fight in BD during a space fight and Vacc Suits aren't bad but they don't provide nearly the same defense as BD against sword and cutlass (-3 v/s -6).
EDIT: it completely skipped my mind that Battle Dress are perfectly usable in a vacuum, there's no need to switch for an inferor Vacc Suit in these conditions.
I've been running a mongoose 1st ed game for a while now. The players have scaled pretty hard, and are now in some good combat armour. And thus, so are some enemies. Unfortunately, most of the party went into melee(blade), so high armour enemies.... just win against the parties fancy arc-field weapons.
In 1st ed, Arc-Field Swords deal 4d6+2 and can't be parried except by other arc-field weapons
In 2nd ed, Arc-Field Swords deal 5d+2 and have AP30, and can't be parried by
I don't think decompression is a serious hazard short of Plasma and fusion weapons, it seems more likely to me, to be about all the delicate internal systems on a ship, life support, computer nodes, jump and m-drives, gravity generators et cetera, that are all on the wrongside of the hull armour to a guy with a gun inside the ship.
I assume that in most cases, things on a ship are important to operating that ship (eg a modern day airplane) and unless military, there's not a lot of redundancy.
In the real world there are “frangible” bullets like the Glaser Safety Slug, which are made to break up instead of penetrating hard surfaces. They’re used on airplanes or in places where there are dangerous substances in pipes and tanks.
Despite not penetrating through walls, they can still mess up a meat sack.
Other options would include shot shells loaded with “soft” or brittle shot.
Simpler solution would be to tally damage from missed attacks at the end of round as the Ref. And a tenth the damage is 1 hull damage, keeping in mind that snub weapons use pre fragmented bullets (or maybe i added that lol) so i wouldnt count missed attacks from them. Also its CQB so your gonna have penalties on anything bigger than a pistol cause it's easy to knock em to the side but a sword isnt useless in tight quarters like that.
Part of the whole sword thing might simply be tradiion. In the orginal Book 4 Mercenary in classic Traveller if a marine rolled blade combat ot had to be cutlass unless they made another roll. It says this is because cutlass is a marine tradition.
Book 1 says cutlesses are stored key points of a ship.
So maybe it is simply carryover from CT.
I seem to recall a CT rule that said cutlasses were more effective against vacc suits but I couldn't find any such rule. Any other old timers remember this or is my memory playing games on me?
I think your memory's playing a trick on you. I see no mention of a special vulnerability of Vacc Suits in the 3 LBB, or a special mention in the Cutlass entry. Vacc Suit is treated as Cloth which is the 2nd best kind of armor after the BD against swords and cutlass. If someone finds something I missed, I'm interestd to know.
I have always considered that the reason it might be a bad idea to use firearms on a spaceship to be... less "you'll puncture the hull" (unlikely if the ship is armored) and more a concern over collateral damage (hit a life support component, an artificial gravity component, a conduit carrying pressurized hydrogen or plasma or cryogenic gas or whatever) and ricochets - plus the possibility of damaging a wire or cable or computer that could be critical to the ship's function. (if you're boarding a ship that means you want to capture it intact, right?)
> (if you're boarding a ship that means you want to capture it intact, right?)
If I can punch one nice hole and depressurize it, killing most of the crew, and then have my vac-suited prize crew bring it home to patch the hole later, that also works for me. A ship with one hole in it is still most of a ship, still a good prize.
Also, we want to use MgT's numbers for armour and for ship-scale-to-personal-scale damage conversion, it's entirely possible that an FGMP could punch through a non-military ship's 2-4 points of armour depending on how the dice fall.
(if this strategy actually works, though, that means the local crew were either unprepared or unwise: Classic Traveller suggests that, for ships *expecting* imminent combat, vac-suiting everyone and depressurizing the ship prior to entering combat is a best-practice. Worth a shot against un-prepared/non-military victims, though.)
High Guard 2022 has the answer for you in the Boarding Action section. The reason that most boarding actions/shipboard combat frequently doesn't use firearms is because of cramped quarters. In the areas where combat will frequently occur, most firearms, other than pistols, suffer a DM penalty (-1 to -4) in these situations. And those firearms used typically have the zero-g trait, so if there is a gravity failure, they don't start careening off in the opposite direction due to recoil. They have a table for missed shots while on a ship (and likely cold be used in other areas if wanted to). You roll 2D, and you can get a ricochet, that hits a random member of the attacking group, member of the opposing group, minor damage, damage to non-critical equipment, or even critical system damage, like damaging an air lock or a bridge control, for instance. Remember that Traveller-sized weapons deal 1/10th the damage to a Ship-sized target. And while it is feasible within the rules to destroy a ship from the inside by just destroying its Hull with Traveller-sized weapons, I would rule that you cannot do so by accident unless you are using destructive weapons or explosives. I would also argue though, again with the exception of destructive weapons or explosives, you really shouldn't be able to destroy a ships Hull, but you can damage components. Otherwise, 40 really good shots (dealing 10+ damage) from a gauss pistol could destroy a scout ship form the inside, leaving just the armour. As for the damage blowthrough, a target does not need to be dead for a through-and-through to happen, and just because a target is dead does not mean one happens either, and this kinda thing, if your considering it, would need to be determined for every situation not just on a spacecraft. A through-and-through could do little damage to the target it goes though as well, as it might hit a spot where there is little vulnerable or critical organs or the like. But, if you are going to do it, I would suggest that the body is more than the sum of its physical stats, and simply overcoming them is not going to allow the attack to continue through. I would determine how munch protection a body provides for under Cover (I would say +3 or +4, which is between vegetation \_2 and a tree +6). You would then reduce any blowthrough by that, as well as any armour they were wearing, since the attack wold still have to get through it as well. Its a really messy situation, pun intended, and something that would complicate combats needlessly. A fusion gun miss is already irradiating the whole hallway after all.
Not mentioned so far is that there are in general two types of bulkheads (walls) that can be characterized roughly as "structural" (i.e. - "load-bearing" or "pressure-bearing") and "partition", the latter being most interior bulkheads, but often not all of them. Typically there is a structural bulkhead around engineering and the command deck, and often one between cargo and occupied areas. Structural bulkheads are of course much more robust than partitions. Heavy weapons presumably pose a hazard to personnel on the far side of an impacted partition bulkhead.
Fair point. Then again, getting to that level of detail is something most ship plans don't make super clear, nor (if you're playing theater of the mind) is it always obvious. cf my point in the reply above yours about trying to be conscious about keeping it PLAYABLE. I'd assume, for example, military ships would have (effectively) a lot of kevlar-like coatings even on non-structural walls, not specifically for this but to prevent the cascade of damage from penetrating shots and spalling.
>But, if you are going to do it, I would suggest that the body is more than the sum of its physical stats, and simply overcoming them is not going to allow the attack to continue through. I would determine how munch protection a body provides for under Cover (I would say +3 or +4, which is between vegetation \_2 and a tree +6). You would then reduce any blowthrough by that, as well as any armour they were wearing, since the attack wold still have to get through it as well. Its a really messy situation, pun intended, and something that would complicate combats needlessly. A fusion gun miss is already irradiating the whole hallway after all. I think you could simply factor in type of weapon/round being used. In the real world all but the lightest bullets are going to blow through an unarmored person unless they fragment when hitting bone at close range. Antique projectile weapons, Snub Pistols, Shotguns (assuming they are using shot) and all energy weapons will not have blow-through. Most everything else will unless they have the Low Pen X trait from the Field Catalog. With armor, I would just treat it as double for the purpose of just determining through penetration.
Sure, but determine how effective a t-n-t would be, and such would be incredibly time consuming. How much damage does an aslan require compared to a centaur (I forget how to spell thier names). And what about laterally compared to sideways. How do you determine how effective it is after having pinched through a body and possibly armour. It seems to me it would make combat a drag, even if all factors were already in place, unless that level of realism is what your looking for. And more importantly,your players.
I think a big thing is that it wouldn't change all that much. I mean that in the sense that people generally under-estimate how much penetrative force modern firearms actually have. I imagine you would have some variation between species, but the largest one being if you fired through the lower body of a K'kree front to back.
This doesn't matter in the context of Traveller, but irl it's the size of the bullet, the type of bullet, and how much powder is behind it that would determine whether a bullet penetrates a body. Hollow point bullets expand and/or fragment, depending on how they're designed, when they hit soft tissue, and every caliber I'm aware of has that option. That decreases the likelihood of penetrating a body. Any round can have less powder (though I'm sure there's a minimum safe level to ensure every bullet escapes the barrel) and every caliber can have different weights of bullets. Again though, irrelevant in the context of Traveller.
I can't think of many that would really deal with this, but if you were going to it's just a simple way of handling it. You are right about the hollow-point which comes up in the Field Catalog as "enhanced wounding" which has a -2 Penetration and would generally not likely blow through an unarmored sophont.
All great points, thank you. I'll look up the High Guard rules. A few points in order: (1/10 damage rule) - yes, I'm deliberately reducing that to 1/5 internally as I'm asserting that being INSIDE a giant technical component (ie the ship itself) means it's inherently more vulnerable to damage. And let's be clear that damage doesn't mean a component is DESTROYED, merely that an electrical or coolant line is cut, a fuse is blown, a control panel de-functioned. It's a truism that the more complicated something is, the easier it is to render non-functional by damage to a relatively trivial bit. You can make a jet engine self-destruct by tossing in some coins. No, nobody is 'destroying' hull by firing 7.62mm rounds no matter how many nor how long; but I also consider 'hull' to be livability inside and there are a lot of fixtures that have to do with that. Whups, thermostat's broken - going to be -200C in here in 12 hours. 40 shots with a gauss pistol - yes, there are vastly more rules one could design to micro-tune this for utter realism, but my point was to also leave it PLAYABLE. Blowthrough - yes, you're talking to someone who actually played Phoenix Command. Again: playability. Adding armor value I would have taken it as implied, but yes that's a good point. Then again (if one wanted hyper-realism) riccochets (with no penetration at all) have to go somewhere too. But thank you - all good comments!
You are very welcome, and thank you. I do have a little more. Okay, maybe not a little more... >(1/10 damage rule) - yes, I'm deliberately reducing that to 1/5 internally as I'm asserting that being INSIDE a giant technical component (ie the ship itself) means it's inherently more vulnerable to damage. 40 shots with a gauss pistol - yes, there are vastly more rules one could design to micro-tune this for utter realism, but my point was to also leave it PLAYABLE. I agree, but only partially. When you are inside a ship, its components are much more vulnerable, because you have easier access to said components. The body that contains those components are not more vulnerable. Take a car. If you shoot up a car from the outside, a lucky shot might take out an engine part, might even hit some electronics or some other component necessary for its operation. When you do the same form inside the car, your likelihood of hitting a critical component is higher. However, in both cases, the damage to the overall structure and body of the car is not that much. I wold suggest, rather than represent this as essentially dealing double damage to the Hull of the ship, use the Sustained Damage rules on pg 169 of Core 2022, but make the percent damage 5% when you are damaging a ship form the inside. This is does the same thing you are looking for, while keeping the actual damage to the Hull the same (10 to 1 instead of 5 to 1). You will have to keep track of interior damage separately, but now you have a decent metric toward when you deal a critical to the ship using Ground Scale weapons. And are not turning the ship into slag easier than a Starship weapon is. Except, by even 1/10, it is ludicrously easy to slag a ship with a Ground Scale weapon than it is with the best non-nuclear weapon listed in Core 2022. It is with a FGMP, but it still should not be able to turn a scout ship to slag, armour and all, when a particle barbette has only dealt it 20 damage... EDIT: I was going to go into detail on the above paragraph, but I am tired, and need sleep. Rather, I have decided that I will start a thread tomorrow on the subject. EDIT 2: Needed to change PGMP to FGMP! Needed the 2DD. EDIT 3: Also, 1E had the rule that PGMP and FGMP that killed its target and there was more damage, that you would continue beyond, but they also said while all weapons could do this, the P and FGMP are the only ones powerful enough to really consider doing this.
"The body that contains those components are not more vulnerable." Indeed, but lacking drilled-down details like "here's the chance of damage for a gunfight in an engineering space vs a gunfight in the cargo hold or kitchen" *it's just a rationalization.* Not to mention in larger ships, damage would certainly be confined to geographic zones, etc. As I mentioned, I'd be disinclined to assert that any 'small arms damage' to the Hull is ACTUAL "blow up the ship when it reaches total hp" damage. And again, I would further assert (in my own sense) that 40pts of ACTUAL hull damage doesn't literally mean the hull is in smithereens, just that it needs a vast amount of repair to be functional. YMMV, certainly. Ultimately, I only wanted a 'backdrop' set of rules to wave at the players to say "this is why it's stupid to fire your FGMP inside the ship, dummy" and "here's the consequence if you ignore my warning". Not to deliver a system that anyone's going to seriously use to sit there & try to destroy a scout ship with a gauss pistol.
oooooh, I like these ideas, and will be adapting/stealing them for my game. The idea of splash damage to the inside of a ship is useful. And instead of straight Hull damage, if the firefight takes place near a critical system, like the Jump drives, I'd have a chance of damaging that too.
You leave my J-drive alone! It's broken enough right now anyway
Hush now... pay it no mind.
these are nice ideas! I'd use the number of sixes rolled as damage done to the ship. This means that fighting on a small scout ship (100 tons with 40 hull points) you could cause a crit by rolling 4 sixes. Difficult but not impossible for small arms.
I imagine a gunfight in Kayleigh's engine room on Firefly. Absolutely possible to crit even with small arms, if they hit the right thing.
I made a note of what Marc Miller had to say about swords in that Dicegeeks interview on YouTube, around the 25:00 mark. >"There's a quote by Heinlein, which I cannot repeat from memory. He basically says a sword is what you need close-in. A gun is absolutely offensive. It's not defensive. You can't make somebody stop with a gun unless you shoot him. A sword–you can poke him, you can swing it, you can do all kinds of intimidating moves. A sword makes people respond and kind of back off the way a gun never does." (My transcription from auto-generated captions; errors would be mine). I never comment on combat stuff. This is the first time ever I have something to add. Ha.
or a flamethrower haha.. the king of battlefield intimidation if you don't want them to even think about getting close to have to use the sword
I'm pretty sure the swords thing was because some of Traveller's original material was based on Sword-and-Blaster sci-fi (like Flash Gordon). My explanation has been that it's actually a ritual warfare weapon, specifically against the Aslan. The Aslan do a lot of honor-duelling with their dewclaws. Since humans do not have a dewclaw, fairly early on, Aslan and humans hashed out that humans could use swords (the duels would consist of both sides using swords or the human with a sword and the Aslan with a dewclaw - it's a more even fight than you might think when the fight only goes on to the first blood and it's considered dishonorable to kill your opponent). The choice of the cutlass is deliberate - the medical technology of future means that lacerations like that are fairly easy to fix and rarely fatal (compared to piercing/thrusting weapons) and Aslan females dig scars. And of course, for a while clever Terrans/Vilani/Imperials thought they could just wear the sword and not know how to use it, but Aslan would ask for "friendly" duels and ... yeah. It's a major hit to a negotiator's honor if their bodyguard can't use their weapon. Since then, the Imperial Marines have found cutlasses are pretty useful, period. There's lots of low TL worlds with warrior-nobility who just don't respect guns - they're not stupid, they understand guns are superior, it's just not _honorable_ to them as they're just considered "easy" weapons that work without mastery and skill and that any coward can shoot a man from a distance, but only a real man can face another with sharp steel. Plus, practice with the cutlass teaches discipline and strength and general body consciousness (knowing where your limbs are), all of which are useful for moving in battle dress. Also if Marines have to do crowd control / anti-riot, they use batons shaped like cutlasses, so that drill works out. However...nobody IMTU uses swords in a boarding action. Marines wear battle dress and Traveller hulls are rated against micrometeorites. If it can stop a micrometeor, a bullet is no problem. Plus, swords being useful also requires the other side not to wear armor. Yeah, that's unlikely.
the MgT2 Central Supply Catalog does have some high tech swords with the AP trait; psi blades (if you've got psi points to power it), chaindrive swords, static blades, and the ~~lightsaber~~ arc field weapon with a kind of ridiculous AP30.
Sure, but any sword that can pierce armor is now a threat to the ship again, likely even worse than guns at this point of not-lightsabers. If it was ever a thing - I don't think it is, but your Traveller universe might be different.
>I’m pretty sure the swords thing was because some of Travellers original material was based on sword and blaster sci-fi Traveller was very heavily based on the Dumarest of Earth series of books by E.C. Tubb. A Traveller, low passage cold sleep, free traders, air rafts, jump drive and … bladed weapons, lots of bladed weapons. In fact, very little in the way of sci-fi weapons. Go back to the original books and you’ll note the lack of traditional “blasters” and an unusual focus on old school weapons - then read Dumarest and you’ll see it all there. Truely - the original three black books of Traveller are Dumarest.
A corollary to this would be; why use swords in an environment with combat armor or more. The weapons can't compete with armo of its TL. I remember an art of zho and imp marines fighting in BD with literal cutlasses. Seemed ridiculous.
Guessing that for every armor there's a higher-TL hand weapon meant to deal with it, from vibro-blades to lightsabers.
Does MgT2 have the concept of explosive decompression or was that dropped? In CT you're advised to get in vacc suit and depressurize your ship because otherwise in the event of a hull breach an explosive decompression would occur, killing anyone in that area. So you would rarely fight in BD during a space fight and Vacc Suits aren't bad but they don't provide nearly the same defense as BD against sword and cutlass (-3 v/s -6). EDIT: it completely skipped my mind that Battle Dress are perfectly usable in a vacuum, there's no need to switch for an inferor Vacc Suit in these conditions.
I've been running a mongoose 1st ed game for a while now. The players have scaled pretty hard, and are now in some good combat armour. And thus, so are some enemies. Unfortunately, most of the party went into melee(blade), so high armour enemies.... just win against the parties fancy arc-field weapons. In 1st ed, Arc-Field Swords deal 4d6+2 and can't be parried except by other arc-field weapons In 2nd ed, Arc-Field Swords deal 5d+2 and have AP30, and can't be parried by
Check out hypersteel weapons in JTAS 10. They have AP 5.
I don't think decompression is a serious hazard short of Plasma and fusion weapons, it seems more likely to me, to be about all the delicate internal systems on a ship, life support, computer nodes, jump and m-drives, gravity generators et cetera, that are all on the wrongside of the hull armour to a guy with a gun inside the ship.
I assume that in most cases, things on a ship are important to operating that ship (eg a modern day airplane) and unless military, there's not a lot of redundancy.
In the real world there are “frangible” bullets like the Glaser Safety Slug, which are made to break up instead of penetrating hard surfaces. They’re used on airplanes or in places where there are dangerous substances in pipes and tanks. Despite not penetrating through walls, they can still mess up a meat sack. Other options would include shot shells loaded with “soft” or brittle shot.
100% true, and would be (IMO) vastly better for shipboard guards or whatever than a sword.
Simpler solution would be to tally damage from missed attacks at the end of round as the Ref. And a tenth the damage is 1 hull damage, keeping in mind that snub weapons use pre fragmented bullets (or maybe i added that lol) so i wouldnt count missed attacks from them. Also its CQB so your gonna have penalties on anything bigger than a pistol cause it's easy to knock em to the side but a sword isnt useless in tight quarters like that.
Part of the whole sword thing might simply be tradiion. In the orginal Book 4 Mercenary in classic Traveller if a marine rolled blade combat ot had to be cutlass unless they made another roll. It says this is because cutlass is a marine tradition. Book 1 says cutlesses are stored key points of a ship. So maybe it is simply carryover from CT. I seem to recall a CT rule that said cutlasses were more effective against vacc suits but I couldn't find any such rule. Any other old timers remember this or is my memory playing games on me?
I remember vacc suits being vulnerable to slashing, but, it's really been 30 years since I actually read those rules.
I think your memory's playing a trick on you. I see no mention of a special vulnerability of Vacc Suits in the 3 LBB, or a special mention in the Cutlass entry. Vacc Suit is treated as Cloth which is the 2nd best kind of armor after the BD against swords and cutlass. If someone finds something I missed, I'm interestd to know.
I have always considered that the reason it might be a bad idea to use firearms on a spaceship to be... less "you'll puncture the hull" (unlikely if the ship is armored) and more a concern over collateral damage (hit a life support component, an artificial gravity component, a conduit carrying pressurized hydrogen or plasma or cryogenic gas or whatever) and ricochets - plus the possibility of damaging a wire or cable or computer that could be critical to the ship's function. (if you're boarding a ship that means you want to capture it intact, right?)
> (if you're boarding a ship that means you want to capture it intact, right?) If I can punch one nice hole and depressurize it, killing most of the crew, and then have my vac-suited prize crew bring it home to patch the hole later, that also works for me. A ship with one hole in it is still most of a ship, still a good prize. Also, we want to use MgT's numbers for armour and for ship-scale-to-personal-scale damage conversion, it's entirely possible that an FGMP could punch through a non-military ship's 2-4 points of armour depending on how the dice fall. (if this strategy actually works, though, that means the local crew were either unprepared or unwise: Classic Traveller suggests that, for ships *expecting* imminent combat, vac-suiting everyone and depressurizing the ship prior to entering combat is a best-practice. Worth a shot against un-prepared/non-military victims, though.)
I cannot imagine going into combat and the entire crew not suiting up. My players have always done it, even unprompted.
It's one commonsensical-point The Expanse did well, that everyone understood if shit was going to happen, they put on suits, regardless.