Starmada:Fleet Ops and Traveller

[The Oz]

MJ12 Games has released a "fleet-level" version of their Starmada starships miniatures rules, called "Starmada:Fleet Ops" (SFO). I have found these new rules to be very adaptable to simulating Traveller fleet-level ship combat. You don't get a 1-to-1 correspondence with Traveller/HG but it's not bad and the rules allow for fast play with large forces. You could easily play with a force of 4 or even 8 battleships (even Tigresses) on each side if you wanted to.

I've started a thread about the Traveller conversion of SFO on the MJ12 forum, here: http://www.mj12games.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2794. At that forum you can find the link to the data files for the various Traveller conversions I've done. I have even done a conversion for the most famous role-playing ships, such as the 100-ton scout/courier and the Beowulf free trader.

You can buy SFO as a paper product or as a .pdf, and it fairly cheap either way.

 

[hdan]

Thanks for doing this. I'll take a more detailed look over the weekend.

 

[The Oz]

Fought a couple of Traveller:SFO battles over the weekend and found out that the missiles (drones, as SFO calls them) can be quite lethal when concentrated on one or two ships. We used the old Battle Rider system of random mission assignments and I was tasked with bombarding a planet wtih a raiding force (Zhodani: 1 Light Battlecruiser, 1 Armored Cruiser, 1 Light Cruiser) that was inferior to the defense (Imperial: 1 Battleship, 1 Frontier Cruiser, 1 Light Cruiser). The enemy BB alone carried more missiles than my entire force. So I started off with a good-sized vector towards the planet (we were using the Mayday/Battle Rider system of vector movement, rather than SFO's cinematic-style) and even increased it on my first turn of movement, allowing me to dump out a max salvo of missiles (10) outside his ship's range. He did the same, but my missiles had a lot more starting velocity. When he saw that my salvo would reach him before his could reach me, his ships started thrusting away from me to reduce the closing velocity of my missiles. That allowed me to start braking my own vector so I could stay out of his energy weapons range. So in the second turn we were both thrusting away from each other while the 1st missile salvos closed in and we both dumped out a second max salvo (which also emptied my magazines).

The third turn was when it got fun. We both continued to vector away from each other, but he got his surprise when my initial missile salvo crashed home on the planet he was supposed to be guarding. By this time I actually had a small vector away from the planet and I was increasing it as fast as I could. His ships started to build a pursuit vector and launched a third missile salvo (which emptied his magazines). We calculated that he could not catch me before I could jump to safety, so the only threat to my ships were his missiles. He spread his first salvo out over all three of my ships hoping to cripple them so his ships might be able to catch me but betwen bad to-Hit dice and good point defense and armor rolls I took only one point of damge to my BCL and one to my CL (which did cripple it). He learned his lesson and his second salvo was concentrated on the BCL, blowing it out of space. His last salvo was smaller than his other two so he focused it on my CL, but truly atrocious attack rolls saved the CL as only one missile scored a hit which was stopped by point defense.

It looked like I had won, as both my missile salvos had gone home unopposed to his planet, but in looking at the details of the bombardment missiion we saw that I had needed to fire those missiles as a precision attack from orbit, which I certainly had not done. So I wound up committing an atrocity attack and lost my BCL and crippled my CL to do it.

Oops.

 

[Ulsyus]

Did you modify their drydock system to build approximations of Traveller vessels?