Jon Mollison has recently covered Classic Traveller vector-based space combat. I especially appreciate the diagram he laid out showing how plotting works over several turns. Not only that, but he goes into a couple aspects of combat that are often overlooked, but matter in Traveller - such as how much all those missiles you’re firing off cost.
For some other insights into the space combat rules in Classic Traveller as presented in the Traveller Book, you can also look at my old post on it.
Strengths and Weaknesses
It’s hard to overstate how easy and intuitive the spaceship movement system is given that it delivers true newtonian movement with inertia. It looks mathy, but isn’t. Instead, plotting movement is nearly as simple as drawing a few lines. No counting hexes, and everything is exact to the limits of the precision and accuracy of your ruler and protractor. Weaknesses? Well - it is simulationist, and if you find yourself in a fair fight, you messed up. Also, as noted in my own post, somehow the missile movement rules got overlooked and need to be pulled from outside supplements.
Intuitive compared to what?
Star Fleet Battles
I had this in the 80’s, and have a recent edition of the basic set as well as Federation Commander which is slightly simplified.
Fiddly doesn’t even begin to describe it.
If you ever wanted the feeling of commanding one or a few starships at the level of detail an actual commanding officer would, this game delivers in spades. Power and movement plotting, weapons charging and timing, weapon arcs, shield facings and reinforcement, impulse movement, plasma torpedoes, tractor beams, boarding parties, and even selective damage to internal systems as the damage penetrates further in are all present.
It’s also incredibly time consuming, and grows far more unwieldy as the number of ships does.
Lastly - it assumes warp drives and ships zooming around like fighters or cars.
So why is it fiddly and what features does it provide?
Every class of ship has a card to track shield status, damage, available weapons, weapons status, and so on. However, unlike the much simpler cards of Warmachine, ships are complex systems, and you’re tracking a lot.
The above are at “squadron” rather than fleet scale for Federation Commander, and the sheets for Star Fleet Battles Proper are even more detailed. So are the rules. Even the simplified version in Federation Commander comprises the largest volume of rules I’ve seen outside of the complete possible rules for Battletech, and that is just the rules for playing - it doesn’t include design rules.
That said, it factors in all of the classic weapons types you remember from the shows including various grades of phasers, disruptors, shuttles, drones (guided missiles), and photon torpedoes. While hex-based, it’s also easily translated to using miniatures.
Talon
What if you wanted Star Trek, but actually playable, and more to the point, teachable, to a normal gamer in an afternoon - and you didn’t mind the serial numbers being filed off? I give you Talon. The basic game factions are recognizably Federation and Klingon simply from their weapons preferences. The hexes and tiles are much bigger, and this is because the ship tiles themselves double as the status cards, rendering the entire board as not only a positional tracker but emulating a realtime game status display.
The rulebook is blessedly short, and in combination with the stripped down status tiles, makes this an easy game to teach. You will need a good dry erase marker and a reliable way to clean it up, as damage and current speeds are all written directly on the play counters.
Attack Vector: Tactical
AV:T is a hard-science tactical space game that factors in full newtonian motion in three dimensions including ship facing and rotation. It is perhaps the simplest possible scheme to account for relative facings and weapon arcs for these movement scenarios. The AVID system for determining positions and orientation is a clever thing of beauty and as simple as you can make such a realistic movement system.
By no means is it simple.
Bluntly - AV:T is an excellent game that would be vastly improved with the actual facing calculations and positional displays were handled by a computer. This is already partially there in the form of the AV:T “Analog Space Combat By Internet” site which helps handle a lot of the bookkeeping, and more importantly, the calculations you’d have to otherwise do manually.
In either case, it, like SFB, is much better suited for small engagements than actual fleets or squadrons.
Squadron Strike
Squadron strike is related to AV:T, but is also it’s own thing. First of all, it has an integrated ship design system that allows for different modes of movement, and can range from nearly as complex as AV:T with full newtonian movement to 2D combat. It’s supposed to be a “universal” design system.
Have you ever wanted to take ships from different universes and see who’d win? If you can imagine it, Squadron Strike lets you build it, then fight it out on the table with your friends. Squadron Strike combines the most detailed ship construction system on the market - it can faithfully reproduce ships from Star Fleet Battles or Babylon 5 Wars - and mates them to a fast-playing tactical engine that includes full 3D maneuver and firing arcs.
Notably, the game starts running much faster when you collapse the system to using 2D.
Also - While I don’t have AV:T, I do have the Traveller-themed release. It chose to focus on larger ship classes, leaning on a few designs recognizable from later supplements in Classic Traveller, rather than the more character-scale ships (100-800 tons). On the one hand, it’s perfect if you want to tactically fight out every battle in Fifth Frontier War, on the other, you’ll have to use those design rules to build out the smaller scale ships.
Interceptor
After FASA created Battletech, it tried its hands at another universe centered around a vaguely roman-themed galactic empire and revolt. The system eventually included an excellent grav-tank game (Centurion), a capital ship game (Leviathan), as well as a strategic level game, but the first release was a fighter game called Interceptor.
I no longer have the game and it’s been a while - but I recall the fighter movement was semi-newtonian. Changing directions included changing facing, and burned thrust in proportion to the speed.
Most notable was an interesting “wiring diagram” damage system that allowed damage to transfer to related systems, but was so fiddly to use it never appeared in any other related product. Looking back - I enjoyed the game but was profoundly glad that Centurion chose a very clever damage template model instead.
Triplanetary
This game predated Traveller and Mayday, and was relatively recently re-released by Steve Jackson games. I’ve posted on it in more detail here.
In this game you can see the origins of both Mayday and the CT combat movement systems. Like Mayday, you use a hex board and chits. On the other hand, instead of using marking chits for future positions you actually draw on the dry-erase board. Extremely intuitive if not quite as DYI as Classic Traveller. Fuel is limited in this game, where CT in the Traveller Book assumes a given amount of fuel allows several weeks of operation. Also, the combat itself is simplistic. However, there are a few interesting scenarios and it lets you get the hang of the basics of this style of movement system.
Mayday
One of three ship combat systems for Classic Traveller, though intended more as a standalone game. The scale is different from Traveller proper, resulting in some interesting discrepancies in performance compared to the RPG. It’s hex-based, but uses future position chits instead of plotting out actual courses using marker or crayon. Unlike most things I’ve discussed todayI haven’t played it but have looked over the rules and especially the movement system. In essence it is a slightly simpler version of the Classic Traveller rules packaged up as a board game.
Classic Traveller
… and back again, and I can see in part why SS:T didn’t bother with small ships. The main book rules deal well with designing these ships, and a few missing items aside - like not including the missile maneuver rules inexplicably - is a barely more complicated version of the ship combat rules in Mayday. The biggest practical difference is the scale and use of paper, pencil, and protractor instead of a hex board.
And there is very little stopping you from using a large hex mat instead of pencil.
Summing it All Up
I’ve played almost all of these games, and owned all but one (AV:T). I enjoy them. However, Traveller/Mayday and Talon hit a sweet spot for simplicity without being simplistic. Traveller and its cousins in particular capture the essence of newtonian movement without getting lost in the weeds of exact facings and true 3-dimensional movement. I find Federation Commander to be as crunchy as I ever want to get on the SFB side, and will rarely break out Squadron Strike - and will likely never play the 3D version on a physical board.
I know there are minis based systems that I haven’t covered, but I haven’t owned or played them either, so it wouldn’t be fair to comment on them.
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Just for fun, there is also Aetherstream: Interceptor which is a spiritual successor to RL: Interceptor. The wiring diagrams are gone, replaced with dice pools to resist damage effects. I've played it a bit during testing and I really liked the feel. Reminded me of RL:I with more streamlining for modern gamers.