UPDATE: I've found the reason for the Pricing Discrepancy. Highguard, pg8. "STANDARD DESIGNS VS NEW DESIGNS Some ship designs have been used for centuries, and have become standard across the stars. Plans for such spacecraft are freely available and components can be purchased in bulk by shipyards, reducing the cost of the ship’s construction by 10%. This reduced cost does not include ammunition for weapons or fuel, which must be bought - at full price - separately for the ship. If a buyer needs a new type of ship, he must employ a ship architect to design it. The architect’s fees are an additional 1% of the final cost of the ship." UPDATE 2: The Bridge size issue was covered in an Errata Update. Correct sized should be 51-99 tons = 6-ton bridge and 100-199 = 10-ton. Honestly, I prefer my explanation of Scout Services politics more. Link to Errata: www.mongoosepublishing.com/pages/downloads-htm
I figured it was (the 10% less was too exact not to have been intentional), but just hadn't seen the rule stating that. A few people pointed to a rule about that in the original 1970's edition, which is about as useful as telling your first spouse you have a food allergy and then expecting your 3rd spouse decades later to have heard that.
If you have a story to tell, you'll find your way. It looks intimidating, but it's actually not once you get started. The rules are your toolkit and you can pick things up as you go along.
Classic Traveller ship design included a discount for "standard designs". Page 56 of "The Traveller Book" states "Standard designs are easier to produce; their prices reflect a 10% reduction in normal pricing". The Type S Scout is a standard design. I don't own the Mongoose rules so I can't check them for a "standard design" discount but I would guess that this is the reason for the discrepancy you found.
I was about to make this same comment. It's also in MegaTraveller, and Marc Miller's Traveller. My guess is that it's hiding in some corner of the Mongoose rules.
I also think this is correct. Or...the ship was a competitive government contract bid where the competing companies lied about the cost to win the bid and plan to make up the difference and more on cost overruns. That happens in fictional game worlds but *never* in real life.
Again, the brilliance of Traveller is the multiple "mini-games" that exist in it... Can you survive CharGen? Mini-game... Want to build a ship? Mini-game... Want to create a star system? Mini-game... Want to define the planets in the system? Mini-game... I sure I've spent more time playing those associated mini-games by myself then I have playing Traveller in a group. God, I love this game!! This isn't "per the book" but for the fuel tanks for the power plant, I don't round until the final amount... So I'd calculate it (using your S Type Scout example) as 10% of 4T Power Plant = 0.4 T for 4 weeks operations, multiplied by 4 sets of 4 week (16 weeks total) = 1.6T rounding to 2T... It's just silly that 0.4T fuel tank per 4 weeks rounds to 3T for 12 weeks. Yeah, you could even just go 20 weeks for that same 2T
Remember these air filters in the scout/courier ship? After some weeks time off into space travel they did start to smell and soon after the air in the ship got to pick up a real nasty stink... until it became so bad that this putrid stench made your eyes water.. So fellow Traveller keep in mind: Never forget to pick up extra replacement filters. Worth every single Credit. Thanks for your vid Seth a pleasure as always.
Typically the crew on s Scout ship is just you. You get used to your funk and don't even notice it. Also with the common areas; when it's just you the whole ship is a common area. That office? All yours pal. You can even hang a non-regulation inappropriate calendar if you want.
I'm just about to finish my first full campaign of Traveller tomorrow night. It's been a wild ride, and I can't thank you enough for opening that door for me!
It amazes me how immersive the scout ship is to this setting after watching how to build it! Common area? Too expensive, cut it. Who needs crew morale? Captain's office on the bridge? Sure! Just enough power to run everything except the sensors and the guns. So if you need to run from a fight prepare to be weaponless and blind while your jump engines warm up! Ability to refuel the ship in just over a day? Heck no, that's going to take too long, lets dump extra cash so we can refuel in a day for our week long jumps into the next sector! Computer to run all of this? Well, it's just a 41 million dollar space ship, lets buy the cheapest piece of junk we can find and jerryrig it to work. Sure everything on the ship will run slow as heck, but who cares as long as they can do the jumps properly.
I used to work at a large University. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured through that place every semester. Every year they built a fancy new building with lots of wasted space and lovely landscaping. Everything looked clean and new and photographed well on a brochure. When I left in 2016, the back-end computer system that held everything together was still Windows 98. Our IT Department had spent years upon years patching and jury-rigging this janky computer system into some Frankenstein's Monster of code that was always on the verge of crashing. Every year the answer was, "We don't have it in the budget to upgrade the computer system," as the same panel then greenlight a massively expensive project that looked pretty. Each of those new buildings came with the additional cost of one less parking lot. As attendance grew (thanks to the new buildings) parking space shrank (thanks to the new buildings). Parking passes grew more expensive (don't get me started on how full-time employees also had to buy passes at $150 a year just to park at our job). However one parking lot never got touched. That was the lot for the senior University officials (who "paid" for their passes out of an expense account instead of their paycheck). To me, that is the Scout Ship's Office.
@@SSkorkowsky I feel this story in my bones. I've worked with so many companies that have money for every project except updating the poor computer system or Webpage that is older than most of the management's children, about to fail any time, and will be my fault when it inevitably crashes and burns, and takes down the entire business for a week. But damn if that isn't a mighty fine looking lawn! 😄
@@SSkorkowsky - back in the early 2000's my best friend worked IT at a major PC gaming company. He had been telling management that they needed to get either a new or backup mail server for their email for years. Well that single mail server finally died and he was tasked with recovering everything from it along with rigging it for limited usage. The company had no working email, internal or external for over a week while my friend worked on that old mail server. He would sleep for 2 to 4 hours a night before heading back to work to deal with the problem. Needless to say but within two weeks of this happening they had 3 brand new email servers at the company. Once my friend had set them up and had most of the lost data from the old server recovered, I believe that they gave him a week off. When it comes to IT, it's not important to who ever is in charge until it suddenly is not working and then it is the most important thing to that company. IT is almost always viewed as doing nothing when everything is working fine, but when something breaks they can not get it fixed fast enough.
@@Winterydee I used to joke at one of my previous jobs that I was away from my desk so often I could probably leave the office without anybody noticing. But if anything broke during that time the entire office would know I was missing and they'd know right now! 😅 And I agree, people only notice IT when things have gone wrong. They never notice the years where everything goes right. To quote Futurama: “When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.”
Everytime I watch one of these videos, not only do I really want to play a game, but I keep hearing in my head the guy from Aliens shouting 'Skorkowskyyyyy!!" Instead of Wierzbowski.
First, the office space. This space, back in the dark ages of RPGs, was for the ship's computer. You know, the types of electro-mechanical devices that was built on spool tapes and mechanical relays. Second, the prices being 10% less is hidden somewhere. I don't have my books right now. The price you calculated was for a custom built vessel. If the vessel is an assembly line standard build, you get a 10% discount on construction cost.
The office space being used to house the computer reminds me of Mother in the movie Alien. I'd go with that explanation, especially if you want a gritty industrial feel to your ship.
@@talon12020 You misunderstand. In the original Traveller game's Scout Ship, that space was where a huge boxy mainframe was housed. It wouldn't have felt retro a the time. For all we know, it actually does take a computer that big to handle jump calculations. TL 12 shouldn't feel "gritty industrial" IMO.
I understood what was said, I just have a different interpretation of its appearance. Mother was a huge mainframe integrated into the ship, it was also a space where the crew went to directly interact with it.
@@talon12020 If you mean the scenes where the captain and/or android were receiving their secrut oders, then yeah. But even a mainframe has terminals and even in Aliuns the crew interacted with ship remotely. And typically in a TL12 ship, you can expect voice interaction with it as in Star Trek or the HAL from 2001. You would need to drop back to... TL 6 or 7 for you to have to directly control a computer electromechanically. But I guess "your species/culture may vary" ... It would be amusing to see a starship that ran on vaccum tubes and mechanical relays.
The 10% discount for standard designs is still part of 2016 High Guard. There are other small micro adjustments to price that are hidden through those rules, like having a light hull for a -25% hull cost. But speaking as a Traveller fan since the original box of booklets, wobblily price calculations are pretty commonplace, and "how on earth did the work that out?" the mantra of designers. I see it as an argument in favor of cutting the players some slack in their ship price calcs.
Hi Seth Great Video (as always). Regarding Jack's grumbling about the 'office' taking up a large portion of the Bridge space, and that space not being available for other uses, it might be a throw back to something in the original rules (1980s) that Mongoose has misunderstood. Back then it was common, in fact mandatory, for Bridges to have an extra room in them like that. However it was NOT an office, it was the "Computer Room". Computers in those early rules were not built into walls, but instead could take up one or more tons of space, and required their own rooms, on the Bridge. Looks to me like whoever did the floor plans wanted to base them as much as possible on one of the original (1980s) deck plans, but the fact that the extra room was no longer needed was lost in translation somewhere.
That sounds very probable. In looking through many of the old Traveller material, there was always a Computer Room with some giant, Forbidden Planet-style computer that I imagine used reel-to-reel tapes. If I were a reasonable man, I would totally believe this. However... an equally plausible answer is that centuries ago, in the early days of the Scout Services, there was a computer room. As technology advanced, the computer became smaller and smaller. Eventually someone started sharing the room with the computer as a cramped office. Eventually the computer fully integrated into the ship, and no longer needed a room at all. However, years of tradition of "That's how we've always done it", bureaucratic red-tape of hiring expensive ship architects to re-design the ship layout, and office politics within the Scout Services of what should be done with that space (a poll of 60 senior officials came back with 84 suggestions), meant that instead of modifying the tried-and-true outdated deckplan to use that space in a more efficient manner, it remained an empty room that captains used as an office.
@@SSkorkowsky Y'know, I spent about four years in the late 80s running a reel-to-reel tape drive mainframe for a medical billing company. Our "computer room" took up close to 50% of the total square footage of the building we were in. Noisy as hell too, you had to shout to be heard over all the drives and AC fans running nonstop. If you took all the equipment and tape storage out you could have parked a Type S scout in the space they used. Admittedly, that was pretty dated tech even back then, and I suspect most modern laptops have as much processing power as the whole setup did.
I'd never considered how much room tape storage would occupy. Now that I think about it, I imagine a lot. Your smartphone probably has more processing power than those beasts. It never stops blowing my mind how fast computer technology has exponentially grown in the last 30 years. Back in 00/01 I dated a woman who worked for NASA. This was back when we still had the shuttle program working. She told me how the shuttle's on-board computers were 8088s. They were cutting-edge Late-1970's technology. I asked why they didn't upgrade, and her answer what he shuttle doesn't need to process graphics or anything monstrously complex, and the old 8088s could handle all the ship's navigation and other needs. The astronauts used their laptops for all their science needs, as they were generations better than the spaceship's computer system.
@@SSkorkowsky We had 175 reels of tape on the racks at all times, gradually cycling out the oldest records and copying new ones onto them in a cycle that took close to a year. Every one of the damn things was about three times the thickness and weight of a vinyl 33rpm album. I'm reasonably certain the total data we had stored on the whole setup wouldn't fill two gigs of memory on a modern device.
I seem to recall something about well-established designs being cheaper because they’ve been optimised and so on. The type S has been used for centuries after all.
This is the best video on the internet. Thanks, Seth. Your step by step example really opened this process up for me. It's videos like this that make me happy to support your Patreon.
Just a random aside which you probably get from time to time: I played the original Traveller and I really really miss the black-with-a-dash-of-color books. As a kid I found these tomes to be so inspiring and their form was part of the magic.
Seth....that Type S Scout Courier behind you....is looking good. The Ships office to me would seem to be the equivalent to an at sea cabin in modern warships for captains. Basically its a stripped down room with a bunk, a computer, maybe a head (fresher) for his use. This would make sense when you think about the ship only has 3 crew. There would be periods of time in service when there would be no one on duty in the bridge. I can see when decommissioned and being either bought up or loaned out, crews converting it into a full stateroom for one bridge crewman, giving the scout a total of 5 staterooms in essence. Or 4 staterooms with one of the normal staterooms converted into a galley/common area.
34:50 Says something about how much things have changed in the real world since Traveller was written that the 3D printers in that workshop would have been implausible far-out scifi back in the day. The LLB days would have referenced presses and lathes and bins of spare parts instead.
Think about the changes in computers since 1977 and how they were looked at in Traveller. Mark and the gang envisioned rooms filled with computers even then. Meanwhile my cell phone has more computing power than what put 3 men on the moon. Ive always ignored the computer requirements of Traveller because its impossible to think what 4 or 5 TLs might mean in computers and electronics. My smart phone might be replaced by a button sized device.
@@jefferydraper4019 Yep. Even today the main reason phones are as big as they are is the need for a readable display and controls big fat human fingers can manipulate. When the tech moves past needing those to be physical rather than (say) projected they'll shrink again. But to me, the changes in computing tech are less remarkable than printer tech. Traveller got the sizes of far future computer hardware wrong and underestimated what software would be capable of, but that was just a matter of scale, they still understood that computers existed and would continue to improve. 3D printing tech - that would have been seen as magic tech in 1977, or even the 1990s. Today's affordable home printing would have seemed almost as implausible as antigrav or FTL drives.
@@richmcgee434 I get it. I remember watching that new Lost In Space show a couple years ago. In the first episode the dad had pulled up the menu of a 3d printer and it showed the items that could be made including a total firearm. We have made a good start toward the magic-box "Replicator" of Star Trek. Who knows what a couple hundred years much less thousands bring.
Maybe it wasn't the bean counters who vetoed a common area for the scout ship. Maybe it was genre awareness. Without anyplace else to be, crew have a reason to be on the bridge even when not needed for a specific task, and thus they will never miss out on a dramatic moment.
I recall that "S" Scout was canonically said to have cramped conditions and defective air recycling system that often developed a distinct, unnerving stench. Well, to be honest if I had to spend a decade on one of this beauties, I would kill for a private office.
@Marek Jurko: I suspect that the ship stinking might have a lot to do with the air intake behind the captain's chair in his office -- of course, his nickname is Captain Farts-a-lot! 🦨
I haven't tried that, but I suspect it would be fairly limited to just simple examples such as Seth did. If you try to represent the full High Guard rules there will quickly just be too many options and variables to be able to track coherently in Excel.
@@ronaldsmith8980 It is doable, but you have to do a lot of "IF" "OR" ect. I did mine with fold-down menus and it worked pretty well. There is only the weapon system that were somewhat clunky if you wanted lots of them, and the "optional system" were not easy to organise
I actually did so this for Classic Traveller several years ago. It took several weeks of hair-pulling to finish it, but I did. I'm not sure how much use anyone would get out of under MGT2. You'd have to change a lot of stuff, I think.
From a guy who has made scores of ships in this system (from small ships to multi-million ton vessels*): 1. I find, that due to the way the Hull Points are calculated, that tonnage in multiples of 3 work best. 300-ton, 600-ton, 1500-ton, etc... This is because when you get to the divide by X.5 it means no crazy number with a decimal point. That is a personal thing, so not important in the grand scheme of things. 2. The organization of the ship building process leaves something to be desired, as well as the format of the sheet. I totally agree with you on the idea that the software should be listed directly beneath the computer listing. More than that though is the "Spacecraft Options" section. Many items there should be listed along with their parent systems, for both purchasing and listing. For example: the various fuel tank options should be in the fuel tank section, the numerous sensor options should be with that part and all the various living/working quarters should be consolidated in a single section. There are more, of course. 3. Crew. There are at least 2 different types of crew members that need to have the totals of the rest of the crew in order to determine their numbers. It becomes a bit of a weird thing when trying to determine total crew numbers. Caveat: This really only affects larger ships with bigger crews. As I prefer the capitol-size/type ship to the mini ones (their explanation of how a small freighter is a viable option has always run flat with me, bulk is always better), it has been a bit of an issue. Note: I have made both PDF and excel (now open office calc) sheets for this, so that it will total the numbers as you go. Not every number, and the excel/open office calc can do more than the PDF one (though I need to do some work on the open office calc one since switching). For the PDF sheets I have made different version for different size ship types from the small 100-tonners to ships larger than the Tigress-class dreadnought. They are in the old Traveller format used in the core book and High Guard (along with Software being listed down below Staterooms, unfortunately), as I have only recently acquired the newer version. (Same with the PC sheet.) If you would like them when I am finished, let me know how you would like them to be delivered. I can Dropbox them easy enough. *Why? Because I can, and I like it! I even did one 600-trillion ton ship I called "Home."
Hope you and your players have fun. One piece of advice I was given, failed to understand, and then learned the hard way after we started playing, is to really decide what kind of Traveller game you want to play. The book gives 10,000 options that it can seem overwhelming. But you don't have to do them all. Traveller is a massive open world. It gives you the tools to do all sorts of sci-fi campaigns, but it's up to you to decide what it is. So if you and your players think calculating cargo ad passengers sounds like too much math, then don't. Find a theme that you all like. Maybe traders, mercenaries, pirates, crew of a massive capital ship, Space Marines, deep-space explorers. Name a sci-fi show and Traveller can do it. My favorite campaign we played was a covert spy campaign where they were flying around in a slow spy ship disguised as a cargo-hauler and trying to get some stolen data before returning to Imperial Space (a highly expanded run of Islands in the Rift). Don't try to explore every system (I'm not even sure that's possible. The Traveller map is monstrous). Choose or create a sub-sector or 2, populate it with some interesting characters (probably from the PCs' backstories) and play around in that. Most of all, have a blast.
@@SSkorkowsky I'll definitely take your advice to heart. When the time comes to run my first campaign with Traveller, it will be a big discussion we have before we do character creation. I ran two of my friends through the character creator yesterday and it was a lot to explain since both only had experience with dnd and other class-based systems but they did get the hang of it fairly quickly. One thing that did become apparent however was that I needed to be a little bit better at explaining that your career might not go the way you want and that you aren't guaranteed the archetype you wanted to make. And explain that that is sort of part of the fun. One of the players got into the Military Academy cause he wanted to be in the Army Cavalry, but a war broke out and he risked being drafted into the wrong branch, but he talked his way out of that and went on to graduate with honours. However, in his second term (1st term in the army) He failed his survival check and he saw his whole platoon killed because of an incompetent commander. So he left the army and became a pirate. But, I got the sense that while that backstory sounds awesome on paper, the player was very disappointed that he was kicked out of the army so quickly. Another thing that also did come up is that rolling the same even twice isn't fun. So I'll probably make a rule that you cannot get the same even twice in a row in the same career to make things a little more varied and exciting. Unless it is a life event of course. Sector creation is a lot of fun, I found that I enjoyed sparser star systems so a lot of the rolls were rolled at DM-2. Hydrographics was also a little confusing when it came to certain atmospheres. But, I think I have been doing it the right way. Anyways, thanks for the advice and have a blast!
Fantastic walkthrough, with your signature spice of humour. Well done as always. You are a great inspiration to RPG players. In a game I'm running with my son and his friends, they didn't like my title of referee or game master, so they named me "space master".
I find it funny the comment with the ship being build by Scout Services (a.k.a. government bureaucrats), it’s basically just cheap and has minimal efficiency. Being in the military, I can confirm this concept is accurate to a horrifying degree 😅
Ship construction was always one of my favorite things. Used to play Space Opera and that game also had fun ship constriction rules. Great video. Perhaps Mongoose will get back with an explanation on the cost difference.
Wait... crew in Traveller get their own room with a food processor and everything!? I'm surprised Jack has anything to complain about! I was expecting stacked bunks with a small storage locker and one bathroom/shower on the whole ship!
Seth: The difference in the cost between generating a ship yourself and the cost in various books is the shipyard. Some are located where key materials are more common and cheaper. Perhaps the shipyard does a large volume and is better automated. This inconsistency is easy to explain. This is fantasy, open your mind! My D&D gaming group only tried playing Traveller a couple times and just weren't interested. We were playing with the first books generating anything took forever. A friend and I have been playing various RPGs and your videos have made a huge difference. Thank you.
Space PCs can be huge, if you take in a count a thick layer for X-Ray protection. For many operators, you could have a big input panels, which can be duplicated, etc.
Just about (54 minutes to go) to run my first session of Traveller. Thank you so much for all the advice you've given, I wouldn't have gotten this far without you.
Good luck with the game. If things get slow and you feel you're losing them... SPACE PIRATES CLOSING IN! Side note: Best Space Pirate attack I did was high-speed craft detached from the main ship. Taking a cue from The Expanse, they were little more than cargo containers with grapple legs. PCs managed to take down 2, but the 3rd one latched on, welded itself to the hull, and then cut a breeching hole straight through the hull and into the ship. Pirates in vacc suits came storming out with a breeching shield in the lead. Fantastic battle. The PCs later had difficulty landing the ship planet-side due to the huge box fused to the side of their hull. They managed to cut it off and weld the plug of cut hull back in place over the hole.
I made a ship using a first edition (i.e. 1970's ) ship building system. Except for the computers (huge), Marc Miller published before Moore's law, it was the same but I made my custom ship cross the rift. 400 hull, Jump 4 x1 jump 4 fuel load and a second jump 4 fuel load in the cargo hold with collapsible tanks. It still had a few tons of cargo when crossing the rift. Oh and a passenger quarter. When I showed it to Marc years back he said he thought he had made it impossible but had not thought of that use of collapsible tanks. Hence the Imperium's need for fleet tankers. Essentially it jumps 4 parsecs to a way point in the rift and then self refuels then jumps 4 more parsecs to the old islands. Trade in the islands with the collapsed tanks folded. Then crosses to he new island cluster and repeats the 2 x 4 crossing to the Spinward Marches. The reception there is a little tricky. Aslan problems. Needless to say the shipyard that makes these is in the Old Islands sector deep in the rift.
Silly Jack, the Cargo Bay is the common area! That pool table is totally being transported to another sector and not there for crew entertainment. I note that there is no entry for the still the engineer installed within minutes of coming aboard, you gotta track that stuff. How else are you going to know how much high-grade reactor fuel you have for bartering with the locals?
One of my Favorite books for all RPGs is Fire Fusion and Steel from Traveler the new era. It's a gross overcomplication of building stuff in games. FAR too much math and a lot of alternate techs. I adore it. Sure i'll design my own 3 barrel Gauss mini gun firing 2mm darts. Sounds fun....3 pages of math later...
I like to think of this the same way my old gm discribed it The differences in price is a way to denote different model runs of Scout craft based off of the year, sector or planet that produced them
I kinda dig the idea of model. Oh, this is the Scout Craft DX, it's cheaper, but basic with only the cream-colored upholstery. Now, if you want something better, then get the Scout Craft TX. That's got leather seats, more cup holders, and carbon fiber dash accents.
Love all your series dude Traveller has a special place in my heart as it was my introduction to ttrpgs. Call of Cthulhu being another favourite though my main game I run is SLA industries second edition. Your vids have been invaluable to me and my players (some struggle to read rules and your learning a new system vid was exactly what I didn't know I needed)
You can add a few more things for the travellers Cargo is useful. Spare parts. 1 months' supply = 1% of the ships volume. This is thing to repair or replace on the ship. It can even count as feed stock for a workshop. Supplies, food, water, air for 20 crew for 1 month weighs in at 1 ton. Price, I leave up to the GM but now this should help with the life support bit.
I have a discrepancy between how you interpreted the vehicle space and how I interpreted it. You added 10% like it was a ship but it states to use the shipping size for vehicles that I would figure would already have that extra 10% calculated. It's just something I understand differently, and this is a great video. Thank you.
If you were shipping the Air Raft to a location, then it's take 4 tons of cargo space, but be stacked up with everything else and not easy to access. Think of it like a big semi-truck. Sure you can park a car inside of it like in Spy Hunter (yeah, I'm dating myself there, but Spy Hunter was awesome), however you don't have enough room inside the semi's trailer to open your car's door. So the docking space is slightly bigger than the vehicle docked inside it to allow room to fuel, maintain, and enter/exit the docked vehicle.
Glad you found the discrepancy. Don’t forget that the maintenance cost for staterooms is increased to 3k for double occupancy, per the running cost table on p145 of the (old) Core Rulebook - this is in addition to the 1k per person LS cost… so the bean-counters decided four staterooms primarily to reduce the wear and tear on the CO2 scrubbers or something (otherwise Jack would be bunking in with Olaf and SOP would be to isolate the remaining space to save costs :-) ).
Sadly, I don't think Seth is playing 2300, so no review from him on the subject. A shame, really. The setting and tech assumptions of that game appeal to me a lot more Traveller's does these days.
Man, you make Traveller so attractive! Someday I'll get my group out of fantasy and into the stars. If I start them into a spelljammer campaign do you think they'd notice the transition to traveller?😋
That sounds like an idea! You can have them get lost in the phlogiston and then end up in the Traveller universe. The mind flayer does not save them, as they have too little brains to be worth the effort. Someday they may be longing to upgrade that brain/computer to a higher tech level!
Yes I agree with the 10% standard price reduction for standard design, as I have 1982 Core rulebook on page 59 states that standard ships cost .9 times the cost of the ship. I came out with 36.9405 MCr. Which is the 2022 Core book total. Thank for running through this construction of a ship! Now if you can work out big ship yards have to be to make a huge ship and the construction times. Shipyards have to be 5 times the tonnage of the ship to be built. I have been extrapolating crane load limits and multiple shipyard making segments and then assembling them all in one huge facility to cut down the construction time limit to "1 Million Credits per Day" . This just doesn't work with Dreadnought classes and higher. This would take decades for some ships at "1MCr per Day"! Not to mention the amount of Engineers it would take to make it and to mention that the pay for all those Engineers at 4,000 Cr per month.
Very good thing you noted that about the barbette. I almost made that mistake myself, and that is going with the old 2nd high guard rulebook. After all, real world barbettes generally house more than one gun, and thematically you can have it as such. But it is counted as once weapon system with no space for anything added to it.
Excellent video as always Mr. Skorkowsky! I wonder if traveller could be used to run a campaign based on the universe of StarSector? Wonder if you could build a Tesseract with these spaceship construction mechanics.
I've only just found your channel and I just finished watching the Traveller Overview playlist. Really enjoyed it, your calm and collected commentary is super easy to follow and your demeanor is quite friendly, which is a nice change in the RU-vid-sphere. On other note have you taken a look at Ars Magica fifth edition? It's my absolute favourite system to run or play anything medieval and magical. It has a very robust system for making your own spells, which is a rarity and the supplements add on to it immensely, some times even making rules for different kinds of magics. My most used supplement is probably the Covenants book which expands on the core book's base (Covenant) building and managing rules, how to make customized laboratories for your studies etc. My only problem with the core book is that parts of it are edited like an esoteric guide to medieval alchemy, which is fitting but quite irritating and some times you really have to dig around to find the one sentence that explains the thing you are trying to understand.
"Finity’s End is a far-traveling ship and wide space is the deep that she knows Infinity’s black is the emblem she bears, and never a mark does it show The stuff of dead suns is her iron and her steel; in a nova's light she was made She set out to travel the day she was born, in the free-running, long-hauling trade And no sun can hold us and keep us for long, for infinity’s ours, and infinity’s free. And no star can own her and no world’s her own, for Finity’s End is she. The Company thought that they’d make them a law and have all the ships for their own “You’re Company ships now and Company crews, you’ll pay us and serve us alone.” James Robert the First was her captain that day, and he sent to all ships in the deep: “Farewell to their ports and good luck to them all, for what they can’t catch they can’t keep.” And no sun can hold us and keep us for long, for infinity’s ours, and infinity’s free. And no star can own her and no world’s her own, for Finity’s End is she. And, wonder to tell, Mother Earth changed her mind, and called back her magistrates too, For no ship would haul beyond Alpha or Pell, so no mail and no cargo got through. Then Unionside came with their ships and their guns and closed up the ports one and all “You’ll all haul for us now,” the Union men said, “You’ll come and you’ll go where we call.” And no sun can hold us and keep us for long, for infinity’s ours, and infinity’s free. And no star can own her and no world’s her own, for Finity’s End is she. Now Captain James Robert was vexed and annoyed, so he sent out the word like before: “We’re free ships and crews and we go where we please; we’ll haul you to hell and no more.” Then Unionside haulers like Candice and Fay, Merry Gold, Carina, and Fame, From Unionside ports reached the wide deep of space, and to Finity’s End they all came. And no sun can hold us and keep us for long, for infinity’s ours, and infinity’s free. And no star can own her and no world’s her own, for Finity’s End is she. “Ah, well now,” said Earth, “you must come to our side, for there is no place else you can be.” But Captain James Robert still sent out the word that all ships from now on must be free. So no ship would come and no true ship would go but the traitor Shalleen and her kind Shalleen drifts in pieces around Shalleen Point, and never a rest will she find. And no sun can hold us and keep us for long, for infinity’s ours, and infinity’s free. And no star can own her and no world’s her own, for Finity’s End is she. The treaty was signed then and sealed and made sure, for ports to be open to trade; And borders be none to withhold us or bind-no law on our decks but the law we have made! And no sun can hold us and keep us for long, for infinity’s ours, and infinity’s free. And no star can own her and no world’s her own, for Finity’s End is she." Finity´s End - Leslie Fish, Joan Gaustad
@@irradiatedslagheap7933 Likewise! When I found out about filk so many years ago I was really blown away by all the songs, stories, in jokes and such. Trying to promote it here and there, where it fits =)
The most fun that I've had with ship design on a mechanics side is back with the Farscape rpg that AEG put out...it was very good at making the ships into characters of their own.
One of the secrets of ship design for the Type S is that you can increase your power plant size, but not lose (that much) cargo space, but converting the Captain's Office into the...*ahem*..."Small Package Cargo Hold". ;)
No idea if there's any rules to support it, but as an explanation of why the book scout ships are cheaper than the construction rules would suggest, Scout Services is buying quite a few of the Type-S. They probably do bulk or continuous orders and get a discount for the volume of work they provide to the shipyards. Which could also explain why the type remains the same despite reports of shortcomings from the field. Any modifications would mean renegotiating that sweet discount they secured on the Type-S, and there's no way the shipyards would let them get away with it again. Alternatively, another in-universe explanation might be that Scout Services uses higher TL shipyards to produce the Type-S, and since the work on a TL 12 ship isn't as intensive for them, they charge less for the ship. The book cost could represent the discount from a TL 14 yard, or perhaps the average price Scout Services pays across all the TL 12+ yards they contract with. Still annoying for the rules example, but it's a possible set of in-universe explanations that suggest rules for discounts on shipbuilding.
Type S is a fleet courier, as well as being a scout. That's why it has the extra fuel processing capacity. Every hour counts when you are carrying orders or intelligence for a massive space fleet engaged in high intensity war.
Excellent video. One of the things I have noted in a lot of current Traveller groups is a reluctance to engage with ship building rules. It is a feature of the game, though, and this video may be the thing that encourages players to actually appreciate and have fun doing it.
Two of my players jumped on it. They got really into the building and modification rules. Two others couldn't be bothered with learning them. Oddly enough, those same players were the ones who kept wanting to improve their ship's engines and add cool features, but could never understand why their fuel tanks and reactors had to increase, too.
Interesting video, a lot of tables and numbers but seems well thought through. I once had to do something similar for my players in a homebrew sky pirate campaign; size, HP, cannons, engine, speed etc. I just trusted my gut and tried to balance the prices as best as possible and I think it turned out well enough.
I think I'd rule in-game that the difference is due to the reduction in price from mass production vs making a custom creation. Buying a mass produced ship would be cheaper then rolling up to a shipyard and asking them to make something completely new.
Nice. Also glad you found the reason for the discrepency in the Mongoose prices. As always, loving jack, but the captain's office on the scout still seems like a waste of space, especially if there's no crew galley. Personally, I loved that Traveller had deck plans for so many ships. Playing just about any science fiction game with ships, having deck plans is a must. After all, the ship is practically your home.
The price difference is because Your ship is new while the one offered by Scout Services in the books is second hand. They would not sell lease a new ship to a traveller, you only get used ones that Scout Services has mustered out.
Back when this was a GDW game, there was a significant cost discount on ship construction for a standardized design -- Scout, Fat Traders, Far Traders, etc. Edit: I see in your sticky comment you found the discount. Used to be you could also obtain a used ship, with some cost discount based on how old the ship was -- if you're going to fly a Type S, there's no good reason it needs to be new (though there's always that chance something will be worn out and cost a bunch to fix). Nice to know Mongoose hasn't changed that much -- I've read "Mongoose isn't really Traveller!" too many times, but I haven't played the game since the early 1980s (other than a couple sessions of Classic 8-10 years ago).
An office allows for private communication between the captain and individual members of the crew. Try having a private conversation at a packed party. Yes a office is a good decision that large is debate. Could use it as storage if it isn't needed.
