http://bundleofholding.com/presents/Clement
Look, I know I’m a grognard, but I try to give things a fair shot. I’m not super excited by alternative settings for Traveller (why not make them systemless, or at least tie them to a system that does computers a bit better if you care about computers?). I’ve never heard of John Watts. But I took a look.
I flipped to starship operations. The cost of fuel varies based on how difficult it is to get hydrogen in a particular system; that’s fair enough. The cost goes up if there’s not much water on the main world, or for low-grade starports (I guess low volume implies high price, which is fair enough)… but it goes down if there’s no gas giant. It’s clearly a misstatement in the formula. But that was on the first page I looked at. Oh well.
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The Anderson & Felix Guide to Naval Architecture is 150 pages of ship design system. That’s unconventional these days, but I’m not arguing with it.
Ships can have an UNREP system - which “allows for replenishment and resupply of warships while in motion and is essential to the function of squadrons on deployment. UNREP includes fuel hoses, cargo transfer tubes and other gear to allow transfer of ordnance, freight and fuel between two ships.”
Do they mean they’re doing this under thrust? When ships develop between one and six Gs more or less indefinitely, is it really worth having a dedicated system when you could just turn off the drive for an hour or two and do a normal zero-G transfer?
Or do they mean you need this system to do that zero-G transfer? The book doesn’t say.
On the same page there’s an “internal components table” which has columns of Tonnes (displacement, of course) and MCr for each system. That’s fair. But “Training facility (per dT)” has a Tonnes cost of 2. What they mean is “Training facility (per simultaneous user)”.
There are sixteen credited playtesters, and an editor, as well as the author. Someone really ought to have had a read through it to spot stuff like this.
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