Friday 6 April 2012

A to Z: F is for Fusion Gun

“The Fusion Gun, Man-Portable.
For when you absolutely, positively,
have to kill every single oengzoez duevae in the room.”

Staff Sergeant Ahallu Jorgon, Imperial Marines, Ret.
PR Consultant

When my friends and I saw our first copy of Traveller Book 4: Mercenary back in 1980, the first thing we did was turn to the weapons stat page and eagerly scan down it. "Holy Space Biscuits!" we said (well, not exactly, but I do try and keep this blog PG), "16D damage! Excellent! What's an FGMP-14 or 15?"

When Traveller was first published, the rules were presented as a boxed set of three little black A5 booklets - hence the term LBB is often used to describe this first, or Classic, incarnation of the game. While there were rules for making characters and designing star ships and planets, the equipment - the weapons that teenage boys love to festoon their characters with - were strangely conservative and "unscience-fictiony". In fact, the only concession to movies like Star Wars, or TV shows like Star Trek, was the inclusion of the laser rifle and the lighter laser carbine, neither of which were particularly robust. I understand the designers of Traveller had a theory that the most efficient way of stopping an animal or a bad guy in his tracks was to deliver a large amount of kinetic energy, and that a bullet, or something similar, would continue to be the simplest delivery mechanism.

Characters in Traveller, as in most roleplaying games, are defined by a number of characteristic statistics that indicate how strong, dexterous, intelligent, etc, the character is. In Traveller, these stats are generated by rolling two six-sided dice for each characteristic, giving a range of 2 - 12. Wounds and aging can decrease a characteristic to 1 or lower, and certain career results can lift a human's attributes to a maximum of 15. In combat, it is the first three physical characteristics - Strength, Dexterity and Endurance - that determine how much damage a character can take before being killed. A character with average stats of 7 for Strength, Dexterity and Endurance could take 21 points of damage. If an FGMP-15 dishes out 16 dice of damage, for an average of 3 per dice, then one shot does 48 points of damage - over twice the damage an average character can sustain!

By the time Traveller Book 4 was released, development work had produced a lot of the classic tropes that we now associate with the Official Traveller Universe of Classic Traveller - the Third Imperium, the interstellar Nobility, the Imperial Marines, the psionic Zhodani - as well as a technology progression running from Tech Level 0 - Stone Age all the way through to Tech Level 15 - Third Imperium leading edge tech. Indeed, the rule books specifically encouraged Games Masters to look beyond Tech Level 15 for Matter Transporters, black hole manipulation and planet-moving technology - in short all those fantastic things which seem like magic, because we cannot, as yet, fathom the physics or technology that create them.

Plasma and Fusion Guns take advantage of developments in energy technology. Using a laser ignition system to ignite hydrogen fuel, the Plasma Gun holds the resulting plasma in the ignition chamber before releasing it through a magnetically focused field along the barrel of the weapon as a 2cm diameter high-velocity plasma jet. The Fusion Gun, first appearing in a man-portable form at Tech Level 14, contains the plasma slightly longer until a fusion reaction begins to take place. This makes the Fusion Gun more powerful than the Plasma Gun and at Tech Level 15, with a gravitic field generator to negate most of the mass and recoil of the gun, usable by troops not wearing powered armour.

So, you can possibly see the attraction to gun-lovin’ teenage boys, and fun-lovin’ Imperial Marines, of the Sun Gun One Five. The acquisition of such a weapon drove a number of the games we played, given that the Imperial authorities were rather leery of having them fall into civilian hands. We didn’t often get there, but we had a lot of fun trying.

7 comments:

  1. I always though the PGs and FGs were over-statted. I remember back as a teenager calculating the survival chances of typical TL15 grunts armed with FGMP-14 and wearing battle dress fighting similarly equipped opponents. I've just done some quick recalcs (hey! I found my LBBs!!) Pretty horrifying - something like a 13-14% chance of not being knocked out by the first shot at extreme range (that's the combined chance of being missed and not having a stat reduced to zero).

    Move in to very long range and hits are automatic (+7 or +8 DMs assuming skill level 1) and with 8D dmg the chances it's less than .1% chance of not being knocked out.

    Any closer and the chances of not being killed outright when shot at are less than 0.2%

    This is based on the grunts having stats of 9 for STR, DEX and END

    Given that it costs CR 365k to equip a trooper with BD and an FG-14, those are pretty expensive odds

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    1. LOL, I've never crunched the numbers like that, but I suspect you are right.

      Given that the Zhodani Line units are usually equipped with individual gauss rifles and PGs, I'm surprised they did as well as they did in the 5th Frontier War, though I suspect that the Imperial marine units were spread pretty thinly, and that Imperial Army units probably had gauss rifles as standard arms, like the Zhos.

      I also suspect that the number of armoured vehicles listed on Marine OrBats in Striker II are overstated, as armour takes a lot of hull tonnage to shift. Being able to cram similar fire power to a small armoured unit onto an infantry squad seems like good value for money if you're hitting hard and dancing away.

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    2. Here's a useful link for calculating possible dice roll outcomes: http://anydice.com/

      My guess is that typical grunts would be equipped at a lower TL than the highest available - maybe TL 13, with elites (Para or Marine equivalents) at TL14 and hyper-elites (SAS equivalents) at TL15

      As for vehicles, speed, armour and longer weapon ranges are their advantage over the TL15 infantry squad. The mix of armour and grunts would naturally depend on the mission - the TL15 elites might be the first in to rapidly assault high priority targets, followed by armour and infantry to take out other targets, followed by more infantry to hold the areas that had been taken.

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  2. Who didn't want to play an ex Marine running around in Battledress (sporting a SEH of course) with a Fusion weapon? Of course, that generally attracted some unwanted attention in the tavern trying to get a job so it became a lot more useful to carry a vibroblade and a body pistol :-)

    I'm really enjoying your A to Z - I went and dragged out a moving box filled with Traveller stuff, from 1st ed through the TNE (shudder...)

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  3. The Fifth Frontier War countersheet shows just how rare the Marines are in the Spinward Marches compared with Imperial Army troops. There are only eight Marine *regiments*, while there are eight IA *Field Armies* and seven *corps*.

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    1. Thanks for that Dylan, I thought there was some sort of troop breakdown for the Spinward March somewhere, but I couldn't recall where. I had forgotten about 5th Frontier War.

      I suppose, just as in any period, anyone playing Imperials wants to have a marine army when in "reality", a commander would be lucky to have a battalion as a spearhead.

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  4. Oh, the fun of these weapons...

    I ran one campaign where there was this ex-prison planet that was rather lawless. One bit of entertainment they had was this maze where a bunch of folks would go in and shoot it out, last man standing wins (this was before Lazertag...). One "gamer" was rumored to play in battledress and FGMP... One PC decided to play. Of course he met the guy with the FGMP. And the outcome was quite predictable... The player was pissed. The other players all said, "Well, what did you expect?"

    Frank

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