Traveller 5.10 Book 2: Starships

Book 2 Part 1

Book 1 is reviewed here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

And yes, a bit of a gap here, but work had a few incidents in the last month, so I've been busy. Plus starting up another game of Cowboys and Dinos. Obviously, you can expect my game recaps from that. And yes - it means I am running 2 games, though one only meets once a month or so.

Starships Overview

Ahh, spaceships! And each version of Traveller does it a bit differently. And there is this very lengthy (and often bordering on belligerent) conversation about mixing Classic Book 2 and Book 5 over on COTI. I never did: it was one or the other as for me, they are just different systems. And I like the crunchiness of Book 5 but as I never had space battles, and the ships were mostly just a means of getting from A to B it was not all that critical. We have some people on the forum devoting a LOT of work to something that I feel only he really cares about to that depth, but hey, we all have our rabbit holes!

Anyway, T5.10 Book 2, starting on page 30, gets into spaceships. First, we have an overview of exactly what is a spaceship. And one cannot argue that a "starship is essentially a Hull containing everything necessary for it to move, communicate, carry a payload and (if necessary) defend itself or attack others." It then very briefly covers in-system versus interstellar engines, power systems, sensors, weapons, defensive systems, accommodations and payloads. And that they have to be very tough to withstand the rigors of both space and the infinite number of worlds it may travel to.

We break down the various maneuver drives, from the Classic Maneuver Drive capable up to 1000 diameters of a gravity source (hmm, just what is the diameter of a black hole?), the Gravatic Drive good to 10 diameters (and I want to say that is a MegaTraveller thing but that is just a vague impression as I never read those rules - it came out after I stopped playing Traveller). These first 2 pages are just a summary of the details and plethora of tables to come.

We also get a formal definition of Adventure Class Ships (ACS), Battle Class Ships (BCS) and Fleet Ships. ACS are 100 to 2400 tons, and appropriate for PCs. BCS are 2400 to 100,000 tons. And of course, Fleet Ships are 100,000+ tons. And I wonder if they will ever get a BCS book similar to Classic Book 5. There has been a bit of discussion that lends me to think they are thinking about it. Of course, I am still waiting for the T5 Players Book. It has only been a decade or so...

the Classics

Pages 32 to 49 cover the classic ships. And they mostly maintain the original 1-2 letter classifications. While I miss the starship profile (I used to have that almost memorized and tended to use the 1st section as part of the ID of the ship), it has been replaced partially by the QSP, Quick Ship Profile. Which for the life of me I could not find the actual definition: the index lists a bunch of pages, and I must just be missing the definition (like so much of T5, a bit of cross-referencing would have helped greatly as stuff is just scattered all over the place so I guess, unless you have either wrote the books or read them a few dozen times, expect to get lost). Anyway, looks like it is the classic ship type, a dash, then 2 characters for ship size and hull configuration, then maneuver and jump drive range. So mostly the same as the 1st part of the Book 5 code. And those tables show up much later of course: we get a lot of info but it is not explained until later if you are lucky. And yes, I do like T5 but sadly, the organization and editing are sorely lacking for making this something you can actually play in my opinion. Still using bits and pieces of it when we do play Traveller, but I just wish it had been better edited by someone who had not read it a lot and made a lot of assumptions. 

We have a few pages of 2 ships per page in a sort of summary view, followed by several pages of each ship fully detailed out. And there is a lot of detail - each ship gets a 1 page of text followed 1 page of a LOT of detail.

I really need to actually read all that to see if it makes sense or not. But I miss the brevity of Book 2. Heck - I even got the reprint of Triplanetary as I do like vector space even if I've sadly never been able to play it in any of my Traveller games. But I remember back when I got the deluxe box, I think I made a few planetary templates just to see if I could figure things out.