Topic: Can anyone help? Traveller:New Era to Privateer

[Skaran]

For many years I have run  Traveller: New Era type games and have put together a large number of ship designs using that system Fire Fusion & Steel construction sequences (see www.skaran.net if you are interested). I want to migrate the game over to Privateer and if possible would like to rerate the vessels and vehicles for this without having to fully re-design them. Has anyone done this before? Or does anyone have any ideas on how it could be done?

Most of my designs used crystal iron hulls and I know the actual hull masses and volumes so that is a start I suppose..

[markc]

 Why do you need to do this? Just use the ships as they are and use the skills and PC gen from SM:P. Yes you will lose the crits and charts when doing starship combat but if that is not a big deal then IMHO it is a win all around.
 I have not found an easy way to convert but you could alter the construction rules in FF&S to be more SM:P like. By that I mean make the tec line up more closely and simply assign MK#'s to weapon outputs.


 I would be interested in what you do as I love FF&S and have incorporated some of its rules into SM:P starship creation. Such as shape which IMHO adds a lot of flavor to the designs.


MDC

[Skaran]

My players have always liked the RM and SM critical tables.

It would certainly be easier to use SM's skill system with FF&S1s construction sequence. Possibly some sort of hybrid would work.

It doesn't look difficult to work out the hit points ant CAT for the conversions - all of my ships used crystal iron so I know hull mass and volumes. The only other thing I guess would be to assign weapon Mk numbers and setting the SM ranges.

[markc]

  Yes you can use the info in FF&S for personal weapons to get a KE number IIRC and map that to the chart in AL:Firearms. Then there is another chart in Blaster Law and maybe in the Equipment Man that says if you do not have AL:F use these numbers for the charts in Blaster Law.
  Or you can just use the weapons in SM:P and keep things simple.


 I checked out your site and loved the ships. Do you use a program to help you or create them all by hand?


Option: IMHO you could try and match up tec levels and then use the MK#'s from there. I think that would be the easiest to do.


I think later on today I will start a few threads about using FF&S and SM:P in the SM:P section hopefully we can bounce some ideas off each other and make our games better.


MDC

[Skaran]

Effectively the designs are done by hand. I do use a spreadsheet to do the adding up but everything is basically entered manually.

Funnily enough some years ago I was invited to have my old destroyers refitted by German shipyards and was constantly getting adds to subscribe to some European shipping publication.

[markc]

Funnily enough some years ago I was invited to have my old destroyers refitted by German shipyards and was constantly getting adds to subscribe to some European shipping publication.

 
MDC

[Gallowglacht]

I found the technological assumptions between the 2 games different enough that I just built what I needed in SpaceMaster, keeping to the spirit of the original design, but without the headaches of trying to combine them.
I think I simply looked at the tonnage of a TNE laser turret and used a Spam laser of the same size, meson guns became apocalypse weapons, sandcasters and dampers stood in for shields and so on.

Small arms were much easier to convert.
Combat improved hugely after I converted, hopefully you'll find the same.

[markc]

I found the technological assumptions between the 2 games different enough that I just built what I needed in SpaceMaster, keeping to the spirit of the original design, but without the headaches of trying to combine them.
I think I simply looked at the tonnage of a TNE laser turret and used a Spam laser of the same size, meson guns became apocalypse weapons, sandcasters and dampers stood in for shields and so on.

Small arms were much easier to convert.
Combat improved hugely after I converted, hopefully you'll find the same.

Nice. Thanks for the info and I always wondered what people would think of doing for spinal mounts, meson guns, sand and dampers. Now just to model black globe generators. Maybe just create capacitors that have point values and use that for BGlB dam absorb values?
MDC

[Skaran]

Sounds good to me too Gallowglacht. Since my Traveller designs used the highly efficient HePlaR system I will have to allow the 2nd Gen reaction thrusters from a higher tech level to match. I am thinking also that since Traveller missiles are so much larger (7 metric tons and 7 kiloliters) that where they were carried by grapels rather than turret mounted that the payload pods would be the way to go and treat them as torpedoes.

[markc]

Skaran;
 I did notice that a lot of your designs carried missiles. A lot more then my designs did from the T1 days. Is there a reason for that? Such as setting or something I missed in my quick glance of the material a few years ago.
MDC

[Gallowglacht]

Sounds good to me too Gallowglacht. Since my Traveller designs used the highly efficient HePlaR system I will have to allow the 2nd Gen reaction thrusters from a higher tech level to match. I am thinking also that since Traveller missiles are so much larger (7 metric tons and 7 kiloliters) that where they were carried by grapels rather than turret mounted that the payload pods would be the way to go and treat them as torpedoes.

Yeah, torps are what I went with for the missiles too. The PCs had a Victrix with launchers for satellites/drop pods/missiles, so the missiles became torpedoes.
If I remember right they became the PC's main way to deal damage and the lasers became backup and point defense. I might be remembering incorrectly though as a OS failure forced me to reformat the drive my stuff was on

[markc]

 Where can the Victrix be found besides the Gilded Lilly?
MDC

[Gallowglacht]

Where can the Victrix be found besides the Gilded Lilly?
MDC

I think there is one in the RC equipment guide, but I created the PC's one since there was so much variation in the class.
Lemme check my book shelf...


Yep, the Kelley Victrix is in the RC equipment guide. It's got a multi mission pod like the RC scout varients.

[markc]

Thanks I got the PDF and am looking at it now and might just use it.
MDC

[Skaran]

Hi Markc. Most of my designs tended to the lower end of Traveller tech levels (mostly 9-11) at the lower end the nuclear detonation missiles carried tend to be more effective than energy weapons. Point defence is also relatively poor so missiles have a fair chance of getting into firing range. It also allows these lower tech fighters to carry a useful offensive load, the energy weapons available are relatively weak especially when compared to the x-ray lasers generated by the nuclear detonation missiles.

[markc]

OK, here goes.
 After looking at FF&S TTNE and looking at the standard weapons in the back. I thought that thins might be a good way to convert MJ to MK# and range.
1) Divide the MJ by 10 to get SM:P MK#
2) Keep Range from TTNE in hex's. IMHO this is important to keep balance between turrets and barbettes. 
3) Ignore damage penetration numbers, ie 1/5, 1/9 and 1/10, etc.


What do you think?


I am looking at the 50 and 100 ton bays now.


MDC

[Skaran]

Looking at my Europa class battleship which has 80Mj laser barbettes that would give a Mk8 which sounds reasonable given it is a relatively small turret laser, this vessel also has 919Mj laser bays which would become Mk50 with +41 say +40OB for round figures. The 10,000Mj spinal PA would be a problem though this would become a fixed Mk50 Blaster with +950 OB probably realistic but definitely unbalanced. The largest spinal weapon I have seen is 250,000Mj.

Now if instead youuse the square root of the weapons Mj output using the examples above;
the 80Mj laser turret - sqrt is about 8.9 so a Mk8 or Mk9
the 919Mj laser bay - sqrt is 30.3 so a Mk30
the 10000Mj PA - sqrt is 100 so a Mk50 +50OB blaster
the huge 250000Mj Meson - sqrt is 500 so  a Mk50 + 450OB blaster but treat all armour as the worst type, no DB from armour belt. Only DBs from applicable screens (in FF&S only Meson Screens and the Black and White globes could defend against Meson fire)

[Skaran]

Also given that Mk1-5 weapons are generally small arms for these conversions you could set a minimum Mk of 6 (corresponding to a 36Mj laser)

[markc]

  I like the square root idea better than my divide by 10. I was also looking at the weapons in Brilliant Lances and saw a 450Mj TL10 50 ton laser bay. And my system it would have been a Mk45 Laser.


  The other way I was thinking about was that the small mount was a turret, the next a barbette, the next a 50 ton bay, the next a 100 ton bay and the last a spinal mount. The, let tech level 9 in T equal TL level 18 in SM:P. Then on a 1 TL for 1 TL basis use the numbers in the SM:P VM. This does without the math though and IMHO makes spinal mounts much weaker than they actually are, IIRC as it has been quite a while since I played T.
 What do you think of this method above?


MDC     

[Skaran]

I think the latter approach would work also, it depends on how versatile you want to be. SM seems to have 1 weapon of each size for each TL while Traveller can have more variations depending on whether you want higher rates of fire, remote firing which allows bigger lasers or turret manned lasers etc.  The tech progression matches mine - I set Traveller TL11 as equivelant to SM 20 with a few variations.

Also the TL9 laser bay examples in FF&S are wrong, don't know about the other bays. They used the wrong bay dimension to computer the laser array size.