CT Completeness Revisited

TOC

From here on out I’ll be referencing a Table of Contents page instead of updating the TOC on every page.

• CT Review Table of Contents

Space Combat: Completeness

I’d made a claim earlier that unlike the mess of many later versions, CT was a solidly built and complete game. So, has that assessment changed? After all, we have the initiative issue in combat, missing sci fi weapons, and missing missiles, if you’ll pardon the expression.

No. The assessment remains.

Yes, one of the arguments for incompleteness resides in the fact that minis map play is brought up, but initiative rules for movement that would resolve them isn’t available, to which I’d reply that the game and range rules are expressly written for theater of the mind and range bands. Merely mentioning that laying out figures or chits on a map is possible does not detract that combat can be described and executed as is.

Insofar as incompleteness of weapons - the game is a framework that can easily have your favorite sci fi stuff added, giving you the basic concepts with a consistency that allows you to easily do so. Marc does so himself with Mercenary. If you want tanglers and railguns, feel free. If you don’t, the already broad selection of weapons gives you all you need to run a broad variety of futuristic and primitive encounters.

The oddest gap is the lack of description for how missiles are handled - in large part because they are explicitly mentioned in a number of places throughout the rules including ship construction, software needed to launch them, and damage, yet for whatever reason acceleration / turns is not mentioned. This behavior could literally be addressed in a line or paragraph each above the existing rules for sandcasters and missiles. This has to be an oversight. or it has to be something that seemed obvious to Marc, but isn’t to a guy who’s played a number of computer sims, Harpoon, AV:T, SS:Traveller, Mayday, and Starfleet Battles/Federation Commander.

So how to address this? One method is to do as I mentioned in my last post, go to SS3 or Mayday. This is valid. It is your campaign, and the kind of game you’re running determines the rules and rulings. But let’s say you didn’t buy the whole FFE CD, or you don’t want to dig outside of the core books at all, or just don’t want something that complicated? How would I fix this as a referee?

Let’s do sand first. Traveller has gravitics, so it’s reasonable to assume some degree of EM control. That said, unless you’re adding tractor beams wholesale - and keeping in mind that sandcasters are a lower tech than antigrav - sand isn’t likely to move with you if you make a hard burn or undergo any acceleration. Given how easy it would be to maneuver to clear LOS for a sand cloud that isn’t around a ship, tossing it to the side or in the direction of your opponent won’t provide protection either.

So sand stays with the ship to protect it until the ship changes vectors. Makes sense, and requires the fewest changes.

What about missiles? Even if I was using SS3, the “standard” missiles seem pretty straightforward but behave more like WW2 torpedoes than later torpedoes or any kind of air-to-air or surface-to-air missile. Their effective range of half a meter (give or take the firing ships’ vector) due to lack of seeking is especially frustrating. The warhead type conflicts (read: overrides) with the basic CT rules. Finally - unless I want to design custom drone and missile types (for which SS3 provides a lot of potential rabbit holes) I don’t want the complexity.

As a reasonably well read wargamer, I can think of at least two basic options. My gut assumption would be “missiles should travel faster than nearly anything out there, if only for a few turns”

1. Ultrafast/sprint relatively “unguided” rockets with a range of “x” that hit (or miss) their target within a single turn. The “standard” missile described in Mayday and SS3 is effectively this against maneuvering targets like ships, with a range of 500mm (plus the firing ships’ initial vector)¹. A similar example in Star Trek would be photon torpedoes (which incidentally bleed off some of their energy over distance). The only thing the ref needs to decide here is the effective range. Since 6G is a practical limit for ships, I don’t forsee even sprint missiles more than doubling that due to materials, targeting, and tracking - so one viable effective range would be 1 meter relative to vector. Maybe even an additional negative modifier for anything beyond 0.5 meters.

2. Guided warheads - what most people think of when thinking missiles vs rockets. In SFB terms this would be Kzinti drones. The ref needs to decide a) how many gees, b) how many turns, and c) how many degrees off the current vector can the missiles steer.

For the second type, there is the issue of steering. Why are course changes in space difficult for what amounts to a overblown model rocket with a solid rocket motor, as most missiles are? Mostly the lack of atmosphere that atmospheric seekers would use to help steer. You need to redirect the entire missile and it’s direction of thrust to change course. Full blown steering thrusters and liquid fuels are possible, but would massively overcomplicate things for the price if your cheap and very reliable baseline is solid rocket boosters. That said, it is still possible to vector the main thruster a little bit on solid motors (see the space shuttle SRB’s as an example) and redirect/steer by pushing the rear end around, much like a motorboat - and even a little bit over seconds adds up.

It doesn’t break things to assume 5G for at least a few turns that would be in play for a normal sized tabletop - especially as fighters are just about the only stock craft capable of hitting 6G’s - with a maximum vector change of 60 degrees to keep a lock on (and incidentally making it hex compatible). And if were to use SS3 as a set of build rules, I’d probably only modify that steering limit to bring missiles in line with modern real-world tech.

Conclusion

Coming up with a solution to plug what is an obvious oversight in CT requires understanding the rules, and a little about the conventions of the genre or the capabilities of technology. Given those, addressing the lack of movement rules for missiles is straightforward. It’s unfortunate that the rules are incomplete in this matter, but it is at least resolvable, and the game is still playable as an RPG without missiles.

1. On the other hand, 6 turns at 5G covers 7.5 meters relative to the starting vector by the time it burns out, and a mind-numbing 2.5m/turn of relative velocity, or nearly a light-second every 1000 seconds. Even without fuel there’s about 20Kg of mass and explosives traveling at nearly 1/1000 c. That is a lot of kinetic energy to come screaming in on a relatively stationary or predictable target like a station or an unaware warship. All you need to do is have a way to getting targeting data to a firing position outside of detection range.