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« Last post by Nemesis on October 22, 2023, 01:31:12 pm »
I'm playing around with the Traveller rules (hard to get legitimate up to date copies locally) designing my own setting, designing ships, creating adventure ideas and background characters. Still no group but even just working with things to implement my ideas is fun.
One of the things I didn't like was the space prospecting rules. The most common asteroid size is 1 million tons (Traveller ship tons which is about 14 metric tons). 1 ton asteroids are as rare as asteroids in the 100s of kilometers. I ran two groups of characters (1 of them twice) through the rules and the group I ran through twice each time found 2 asteroids with wealth in the trillion credit region. The 2nd hit up to about 850 billion. Both of these were in weeks. I'm reworking this to make the 1 ton asteroid the most common and that most really large asteroids will have already been prospected and if valuable claimed if there is an active belt industry.
The Scavenger/Belter class has serious issues, they can't roll the skill to pilot the one ship designed for them. They can't roll the sensor skill for prospecting, the gunner skill to operate the laser drill for mining the Profession (Belter) skill doesn't have a definition as to what it covers. Oddly though they can't pilot the ship they can get astrogation which is useless for any type of ship they can pilot as they can't have jump drive. The newest edition of the ship removes the mining drones and puts a much smaller laser drill on a 4 ton craft to do the mining. The ship mounted laser drill ONLY EXISTS for this mining so why would they make another one that is smaller and less useful? The ship one is still in the new rules. The jump net which could make mining even iron ore moderately profitable (and pay your ship mortgage) isn't on the ship and no mention is made of it being a common retrofit, it is even CHEAP compared to most things on the ship.
Now I don't have the current edition core rule book with the class in it just the prior edition (I have the current edition High Guard book with ship design though).
The world rolling rules don't allow for any planet that would really qualify as a super Earth. Back when the original game was designed that would be acceptable as no exoplanets let alone super Earths had been detected, now they have. The updates should reflect that. You can roll a planet with one guy on it and a Class A Starport? So I plan on revising those rules based on the 1980s Scout book to roll entire solar systems not just the inhabited world and whether there are asteroids and gas giants which is all that is in the most recent rules I have access to. There are no rules for atmosphere types on none habitable worlds either. No moons.
Odd that a game this old hasn't had more modernization. At least computers are now assumed to have negligible tonnage rather than taking tons of space as in the early editions.
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