Category: Uncharted Worlds

Let’s Break The Vehicle Rules!

Part 2.

Now, we go to The Future! The Traveller future, to be specific, to the main battle tank of the Imperium of Man, the Trepida grav tank. That’s it right there, with the Astrin grav APCs and battle-dress troopers hanging on. The Trepida is the primary AFV of the Imperial military, and is enormously capable. TL-14, with an RFX-14 Fusion cannon, co-axial AP and PD lasers, it can fly at 1000 kph+ and be dropped from orbit (it can also achieve orbit on its own). 125 tons, with a crew of 2 or 3 (sources differ). Introduced in 1109, it is one of the most potent non-starship weapon systems in the Imperial inventory.

Is this a super-heavy armored Flyer, or a Tank that flies? By this point in Traveller tech development, the point is moot; gravitic control has erased that line a long time ago. So how do we design this in UW?

Trepida (Class ? Shuttle)

Let’s start there. While it’s fast, it’s not as fast as a dedicated flyer, nor as maneuverable – pure grav vehicles with little to no control surfaces would have trouble changing direction at speed. So Agile doesn’t fit.

Armored simply isn’t enough. This thing would eat the Abrams from the previous post for lunch, and might, might, need a paint job touch up afterwards. So, we’re adding in Plated and Reinforced from the ground vehicle list. Grav vehicles get to break those rules, I’d say. Should they get the automatic Armor 2 as ground vehicles? Good question. In Traveller, I’d say so…maybe…?

Turret is obvious, as is Armed – x3, again, as it’s got two independent laser point-defense systems, in addition to the co-ax AP laser. The main gun really should be a starship energy cannon, but we’re sticking with the vehicle rules for the moment.

Trepida Grav Tank (Class ? Shuttle, Armor 6 (8?), Armed (x3), Plated, Reinforced, Turret)

AP/PDS Laser (Class 4, 2H, Clumsy, Destructive, Laser, Penetrating, Spray, Sustained)

RFX-14 Fusion Cannon (Class 5!, 2H, Clumsy, Destructive, Breaching, Chemical, Concussive, Penetrating, Plasma)

You might think I’m overdoing it. I’m not. The RFX-14 lights up the surrounding terrain like daylight for a kilometer when it fires. It kills unprotected troops and starts fires for 10+ meters along the path of the shot, not just where it hits. It’s essentially a small fusion reactor with an aimable exhaust port.

It’s got the best systems money can buy, but it’s still a tank, so Luxury may or may not be applicable. Since it’s space-capable, it’s got Sealed. Rugged is assumed, as it’s designd to fight and thrive in a high-energy, nuclear battlefield. Sensors might be applicable, but I think there’s a baseline assumed in there. Maybe Sensors should be reserved for the fire direction vehicles, that are just big sensor platforms on a grav APC hull.

It’s not Stealthy, by any stretch of the imagination.

Shielded works, as the information battlefield is a thing in Traveller, just not quite as much of a focus.

Trepida Grav Tank (Class 7! Shuttle, Armor 6 (8?), Armed (x3), Plated, Reinforced, Rugged, Sealed, Shielded, Turret)

As with the Abrams, the Trepida isn’t something you can buy off the shelf, or even on the blackest of markets – this thing is a city-killer, and the Imperium is very, very careful about who gets to play with them. So, Class 7 is way outside the normal Asset ladder, but again, that works.

So what did I learn from this?

1) Designing vehicles and assets is fun. I really like this system, it’s clean and flexible.

2) Having a Class 3 limit on assets isn’t as limiting as I had expected – things that break that aren’t really things that should fit in that anyway.

3) High-power vehicles and spaceships are a fuzzy overlap, and I’m not sure how to resolve that, or even if it needs to be resolved. I’m looking forward to the Large Mecha rules in FBH, as I think they might handle MBTs of varying tech levels better. A MadCat is the same weight as an M1A1, after all. And a Trepida beats them both. 🙂

As promised…

Let’s Break The Vehicle Design Rules!

Part 1.

The purpose of this isn’t to say, ‘the vehicle design rules are broken’, but to use them to build some vehicles that break the rules – one real-world, the other fictional. So, why do this? These vehicles might be somewhat extreme, but not so completely over-the-top as to never be encountered – and Sean Gomes himself mentioned Imperator-class Titans, so…there’s not much that isn’t ‘over the top’, when you’re talking about a walking castle with nuclear missiles and opinions. I want to see where this goes in creating things that can and do exist, in both the real world and a standard scifi setting – I don’t think that the rules need to be changed, but I think that things that ‘break’ them are going to come up, and GMs and players should be prepared to handle them.

There’s going to be a lot of thinking out loud in this, so prepare for walls of test.

Let’s start with the real-world vehicle:

M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank

This has Tracked: A continuous-track laying vehicle, capable of significant off-road movement. Fits a driver plus 4 passengers or crew.

(This also makes me realize that we’re missing Hover as a base design type…)

So, what Upgrades does the M1A2 have? It’s a beast, probably the best tank in the world at the moment. Heavily armored, fast, with a powerful cannon and a bunch of machine guns.

Armor first.

So is it Plated, or Reinforced? Good question. Are we building this within the context of just other late 20/early 21 C vehicles, or do we want to be able to drop it in almost anywhere/when? Let’s go with the latter. Plated gives just a + armor, which would make it Armor 5. Not bad, but I’m not sure that gives it that extra toughness that sheets of depleted uranium and Chobham epoxy armor imply. Reinforced gives the same Armor boost, but also notes that it ignores Armor-Piercing (Penetrating?) and Destructive, and must be Breached. I’m torn about this. Penetrating can mean something that easily cuts through personal armor, but that’s a whole different world of protection than tank armor. Destructive seems to be used mainly for explosives, and while you can use explosives to take out an Abrams, it takes a bit – some have been lost to large IEDs in Iraq. Breaching: ‘damages starships and reinforced structures’. Yikes. This is implications for how we’re going to design the main gun, as well. Part of tank design is that you want your frontal armor to be able to hold against your own main gun, on the assumption that you’ll be facing a roughly equivalent enemy.

But tank cannon aren’t the only big scary weapon on the modern battlefield. Missiles, from the manportable Javelin up to the TOW, Hellfire and Maverick, are serious killers, and no small concern to tanks. Do we count those as Penetrating, or Breaching? They are used to take out buildings, or at least severely damage them. They’ll put a nasty hole in almost anything – even old, the TOW is supposed to be able to defeat any armored vehicle in the world, and Javelins have a top-attack mode, to hit tanks on the less-armored top surface. A Hull-Buster is a Class 2 Destructive Heavy Weapon with Breaching and Seeking (but not Penetrating, which is interesting!)

(Tank armor ratios, front to sides to back, are traditionally 8:2:1, with the top and bottom being about as armored as the sides, at best…)

What else has 5 Armor in the book? Spider Tanks and Assault Walkers, both of which by their design are going to be weaker than a tracked tank – they have arms and legs which have to bend and flex, and a tank is two armored boxes, one atop the other, with a few things sticking out of them.

So, let’s go with Reinforced for right now.

Next up, speed. The Abrams is notoriously fast, using a gas turbine engine instead of the traditional diesel. So much so that it has a speed governor on it to limit it to 45-50 mph. There are tales from the early years of M1s reaching 70+ on German highways… 🙂

Is this fast, for a tank? Yes. Can it do this off-road? Eh…depends, do you want your crew to be functional? Is it faster than other equivalent tanks? Turns out, not so much. Modern turbo diesels are pretty good. It has a good power/weight ratio, which is what gives you good acceleration and mobility but it’s not hugely better than other tanks of the same generation. So, Agile isn’t really justified. The turbine is complex, but the whole thing is designed to be pulled and replaced as a unit. Rugged might be reasonable. It would also represent the environmental defenses, whereas Sealed is more than it has (can’t make it work underwater, or in a vacuum).

M1A1 Abrams, (Class 2 Track, 5 Armor, Reinforced, Rugged)

Next, the fun part – guns!

Turret is easy. Big flat spinny thing, cannon sticking out.

What kind of cannon? The 120mm smoothbore is enormously capable. Saboted DU anti-armor darts, high explosive rounds, canister loads full of thousands of tungsten balls…it does it all.

120mm Cannon (Class ?, Clumsy, Destructive, Penetrating, Breaching?)

Do we want to have a ‘switchable’ upgrade, where it gains one but loses another? Trade Breaching for Spray, perhaps? Does it really count as Clumsy if it’s not hand-held? Would it be better considered as a Starship weapon, a smaller cannon? (As point-defense guns on a ship are considered Heavy Weapons, I think this might be a better path to take, but for now, we’ll leave this as is. It also begs the question, do Ship weapons need Upgrades?)

But the cannon isn’t the only armament on this thing. There’s 3 other machine guns, one co-axial with the main gun, and the others on pintle mounts at the commander’s and loader’s hatches. So, is that Armed times 3? Considering that the commander, loader, and gunner can all be firing at the same, or different, targets, that’s a lot of lead going downrange. The coax MG can’t really be fired at the same time as the main gun, and nobody really wants to be outside (which you have to be to fire the two top MGs) when the main gun goes off. So, I just count this as Armed, and note that it’s got 3 of them. Even so, we’ve just broken the system, a little bit…

M1A1 Abrams, (Class 4 Track, 5 Armor, Armed (3), Reinforced, Rugged, Turret)

A Class 4 vehicle asset – technically, Class 4 is only ever Cargo. But this shows that it’s pretty easy to make a vehicle that exceeds Class 3 – especially if we change out the main gun for a light ship-class weapon (which has its own issues). But considering that the Abrams is a multi-million dollar armored fighting vehicle that you can only buy if you’re a national military, exceeding Class 3 doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Next up, Fear and Trembling…