"Traveller P.F. Sloan Fleet Escort preview" Topic

The P.F. Sloan Fleet Escort is one of the fifteen ships included in Squadron Strike: Traveller. It originally appeared in Classic Traveller Supplement 9: Fighting Ships. Squadron Strike includes background on the class, a ship sheet for 2D play, a ship sheet for 3D play, and an all-new variant for 3D play.

The background page includes design history, service history, and a beautiful illustration by Charles Oines based on the original art in Supplement 9.

The 2D ship display helpfully incorporates play aids on the left side. The ring tracks where your nose is pointed and you record your vectors in the boxes around it. The two "wedges" below that are for plotting your thrust: by marking a hex, you can distribute your thrust between major directions, so you're not artificially limited to thrusting straight ahead.

To the right of the play aids, the various ship systems are grouped into ten numbered rows (with sub-rows inside them). This is the damage alocation table for the ship. When you're rolling for a weapon to hit, roll a die of a different color to find the hit location. Combining the hit location table with the systems display lets you immediately start marking off damage, instead of hunting for the correct group of boxes.

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For small ships like the P.F. Sloan, the 3D ship displays fit two ships on each sheet to reduce the amount of paper on the table. Down the middle of the page are the firing arcs, number of batteries, and weapon statistics. The firing arc displays are spheres that have been peeled open. The triangle shows the nose of the ship, the half-circle is aft, the top and bottom are the top and bottom of the ship, and the cevrons are the sides. White shows the firing arc, black shows where it's blocked.

To the side of each firing arc are the weapons that use that arc. Below the weapon abbreviation, each diamond is one battery. Below the firing arcs are the weapon stats, showing range bands, accuracy (roll a d10), base damage, maximum variable damage, and special traits.

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Each of the 15 ships in Squadron Strike: Traveller comes with a variant, so you could say that there are really 30 ships in the set. The variants include different weapons (strike and escort variants), carrier versions, and, in one case, different jump and thrust values.

The P.F. Sloan comes in a beam frigate variant, designed to reduce the logistical load of refilling the missile magazines and making it easier to operate at the end of a long supply line.

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