"Traveller equipment for Stargrunt" Topic

Hi all,

I wonder if any of you know of sites or people who have tried to convert traveller & particularly its equipment to SG2?

I'm interested in setting up a traveller flavoured campaign, and confident about using the system & planet rules, including tech levels, but wonder if anyone has done any work on weapons, armor or equipment?

anyway – If you can help..

Most of the systems in StarGrunt and Dirtside are Traveller inspired. Don't get caught up in trying to do 1 to 1 conversions, just assign classes of weapons/systems from one game to the other. When you get down to it, all you are after is how does it act in this game environment.

Tech Levels can be differentiated by shifting Die types or values (Armor, Fire Power, etc) up or down.

Stargrunt's a little light on personal laser weapons (which are big in Traveller at some tech levels), but you could simulate those easily enough by just adding a High-FP, Low-Impact "laser rifle" to the weapons chart. Maybe FP3(4 with a GL), Impact d6?

You'd need rules for Grav Belts/Harnesses, too, but that's just a mobility thing. Let the wearer move 12/d12x2 using the same costs as a grav vehicle, maybe?

Other than that, what would you need to add? Psionics, maybe, if you're facing Zhodani, but I'm not tackling those rules. Maybe some alien psychology/threat level changes for the other races, and perhaps some tweaks to their basic abilities. K'kree move faster than a human, that sort of thing…

Or you could just go here:

link

Or here:

link

Or here:

link

hugely helpful all, particularly Hundvig!, Hyperbears pages had pretty much what I needed, and for now I'm not going to integrate any psionics…

(Though I had thought of randomly generating resistance for squads regardless of their quality)…

If anyone else has anything to add feel free!

After looking through most of the links… I thought that I should point out a few things…

Combat Armor's TL has been lowered to either TL 9 or 10 (I need to go check)

Combat Environment Suit's TL is lowered to 8

Battledress's TL is lowered to 10

There were/are many other technologies that had their TL lowered in later publications of Traveler due to contemporary advances in tech.

cheers Judas – I'll dig out my own (old 1st ed.) copy of Traveller use that – it's vanilla flavoured & thats the way I like it!

still keep em coming..

There were/are many other technologies that had their TL lowered in later publications of Traveler due to contemporary advances in tech.

Keeping up with technology is always a joy. What TL was the rough equivalent of a laptop in the early days? Somewhere around the "gravity manipulation" stage, was it? :)

Most of the guns in Traveller are slug throwers, at least on an infantry levels.

The real thing is to reflect when people of different tech levels fight each other :)

hundvig,

In the early days of traveller, they had "laptops" that had rougly 512Kb at TL15…

I had a conversation with Frank Chadwick in 1981 where he suggested that small computers could never hold enough memory or processing power to do much of anything, much less be able to help navigate through interstellar space…

The "Gravity manipulation" satge was TL9, and was changed to TL8 when Mercenary came out (although it was used more for reducing the weight of large IFVs than it was for actually floating them)..

now you've got me thinking…. laptops 512kb RAM…. pfft!

The computers really were that bad, eh? I'd been sort of hoping I'd misremembered that.

I imagine a modern camera-equipped tune-playing cellphone would have been Ancient-level tech, too. Sigh…if only they were.

Yep… by 1984 I was having pretty regular arguments with both Marc Miller and Frank Chadwick about the direction of technology. I had not heard of Moore's Law specifically back then, but it was something that i argued often.

Their basis for technological advancement seemed to be roughly 100 years between most TL advances (especially the high ones), when the exact opposite is probably true (That as TL increases, fewer years pass between significant paradigm shifts)

Technically, this is a problem with Traveller as well… Almost ALL of their technology right up to TL 15 is based upon the same substrate paradigm. They have NO nanotech to speak of, They are severely befixed with a Frankenstein complex (meaning no significant recognition of AI or robotics in society, nor the implications that bionics has to robotics).

In reality. TL15 should be lowered to around TL12 (GURPS places TL 15 at 12), and around TL9, new paradigms of most technologies should begin appearing:

Nano-computing as a norm, optical computing as a highly developed new paradigm, and Quantum computing just becoming highly viable, but still a relatively nascent industry. Ai should be at the level of nearly fully sentient, and capable of passing a turing test.

Those technologies should advance until TL15, when femto-tech should be the rising technological substrate (using ub-atmoic particles as the computational bits of a computer, rather than the molecules and atoms of Nano-computing). At TL15, you should see a FULLY transhuman civilization, which is something that you don't see in Traveller (Frankenstein complex), even though the laws of economics and darwinism would create this type of society no matter how hard you tried to prevent it)

Iscariot – do you ever read Charles Stross?

Of course, you could just assume that the Traveller universe operates under slightly different laws of physics than ours, retarding the development of some tech types and advancing (or allowing) others. They get FTL, we get computers that don't suck, they get grav control, we get nanotech. I agree that their tech curve is, well, not curved, but with lousy computers, our own rate of change would probably be a *lot* slower too.

And in some other continuum, a bunch of gamers are sitting around right now complaining about a scifi RPG that fails to predict antigrav generators in the year 2100 but has "magic" robots the size of a molecule…so unrealistic. :)

Rich

well, part of the charm of Traveller is that its a retro game.

Its kind of funny to complain about lack of nanomachines or whatever, but accept faster than light travel and dog people without blinking

Maybe you didn't read what I was inferring too carefully…

Dog people are probably a LOT closer than Grav and FTL (Although I am pretty confident that some form of FTL will be realized in the coming centuries).

Genetic manipulation is part of the exponential rise in technology… Making them would be no problem for a culture that had both human and dog genomes completes dechipered and coded…

You would just need to either begin emphasizing human genes that were similar to canine and canine genes that were similar to himan (intelligence and the development of opposable thumbs for instance)