Pirates

One issue that has been raised by the group for our Traveller campaign, is that they didn’t really have a feel to how starship combat worked. So after heading off into jump after our previous session, it was decided that we would have a ‘virtual simulation’ of starship combat.

The have a 400t Frontier class Lab Ship. This is based on the classic laboratory ship, but slightly armoured and has a couple of turrets. It’s designed for exploration into wilderness regions, but larger than a scout ship. We were also down a player – the ship’s Doctor wasn’t able to make it, and since the next world should be of interest to him, it was also an opportunity to do something else rather than have him miss on the chance to make use of his medical and science skills.

I didn’t want to use vectored movement for this, so just used standard movement. I started with a couple of small low tech fighters, and moved things up to a larger combat.

One thing we noticed was that when I started to add actors to the Foundry combat tracker, all players started getting error notifications. These errors were the same as what we’re seeing in our Pendragon campaign. I have a suspicion about what’s causing it, so possibly I can investigate this weekend.

The fighters I chose were some TL 10 craft with thrust 3, so they had a great deal of difficulty close in on the player’s Lab Ship. The first two were destroyed long before they got to within dogfighting range.

After that, four more appeared, along with a far trader equipped with a pulse laser. The gunners turned out to be highly competent – or at the very least lucky, and managed to do considerable damage to the Far Trader whilst it was only scratching the Big S’s paintwork.

For now, they ignored the fighters. Fighters can’t really do much at long range, but I think they can get to be quite deadly once they get within dogfighting range. However, in this battle they never got within range.

A turn or two later, I added a second Far Trader, plus a Patrol Cruiser. Everyone was firing at long range, and the Lab Ship had enough hits to be able to soak up the small amount of damage that it was getting. So the players were doing surprisingly well. The Patrol Cruiser fired off two salvos of 3 missiles, and the Big S attempts to use electronic warfare came to naught.

When the missiles got within strike range, the first salvo was taken out by point defence fire, the second salvo made it through…. and missed. So the Travellers were incredibly lucky.

This was a good point for the simulated pirates to call it a day and retreat. We learned some things frm this though.

• The Lab Ship can take quite a bit of damage, so against small threats it can stand up for itself. It has two twin pulse laser turrets, so can dish out quite a bit of damage.
• Fighters are useless until they get into dogfighting range, and so fighters without a high thrust are just sitting ducks. They need either large numbers, or high thrust.
• Missiles are potentially a threat, but a bad roll can render them useless.
• Space combat is expensive.

The last point was the real take away by the players. After the combat finished we took a look at what repair costs were going to be.

• They had taken 33 damage, so that’s MCr3.3 to fix their hull.
• Their jump drive had taken a critical hit, so that would need fixing.
• The had also taken a Bridge hit, and lost the Astrogation console. That would need repairing before they can jump, and would cost money to fix long term.

So whilst they had survived without serious damage, getting into combat was going to be expensive.

But as players they have a better idea of how starship combat works, and what their roles are. Importantly, all the characters had something to do during the fight, even it was just yelling orders to give others bonuses.

We also managed to uncover a few bugs in how starship combat is handled in Foundry, which I can take a look at fixing. Overall I think it was a productive session, even though we didn’t make any progress on the ‘story’ side of things.