> Jim  Vassilakos <mailto:xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

>     And here's another one: Gunners

>     Given that cargo specialists could be replaced by computers, what about gunners? It seems to me
>     that if there's anything a computer should be able do better than a human, it would be the
>     accurate and efficient use of a weapon. The pilot ought to be able to just designate targets and
>     let the computer figure out how to take them out. Not only would this save the cost of paying,
>     housing, and feeding a gunner, but the ship would arguably end up winning more battles.
>     So how many of you still run Traveller with actual human gunners, and how many just assume the
>     whole thing is computerized to the point that they're no longer necessary?

My 2 cents, worth what you paid for it... Also I'm sure this is completely non-canon.

It depends partially on the target. If this is something which can't change course "quickly" (see
below) (e.g. a capital ship), then a computer can handle the targeting just fine. Of course, the
target is likely to have defensive armour, and so on. OTOH, if the target (e.g. a missile) can
"jink", (change course, direction, and acceleration) then it is likely to be doing so throughout
its trajectory, and it won't have a lot of defensive armour. From now on I'm going to refer to such
a target as a 'missile', but you can generalize the concept easily enough.

Such jinks would be driven by random-number generators, so the best that a computerized weapon
could do would be to put 'a lot of ammo down-range', that is, to put a large amount of ammo
through the target's "trajectory cone" (to coin a phrase) - the places that the target is likely
to be when the ammo actually arrives. This can be done, but uses up a lot of ammo, and is, the
way I play it, not likely to be successful. BTW this is basically how a point defence weapon
works, even today. (Side note: if the missile is using a pseudo-random number generator and someone
can steal or predict the number sequence, then you have a different situation. Yes, in RL this
would be a lot harder, and I'm not getting into it here.)

"Quickly" of course depends on how far the source and target are away from each other, and their
relative velocity vectors. If it takes ten light-seconds for the missile's position to reach the
target, then by the time a laser pulse can arrive in response, the missile has had twenty seconds
to jink, and it's probably doing this (again, IMTU), every second or so. That's a lot of potential
variation in the missile's trajectory.

So how does Gunnery skill help? I hand-wave it as either a Luck-based skill, or perhaps a Psionic
one. It gives someone with the skill a chance to sub-consciously predict *how* the missile will
jink, that is, exactly what course changes will be triggered by the missile's random-number
generator, over the next few iterations of this. The closer the missile is, the fewer iterations
would be necessary to predict its co-ordinates, and vice versa. So the more skill levels in
Gunnery you have, the more course changes you can 'predict' and/or the better you can predict
them (again, this is all sub-conscious), so you end up with a higher probability of hitting that
incoming missile, and being very popular with your ship-mates for doing so.

As others have noted, this all boils down to playability. Once you start looking behind the
curtain, lots of things in every game system start to break. My personal approach is to cheerfully
throw away everything from canon that I don't like, and/or come up with hand-wavy explanations
if my players happen to ask, and usually they don't; I am blessed that way with players who are
mostly concerned with the entertainment aspects of playing an RPG.

Jonathan