Traveller: Part 6 - Space Combat

Part six of my series on Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition (MGT2). Today we cover Space Combat, Range Bands, and Ship Damage.

I apologize if this episode it a bit more rules crunch than normal. There’s a lot to cover and I wanted to give suitable attention to the various part. So, the help you navigate and reference it:

00:00 Intro
1:27 Ships and Turrets
6:14 Range
10:04 Spaaaace Combat
10:15 -Ambushes
10:42 -Initiative
11:05 -Tactics
11:26 Combat Steps
11:48 -Maneuver Step
13:51 -Attack Step
15:30 -Reactions
17:46 -Action Step
20:51 Dogfighting
23:25 Missiles
26:45 Damage
27:22 -Critical Hits
32:22 Boarding Actions
35:58 Closing Thoughts

Of course, this is all highlights. Some details or options I either breezed past or didn’t mention (such as capital ship weaponry). This is intended as a general overview or foundation-builder, not as a replacement for the rulebook. If I missed a rule, my bad. If a referee wishes to do it different, that’s perfectly fine. Just have fun and keep those fighters off your six.

Guest starring Jack the NPC

[SSkorkowsky]

Correction: Weapon power requirements appear in the Ship Operations section (pg.144). My bad.

[ricksherman]

Seth, I've been playing Traveller for 40+ years, and I use your videos to let my players get caught up on some of the more challenging aspects of the game [ And they're great reference for me as well ! ] I appreciate all you do for the Traveller game and the care and attention that you give it. - Rick.

[mikebrines]

Play LOTS of Traveller. When we do boarding actions we just use the regular combat rules. As to damaging a ship, remember, 1/10 the normal damage does damage to the ship and any time you miss a shot inside it's gotta hit the ship, so just roll damage and apply 1/10 as hull damage. God help you if you use grenades or heavy weapons that might score a critical hit.

[BeerMatt]

There was a great article in White Dwarf back in the day (back when it had Thrud the Barbarian and The Travellers comic strips, and before it became the Games Workshop product brochure), all about boarding operations in Traveller. It was light on rules, but the atmospheric commentary was amazing: using fake airlocks, environmental controls and zoning to make it really hard to get a bridgehead on a hostile craft - as opposed to lining up in corridor doorways and waiting for Imperial Stormtroopers to cut their way in. It was a fantastic read.

[robertsalvia]

Really nice to have the video timeline broken up into easily referenced sections, nice touch

[glenagalt]

They took their time, and it's outside the scope of what you were supplied to review, but I'm pleased to report dat dem Mongoose Boyz finally came through. The 2022 Update to High Guard significantly beefed up the detail on boarding actions. It is basically personal combat with extra flavour, but pretty good flavour. We get...

More detail on methods of forced entry- gear needed and time taken.
Hacking options
Two extra rules for ranged weapon use: "Stacking" (firing into or through groups) and...the one we all wanted, what happens to missed shots..and what might get damaged. They even included grenades, for the terminally enthusiastic.

I was about to confidently type about "why blades are bad news if you're wearing a vacc-suit" because I remember reading that table recently too...but double checked, and am glad I did. Those details do exist in a recent acquisition of mine- but it's not High Guard 2022. It's in the 2018 edition of the Companion at the bottom of p64, so all the gory details are in print....but you have to put your hand in your pocket again if you don't already have the Companion.

[dinisnascimento]

Currently wearing my Scott Brown t-shirt

[SkullDixon]

Traveller seems like the type of game where players should taking on some GM tasks to lessen the burden the GM has to handle. So like in space Combat. A player who tracks al the Thurst and whatnot can be tracked by a player so that the Gm doesn't have to.

[shadowwalker]

I love your house rules and will be using them when I start my own Traveller campaign. The only thing I might add is a modification to the maneuver phase: Ships will act in ascending order of initiative in the maneuver phase only, that way the ships with better initiative can react to the slower initiative ships' actions and have the upper hand in placement/location.

[jfridy]

If you want some old school Traveler spaceships and boarding, they actually had it in the old 1970s version in two small boxed supplements.

Mayday: the ship combat system, has inertial movement, basically your current speed and course is where you go next turn, but you can adjust it with your thrust. It actually works pretty well, and is pretty playable.

Snapshot: the shipboard combat system. It's a slightly more streamlined version of the general combat system, with deck plans.

Both are available on the used market, and were printed (You don't need any specialized counters, just a map and markers for ships, ) in Traveler: The Games, from Far Future Enterprises. They did reprints of the old games before Mongoose got the rights.

[kevingriffith]

Honestly I think they were in kind of a tough spot for boarding actions in a similar way that Shadowrun was in a tough spot for deckers in earlier editions: you run the real risk of turning the game into a 1 on 1 between one player (the one boarding) and the GM while everyone else waits, especially when you take the 6 minute ship round vs the 6 second personal round into account. Now, if one player is running a boarding *team*, then there's no problem, you have a handful of marine NPCs that the PCs can play as during the boarding action, and every 10 rounds inside the ship the players in ship-to-ship combat get to do their round and cause something dramatic to happen inside... but a lone saboteur could be a real problem.

Now as long as the one boarding is dealing with ship systems like opening doors with breaching charges or some other mechanical knowhow then you can have those actions take roughly as long as the ship-to-ship turns, but the second they have to fight ship's security teams or internal security systems then things get hairy.

[LHEli]

Last time I was this early they still spoke vilani in the imperium...

[MrJormun]

In the space opera anime " Legend of galactic heroes " they used some sort of gas particle against boarding actions, that would ignite and explode anyone firing a laser weapon. so they used halberds and crossbows

[mythrandil]

I'll point out that "We figured that since the damage came from the critical hit that just happened to the hull, we'd just increase the severity of the critical hit" is actually a houserule (nothing in RAW supports this), so your houserule to roll again on the critical hit location table is actually just RAW

[tilasole]

4:56 who uses life support!? Babies, that's who! Now crank the power up to everything else, Carl and let's show these space punks who's the boss!

[Tony-dhmz]

5:55

Wait wait wait, you're doin it all wrong,
To shoot at people ya use missiles, the blast radius, you can't miss,  

FLASHBACK
Me with my Scout ship on a desert planet with insidious atmosphere, (eats anything away given long enough) Sitting in my cockpit assessing how long exposer time I have, when a group of people in battledress crested a dune in front of my ship, they had plasma gun (noticed i said "they had"?, yes its going places) if you didn't know plasma gun can do a number on a space ship, (That would be the number "2" btw) so i armed me a missile and let rip,  

The blast radius made it an easy hit, and anyone that survived that blast, didn't last long in that atmosphere, after their armor had been compromised,  

The gm was p-ssed, he had planned a long fight....

[NefariousKoel]

There's a freebie user-created chart to help with space combat ranges and movement. It's really simple and has all you need to keep track. Just a grid of numbers for moving an enemy ship chit down the spaces with the Thrust and Range values listed in each. It's called the Traveller Space Combat Chart.

[hDansRandomCrud]

Re: cascading criticals, the way I intended to play is is that a single crit roll that causes another crit cannot cause a crit of the same type. So if you roll "Hull" for the second critical, re-roll. If you still managed to cascade into further crit rolls, then the previous TWO crits are now unavailable, etc. I feel like this simulates "hitting something important". Like you suggest - Hull damage causes a fuel leak, or knocks loose a coolant feed for the power plant, etc.
I'm really loving this series, btw. Thanks for doing this.

[arcaciustrell]

4:30 I would like to point out that power requirements for weapons and turrets are listed on page 144 of the core book.

[kevinm]

I would love to revisit this game; I played it in the late 70's and it was brutal, but fun!