Traveller: Landing Your Starship

Usually I don't role play the landing of starships. I may make them do a piloting roll if the planet has some extreme environment of some sort. I know Classic Traveller does not use a lot of automation, but even when I played in the 80s, a lot of the operations were automated as that's what I thought the future would be like.

Now, I am more of a "cassette future" or retro-futurism if playing Traveller. Leaning heavily back to the giant computers and a lot more manual processes. Call it nostalgia if you wish, but there is a certain charm to that. Quite possibly driven by playing more pulp-like games lately.

Anyway, I was going through some of the electronic Traveller library and found the Starport Planetfall publication (I don't have a physical copy, but one from the Apocrypha 3 CD from Far Future). 

 There are some interesting looking rules about making planetfall. First, when you get into orbit there is a wait of 1d x 30 minutes. A straight roll. I'd probably modify it though, based on the port type and population somehow. And possibly law level and government type. A class A port with a high population planet and a restrictive government and high law level may be a lot longer, whereas as class E port and only a dozen people on planet would be immediate. But it is a decent base roll. 

Then it takes 1000 seconds x the planet size for landing. The only thing I would change on that is it may change based on the atmosphere. A tainted or corrosive atmosphere you may want to go slower. Or not: it would be instrumental landings anyway. But a planet with a very active atmosphere and extreme winds would, I would hazard (hee-hee) should take longer.

For each of those 1000 second phases, you roll for an encounter. The pilot skill level is a negative DM on the 7+ for some sort of an encounter. If I read it correctly, there is only 1 encounter. So you deal with that one thing, and not a possible cascading of issues. I suppose a sadistic referee may make the pilot roll each 1000 second segment. Especially if the ship had not been maintained. Hmm...yeah, add +1 for every 6 months (12 months?) past when it was supposed to have its yearly maintenance completed.

The table is in the appendix and not in the chapter. Most of the rolls are no encounter, but you can have ship malfunctions, port errors, weather and collision alerts. Then tables for more specific results. There are modifiers based on the starport type, so it will have some preferences. 

There is a similar process for leaving the planet. 

I think I'll test this out on the next Traveller solo session I run, hopefully this weekend. Though if it ends in a crash (a possibility!) I may disregard that. Or not...

There are also a lot of help for various other things in the port: encounters in the port based of the port type, costs for various services and processes, officials you may meet. There is also yet another Starport Authority character generation system there: I think that makes at least 3. There is the one from the JTAS 19 and one from Diverse Roles from Gypsy Knights. See my Traveller career bibliography here, which I'll now add this version to as well!

I do love reading through Classic Traveller things. There was a certain simplicity in the rules and how things worked. Though a lot of interpretation as well!