Subj:	TRAVELLER digest 357
Date:	95-07-24 20:04:44 EDT
From:	traveller@mpgn.com
To:	traveller@mpgn.com

From:	traveller@mpgn.com
Sender:	traveller@mpgn.com
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			    TRAVELLER Digest 357

Topics covered in this issue include:

  1) WARNING: message delayed at "mmu.ac.uk"
	by J.Brooks@mmu.ac.uk
  2) Other races........
	by Bri <bri@teleport.com>
  3) Re: Trademarks and Gaming
	by chrisb@MPGN.COM (Christopher Beattie)
  4) Jump-points
	by library@dss.gov.au (DSS Library)
  5) Re: ship maintainance questions (Td#356)
	by Derek Wildstar <wildstar@qrc.com>
  6) Fuel Formula Reference
	by lhowie@dilbert.lrmi.com (Les Howie)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 00:43:55 +0100
From: J.Brooks@mmu.ac.uk
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: WARNING: message delayed at "mmu.ac.uk"
Message-ID: <199507232341.TAA18203@Mithril.MPGN.COM>

Your message, 
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	UA-ID TRAVELLER dig...
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 15:56:39 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bri <bri@teleport.com>
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Other races........
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950723155606.3093A-100000@kelly.teleport.com>

 I was wondering if anyone could send me info on what adjustments you 
would make so that you could play a Dryone?
 Thanks.

bri


------------------------------

Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 20:34:18 -0400
From: chrisb@MPGN.COM (Christopher Beattie)
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Trademarks and Gaming
Message-ID: <199507240034.UAA29046@Central.KeyWest.MPGN.COM>

While in the news groups the issue of trademarks, copyrights, etc.
are mostly flame wars, a few issues do get passed by and these issues
should be addressed in any general document that is created for 
gamimg company consideration.

In the first case, many companies have or at lease believe have an
implicit copyright on their own scenarios for the various games.  
Thus TSR for example would have a copyright on their Forgotten 
Realms, as well as GDW on their TNE universe.  Unfortunately, there
is (If I remember, 'though I forget the exact incident) case 
president in fantasy fiction where one writer gave permission for
another writter to write a story in her fictional world and in 
essence lost her rights to her originial fictional world.  This
bodes ill for players who want to publish their campaign stories,
which are based off of the GDW campaign worlds.

A similiar case is where a company is working on something that
soneone later posts something similiar to.  This gives the appearance
that the company 'stole' the writers works.  This is one more
reason why companies might be not as easy to let such things occur.

These are only a few of the things to consider in such a generic
document.  After the flames die down I think there will be a slow
but painfully thought out compromise from the various companies.
One thing is clear, if the courts do get dragged into this, both
the gamers and the gaming companies will come out the clear loosers.

|     _____         |Christopher Beattie |Tantalus Incorporated|
|  ___ |[]|_n_n_I_c |Tantalus @ Key West |        P.O. Box 2310|
| |___||__|###|____)|Development Division|   Key West, FL 33045|
|  O-O--O-O+++--O-O |chrisb@mpgn.com     |Phone: (305) 293-8100|
| Opinions expressed here belong to me!  |  Fax: (305) 292-7835|


------------------------------

Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 14:28:39 -0500
From: library@dss.gov.au (DSS Library)
To: xboat@MPGN.COM
Cc: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Jump-points
Message-ID: <9507242130.AA09610@babylon5.dss.gov.au>

Re: "From Port to Jump-point"

The article's main points are:

1. Number of ships in port
2. Number of Docking Bays per port
3. Jump-point - incl. star system jump-point cascade
4. Encounter Tables - ideas in their creation

The following text is taken from Section 3, "Jump-point":

"The jump-point J-1 is the largest solar mass in-system and the next
largest mass in-system with an unconfined jump-point is J-2, and so on."
Examples of confined jump-points were Mercury and Venus, being within
Sol's 100-diameter limit. The article also said that "... a starship
could have an unconfined jump-point if it were outside the jump-point
of a planet or star".

The sample table is shown below:

"Unconfined Jump-points in Two Sample Systems

      Terra/Sol     Regina/Regina*
J-1   Sol           Lusor
J-2   Jupiter       Assiniboia
J-3   Saturn        Olybrius
J-4   Terra         ---
J-5   Mars          ---
J-6   Ceres         ---
*Lusor only
Note: - Terra is just barely an unconfined jump-point.
      - Titan is partially unconfined at J-3 Saturn.
      - Olybrius is an unconfined J-3 only when it is farthest from
        Lusor, and may be partially confined when nearest Lusor.
      - Regina is easily accessable through J-2."

All quoted text is taken from the following article:
     "From Port to Jump-point", JTAS #22, Leroy Guatney, GDW 1985, USA.

- Hyphen
  (David Jaques-Watson)



------------------------------

Date: Mon, 24 Jul 95 01:46:05 -0400
From: Derek Wildstar <wildstar@qrc.com>
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: ship maintainance questions (Td#356)
Message-ID: <9507240546.AA04786@qrc.com>

rhunt@med.unc.edu (Rick Hunt) asks:
> What is the role of wear value in starship maintainance?  Earlier in the
> chapter, the rules say that you roll for breakdown every 8 hours, but this
> seems a little extreme for a ship in jump.  Even a ship with a wear of 1
> and a good engineer will never last a week in jump.

You're exactly right - the rules, as written, will have practically every
starship with wear value of 1 or more kill their occupants on the first
jump.  You should treat those rules as only applying to cross-country
trips with military equipment in a post-nuclear-holocaust 21st century Earth
setting (in other words, the wear rules are holdovers from Twilight:2000
that were just dropped into T:TNE and applied to starships without actually
thinking about them, let alone actually playtesting them).


For starships (and other "high-reliability" equipment, as determined by the
Referee; all spacecraft are automatically "high-reliability"), rolls against
the wear number should be made no more often than once per week.

If you're using the "generic" system (one wear value for the entire
starship), roll once per week, determine the system that malfunctions,
(or potentially malfunctions) and implement the incedent at some
appropriate point during the week.

If you're using the "detailed" system (wear values for individual systems),
make the roll the first time the system is used during the week. 


It's also worth noting that the "detailed" system is not equivalent to the
"generic" system.  A wear-5 starship would have a 50% chance of a potential
breakdown each week (affecting one system).  Broken into three wear-5
systems, the ship would have a 87.5% chance of at least one potential
breakdown a week, approximately eqiuvalent to wear-9.

To convert from "generic" to "detailed" (or back again), you can use the
following table and procedure:

Wear	Chance		To determine the composite (generic system) wear
0	1.0		value of a ship that has multiple systems, each
1	0.9		with it's own wear value, determine the "chance"
2	0.8		corresponding to each wear value, and multiply
3	0.7		them together.  Subtract the result from one,
4	0.6		then multiply by 10 and round to the nearest
5	0.5		integer.  This result is the composite wear value
6	0.4		of all of the systems.
7	0.3
8	0.2		Wear = 10 * (1 - Chance1 * Chance2 * Chance3 ...)
9	0.1	

For most ships, it's reasonable to assign wear values by trial-and-error,
repeating until the composite value is correct.

Example: A ship using the generic system has a wear value of 3.  The referee
would like to break this up into four "systems" (maneuver/power, jump, life
support, and electronics).  As an initial guess, he assigns wear values of
2, 1, 0, and 1 respectively.  To calculate, .8 * .9 * .9 * 1.0 = 0.648;
and 10 * (1-.648) = 3.52, which rounds to 4; a bit high.  Setting all the
wear values to 1 results in 3.439, which rounds down to 3.

> Does maintainance cost money?  Or does the crew just walk around
> tightening screws and pushing buttons?

Right.  "Maintainance" costs (hoses, fan belts, and the occasional oil and
oil filter change) are presumably included in the operating costs of the
starship.  Again, the maintainance rules are lifted from T2k, where purchase
of such maintainance items is impossible, and the characters are assumed to
jury-rig, make do, and scrounge.

In Traveller, presumably the cost of any maintainance parts is included in
the day-to-day operating costs of the ship (life support costs, annual
maintainance costs, and so on).

> Does the wear value have any effect on time or money?

Well, you generally spend more time going around tightening screws and
pushing buttons on a high-wear ship, in an attempt to gain favorable
modifiers if there ever is a potential breakdown.


> How much fuel is used in normal maneuvers?

The starships in T:TNE have their maneuver fuel duration listed in G-hours.
Thrusting 1 hour at 1G (a G-hour) consumes 1 G-hour of fuel.  Thrusting at
4Gs for 1 hour consumes 4 G-hours of fuel.  The rules for maneuvering around
a system give thrust requirements in G-hours; you can figure the required
accellerations in G-hours, and the ship will consume the appropriate amount
of fuel.

> The rules say it is based on a formula based on weight, acceleration,
> etc., but never gives the formula.  Is the formula in some $30 supplement?

No, a $16 supplement.  All the starships that are available in the T:TNE
base rules have their meneuver fuel listed in G-hours in the ship's data
listing.  To design your own starships, and figure out their fuel
consumption, you need _Fire, Fusion and Steel_.  The ship construction
rules (an earlier and less-complete version) are also in _Brilliant Lances_;
however if what you want is support for a role-playing campaign, I suggest
FF&S.  If your players like the idea of boardgaming-out starship encounters
(or if you actually intend to conduct starship combat) I suggest _Brilliant
Lances_, as the starship combat rules in T:TNE are nearly unplayable as
written, except for the simplest encounters beteween the smallest starships.

* Anyone who disagrees with this assertion can join me for an all-day
session, gaming out an encounter between a Broadsword and two SDBs using
the T:TNE rules exactly as written.  With several hundred die rolls per
combat round, I expect it to take a while ...

> As you can tell, we have gone from trying to buy equipment to trying to
> fly the ship. :-)

Good luck!


wildstar@quark.qrc.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                      "I've been to hundreds of new worlds ...
                               ... what could be so different about this
one?"

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 10:08:15 -0300
From: lhowie@dilbert.lrmi.com (Les Howie)
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Fuel Formula Reference
Message-ID: <9507241312.AA18917@lrmi.com>

pd82495@wapol.gov.au (Michael Bailey) write
>In response to Les Howie's query:
>
>>From FF&S p42:
>
>Fuel used = (DV*J*5)/MJ
>

Michael, thanks for looking this up in FF&S -- I found it there as well.
My post is more of a grump about GDW proofreading.  One of the following
cases must be true:

(1) This formula is the main TNE book, which should be all a person has to
buy to play the game, and I am just blind.

or

(2) You really don't need that formula because the information is provided
in some other way that I cannot figue out.

or

(3) They are bound and determined that you WILL but FF&S, so they left it
out on purpose.

or 

(4) They screwed up.

I'd like to believe its (1) or (2), but I really only can find the formula
in FF&S.  Can anyone find it in the main book?
Les Howie
Senior Software Developer
Atlantic LRMI


------------------------------

End of TRAVELLER Digest 357
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