Saturday, October 30, 2021

Montca - A Different Image With Mechanics

 Trying something a little different. And thinking it would fit in my half-sheet sized referee shield/display/whatever they are I got way back in the Schlock Mercenary RPG Kickstarter (which they also offered as an add-on in the XDM book KS. Which why yes, I did back).


So we have a lot of the basic stuff, then a really long extended UWP. Essentially I took in the additional security profile and starport activity index from Mongoose's JTAS, and threw in a bit more. I need to recheck my math for the 100D travel time (and reformat that table to make it fit better). Pretty sure I did the math right, but it has been (cough) years since I've had to deal with math outside of writing software for accounting stuff. Using the old formula from book 2:


D is in meters, so for a size 6 world that is 6000 miles in diameter, or 9,654 km in diameter, or 9,654,000 meters, then x 100 for 100 diameters, and our acceleration is 10m/s for G1, that gives (loads up the calculator) 5.45 hours. 6G gets there in 2.23 hour. So you save 3 hours each way with a 6G ship versus 1 1G ship. 

Which is why I have that chart there! Once I get my math right (and I think I got it all straight!) Anyway, I don't want to be figuring this on the fly in games so figure that handy chart will come in handy.

Looking over the extended UWP:

A639993-C 200 A4-V S7D5-8 PAA-S SAI 9x3/5-10-20-30

We have the standard UWP, then the PGB for population, gas giant and belt adjustments. So no gas giants nor asteroid belts in this system and a population around 2,000,000,000. The S7D5-8 shows that the planetary law level is 7 as per the UWP, but near-space to the 100 diameter limit is really, really high at D, but past that is a 5. The PAA-S indicates that the planetary and orbital ports are both class A with standard amenities. The SAI (Starport Activity Indicator) are actual die rolls and percentages: roll 9 die and multiply by 3 for the number of ships at or near the port as your players show up, and the percentages are 5% are bulk carriers (50K tons+), 10% large freighters (10-50K tons), 20% medium freighters (5-10K tons), 30% small freighters (1-5K tons) and the rest are incidental ships such as the adventurer's ship. Obviously this breakdown can be adjusted to a smaller ship universe, back when the Kinunir was considered a pretty big ship.

So this means when players show up in system, we have several rolls for each visit. First at the security, if they jump outside the 100D range, a roll of 5 or less means there will be some radio communication from the authorities. Within the 100D there will always be security checks, including a boarding by customs inspection. While on the world, an 8 or less means that the security and law are a bit more enthusiastic in their response to issues. The normal law level of 7 is the daily check: 7 or less and they may be pulled over for a routine check,

For ship traffic, we roll 9 dice & multiply by 3 for the number of ships. 39x3 indicates when the ship comes in there are 117 ships (this is a high-tech system with an A port). Of the 117, 6 are huge 50,000 ton freighters, 12 are 10-50,000 ton freighters, 24 are 5-10,000 ton freighters, 35 are 1-5,000 ton freighters, and the remaining 41 ships are sub-1000 ton ships. Some of these could be cruise/passenger liners if those exist in your Traveller universe. So we have a pretty busy port apparently (and quite possibly approaching the GURPS Far Trader level of ships). 

We also know how long it will take the ship to go from the 100D to orbiting the planet. Once there, I usually end up doing some sort of roll for how long it takes to get permission and a spot to land. Pretty sure there was yet another article about this, and I know several threads over on COTI with a lot of suggestions as well.

Since this system also supports a class A orbital port, those larger ships are going to be in parking orbits near that high port, so there will probably be significant shuttle traffic as well. This helps us paint a visual image of just how busy this particular port is.

Then throw in starport encounters (which I need to break out in the solo installment - maybe tomorrow as my Sunday game has been postponed due to Halloween) and we have quite a number of things going on.

So a bit of prep ahead of time for each system that can be visited (and eventually I have a library of systems) and I can be a bit more confident about getting from jump to the planet.

And I am hoping to get my Sunday group to play Traveller as well. Not sure how will that will go as they are more fantasy than science fiction, but I can hope!

And finally, as per a previous post about the security, a good bit of this came from the Mongoose version of the Journal. More than half was simply re-doing the original JTAS articles, but there were some new things in there that are useful. And apparently, with the revised 2nd edition, they finally dropped those really stupid orthographic deck plans for flat 2D plans you can actually, you know, use. And there is a KS for the next set of journals. Which, though I really don't like where Mongoose has gone (it seems to me they are just redoing the same stuff over and over again, and I'm not impressed by the physical quality of the books as mine are falling apart and barely used!) I will still probably back. I am a sucker for that sort of thing, though I'll no longer get any of their adventures. And I've yet to use those giant deck plans of the cruiser. And not really satisfied with those to tell the truth: there was obviously a lot of copy/paste going on and the two halves of each module seem to simply be mirror images. And I wonder about the deck heights for some of those that carry shuttles. But perhaps I just need to spread them back out on the floor and wander those corridors again.

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