Cepheus Review - Vehicle Combat

Drive, she said...

TOC

1. Cepheus Engine Review TOC.

Miscellaney

Traveller

At the time of writing, the Joy of Wargaming Youtube channel is continuing it’s solo Traveller campaign. Check out the channel for a lot of material on solo RPG play and minis wargaming without getting sucked into the gravitational maw of the big guys.

Also a few updated and related posts on the Blackraven’s first haul, and on Blaine’s World.

ACKs

In the meantime, I’d like to introduce another substack, Harrowed’s by

Harrowed

. He’s been taking an extremely detailed look at the borderlands of Sinister Stone of Sakkara, with weather and factions in place. The latest article is below, but there’s. a lot to dig into. You can also find him at the Autarch discord.

Powers of the Borderlands I

Vehicles

The Basics

Page 70 starts us with “Vehicles in Personal Combat” - a section notably missing in the Classic Traveller rules, and not well covered in Mercenary either. I cannot speak to Striker - but the combat system there is fundamentally different from the basic CT combat.

It starts out noting differences in vehicle combat, and the second paragraph shows that maps or minis may become necessary very quickly. Depending on the overall situation, theater of the mind may break down:

Unlike people, who are mobile and maneuverable, careful track must be kept of which way a vehicle is facing. Vehicle- mounted weapons – and armed passengers, to a lesser extent – are restricted to certain fire arcs.

Basically, which way is the vehicle pointing and what are your firing arcs based on where you are seated.

Three additional bullet points:

• the driver is constantly expending minor actions for normal driving

• tricky obstacles may require a significant action

• vehicles are generally +1 to hit due to size

In the spirit of firing arcs, open vehicles such as convertibles offer no cover and impose no firing arc restrictions. Closed vehicles offer at least 1/2 soft cover and firing arcs are limited by windows.

I’m not sure what to make of convertibles in this context, especially since the rules care about firing arcs. Sure, a straight up unsided flatbed offers no cover, but look at the diagrams of an air raft, at least in CT, or a typical convertible. You may not have a roof or glass windows , but everything below your shoulders or mid-chest are still below the vehicle side. Even if you had a flatbed with an enclosed cabin, someone standing in the rear bed firing forward would have at least partial cover of the cabin.

My initial assumption here is that cover in an open vehicle will be dependent on the actual structure of the vehicle and firing arc.

The section on vehicle weapon firing arcs makes sense. I think a .50-cal on a mount in a hilux “technical” bed would qualify as a turret.

Collisions are handled as follows:

When a vehicle collides with something else everything takes damage. Roll 1D6 for every 10 kph of the vehicle’s speed (round up). This is applied as damage directly to anything hit and, if the thing struck is solid enough, also to the ramming vehicle. Any unsecured passengers in a vehicle damaged in a collision take the same damage and, if possible, are thrown three meters for every 10 kph of speed. Secured passengers (those wearing seatbelts or something similar) are not thrown anywhere and take one quarter damage.

For non stationary targets, the speed should likely bee the difference in speed. Otherwise, it’s a reasonable and unfiddly approximation.

Vehicular Actions

Vehicles can’t dodge as a reaction. They can however make evasive maneuvers starting at his initiative until his next action, which uses the effect from a driver’s skill check as a DM for attacks in both directions.

Basic maneuvers do not require a skill check. Stunts however do require a vehicle control check, and is a very broad category including skipping a shallow sandbar without damage, wheelies, drifting to improve a firing arc, and so on.

Weaving allows you to break off pursuit in heavy traffic or congested streets. The driver choses a weaving number as low as one up to speed/20, with a collision the result of failing the check. Pursuit has to make the same difficulty check, with the same consequences, or break off.

It looks like a vehicle control check is a standard target check using the appropriate vehicle skill. From reading the rules, it seems unlikely to apply environmental or other modifiers unless they significantly impact normal operation, because the whole point of weaving is that the driver chooses how tricky the maneuver is.

Aside - real life breaking of a tail can involve running a yellow light, in which case, the pursuers suddenly find themselves with a weaving situation that the pursued do not. random rolls to determine chase obstacles may be needed.

Also, weaving rules may be less useful for grav vehicles but are still relevant.

Vehicle Damage

There’s a bit of a disconnect here in that the above rules imply you can target an individual in a vehicle at partial cover, but don’t cover if misses hit the vehicle - which likely can be handled by the close proximity rules in my last post. Nor does the vehicle “hit location” table have a location for “windows” that would be relevant even if you are targeting the vehicle itself. Especially an open vehicle.

I hate to add more fiddliness, but I think both of the above issues need to be addressed.

Outside of that, the external hit location table for damage allocation seems reasonable, after looking at the earlier vehicle stats tables. The vehicle damage table converts damage rolled to “vehicle hits”. A few things remain unclear.

1. If a vehicle loses or doesn’t have armor - where does the damage go?

2. All hits to hull must be exhausted before damage penetrates, but any “hit” only removes one point.

3. Firing arcs matter, yet you can’t open up a side while the others are relatively untouched.

The description of how each hit location affects the vehicle is short and straightforward.

Repairs

A succinct rundown of what repairs to structure and systems entail, cannibalizing spares, jury rigging, and costs.

Starships

+4 to hit, but damage is divided by 50 to get a single “starship hit” - though multiple weapons can combine fire.

Thoughts

Overall I like it, but given the insistence on firing arcs for firing out, facing should matter for hits and damage as well, and something needs to be done to factor in missing targeted passengers vs occupants hit through open vehicles while targeting a vehicle.

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