Agility & Traveller Starships [Skills vs. Hardware in space combat]
kaladorn@xxxxxx
(26 May 2020 02:53 UTC)
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Re: [TML] Agility & Traveller Starships [Skills vs. Hardware in space combat] Rupert Boleyn (26 May 2020 03:11 UTC)
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Re: [TML] Agility & Traveller Starships [Skills vs. Hardware in space combat]
kaladorn@xxxxxx
(26 May 2020 16:30 UTC)
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Re: [TML] Agility & Traveller Starships [Skills vs. Hardware in space combat] Rupert Boleyn 26 May 2020 03:11 UTC
On 26May2020 1453, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote: > In High Guard, if I recall, agility (or maybe emergency agility, but > then again if I'm in trouble, isn't all agility emergency agility?) > was calculated from excess power and in MT perhaps as well. In some > versions of the game, you got to sometimes substitute your pilot level > (but others did not seem to do that). In HG it was based on your excess power after everything *except* your manoeuvre drive was accounted for, and was capped by your manoeuvre drives's rating. It was thus your combat acceleration with everything powered. Most warships had agility equal to their M-Drive's rating. In MT is was based off excess power after everything *including* the M-Drive was paid for, so having a really big reactor somehow made you more agile without you having to pay for extra manoeuvring thrusters or the like (and also without you being able to actually *move*). I think the authors of MT's spaceships section didn't actually understand what agility in HG was. A late errata made agility scale with power/displacement I think, but even so using excess power as a measure like this is silly. > > It always felt odd to me to see the 60K dTon cruisers having high > agility and your small traders and whatnot having less (unless you > could count pilot skill and ignore your hardware because even a crappy > trader could have a pilot-4 or 5 if they were very fortunate). Remember, combat turns were about 20 minutes long, and agility wasn't about little jinks and weaving like a WWII fighter, but about hard accelerations that meant you weren't where you were expected to be when the incoming fire arrived. > > With the geometric laws that govern hull size and mass, I would have > thought that it would be easier to have an agile small ship than > large, especially because most of them only have Jump 1 or Jump 2 but > many of the larger cruisers and the like are Jump 3 at least. That does make it easier to fit big engines in, yes. However, you have to mount those big engines and power them. A small warship is probably quite agile. A small freighter is most likely not, because big engines and powerful reactors are cost and mass that's useless almost all the time. -- Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>