Sector Fleet

Sector Fleet
by Martin J Dougherty
Mongoose Publishing

Marc Miller first examined the Traveller Imperial Navy in detail in MegaTraveller’s Fighting Ships of the Shattered Imperium. This book expanded on the Classic Traveller Supplement 9 Fighting Ships, which was purely a collection of ship stat blocks, to include a small section on the Fleets of the Imperium, and how they were organised. It also examined how this organisational structure had adapted to the Imperial Civil War era of the MegaTraveller setting.

In 2006, Martin Dougherty published Grand Fleet, the first comprehensive work on the Imperial Fleet, its composition, mission, and organisation, through Avenger Enterprises. In 2010, Martin expanded upon his earlier work and released Sector Fleet for the current version of Traveller from Mongoose Publishing. As Sector Fleet is about twice the page count of Grand Fleet, it is obvious that Martin has given the subject of the Imperial Navy, the way it recruits and functions, its facilities and resources, and the way it interacts with the Imperium, considerable thought.

Sector Fleet gives a Gamesmaster a comprehensive picture as to how an institution like the Imperial Navy might function – not as a deux ex machina, but as a series of systems that follow their own internal logic and traditions based upon experience and the demands placed upon them by the government that they serve.

As a bonus, Martin provides a pretty comprehensive breakdown as to how the Spinward Marches Sector Fleet is deployed just prior to the 5th Frontier War, and what its structure looks like. Even if you don’t game in the Spinward Marches, or use the 3rd Imperium Background, this section is invaluable for the insight it provides a Gamesmaster with an interest in running a Naval campaign. From Martin’s baseline numbers, it is possible to extrapolate upwards or downwards, depending upon whether you favour a small ship or a large ship campagn, or even just compare Trillion Credit Squadron-derived budgets against.

This supplement is well worth getting, even just as another tool in a Traveller Gamesmaster’s toolbox.

5150: New Beginnings

5150: New Beginnings is a Science Fiction immersion game from Two Hour Wargames, and the first immersion game that I have bought. While I’m still reading the rules, I like what I see.

I’m not sure if “immersion game” is a tagline that THW has coined for their games, as I have not come across it before but, essentially, it describes a type of game that sits between a tabletop skirmish game and an RPG. By using reaction rolls, the characters in the game are meant to act and react to events as they unfold in a way that is more natural and logical than the traditional “I go, You go” of tabletop wargames.

What I really like is that there is an extensive campaign side to the game, and that the game can be played solo as well.

I first came across the game either on TMP or on one of the many blogs I follow. I joined the Two Hour Games Yahoo Group and read a couple of very entertaining After Action Reports written by guys fumbling their way through character creation and initial encounters. What sold me on the game was that I could easily see myself using my Traveller campaign as a setting, and actually getting to play with some of the figures I have been painting. My initial plan is to set the game in the Border Worlds – along the Lymethius and Gamelea Subsector borders – as this is an area of friction and conflict, which tends to generate good stories.

I elected to get the printed version of the rules from Two Hour Wargames, rather than the pdf, and it came, spiral bound, on a nice weight of paper with a colour card cover. The spiral binding made sense after my initial surprise as the book is going to spend a fair amount of time open when in play. I intend to rebind it, adding clear plastic covers to protect the very nice cover art, as I have access to a spiral binding machine.

I will post some updates on this soon, I think.

Trade Makes the Galaxy Go Round

I’m still crunching away at the trade figures for the RimWorlds. At present, I have covered most of Lymethius and Gamelea Subsectors and already some interesting patterns are beginning to emerge.

GURPs: Traveller - Far Trader works by creating a World Trade Number for each main world – derived from that world’s Tech Level and population, and modified by the Starport type. An individual planet’s World Trade Number ranges from 0 to 6.5.

The World Trade Numbers of two worlds are added together, modified by Trade Classification type, if applicable, and by the distance in parsecs between the two worlds. The resulting number is called the Bilateral Trade Number and represents the amount of trade between the two worlds in question. What we are looking for is the existence of Major, Minor and Feeder Trade Routes associated with Bilateral Trade Numbers of 10+, 9+ and 8+.

Where GURPs: Traveller - Far Trader is quite clever, is that the distance modifier uses a logarithmic scale. This means that while the serious negative modifier of –2 kicks in at 10 parsecs separation, it is still possible to have a Major Trade Route between two planets up to 19 Parsecs apart, assuming each had a World Trade Number of at least 6 and both were members of the same polity. If there are sufficient High Tech/High Population worlds, they will naturally daisy chain and create lucrative Mains.

Where this information becomes useful from a gaming point of view is when you want an idea of how much traffic, and of what tonnage, is likely to be in a system, and how much freight and passengers are likely to be hanging around, waiting for a ride.

Be prepared however, if you want to use GURPs: Traveller - Far Trader as an economic mapping tool, for a lot of initial work. While parts of the job can be auto-calced by a bit of cunning Exel-fu, there is a lot of tedious manual matching of pairs of WTNs with distance modifiers to arrive at BTNs. Though, if you stick to the formula rules, you can quickly correct any initial calculation errors – such as happened to me this evening when I realised that Acorlis V’s WTN was wrong; once this was fixed, the BTNs I had laboriously calculated all corrected themselves – which was a relief – and the trade routes I had noted leading to Acorlis V all disappeared as the BTNs had dropped below the Feeder Route threshold – which makes sense as Acorlis V is best described as a dusty pest hole the inhabitants are too poor to leave.

Fifty Followers - a mile stone

I discovered today that fifty people now follow this blog. This fact is in equal parts humbling and terrifying - humbling that fifty people care enough about what I write to subscribe to my blog, and terrifying that they might find out I have no idea what I'm going to write about next!

My thanks to you all for your support - I hope to get back into the swing of things soon.

Website Update #13

While work on Gazolan Subsector has ground to a halt, I'm still plugging away at trade routes with GURPs Traveller: Far Trader. Due to the slightly cock-eyed way one reaches inter-system Trade volumes, there is room for error and I had to redo a chunk of stuff when I realised I was deducting the distance factor twice.

On a happier note, I have almost finished painting a nice little crawler flatbed and some figure conversions. More here.

Issue 4 of Brett's Traveller fanzine, 'Into the Deep' is now available as a free .pdf from here.

With a focus on Reavers' Deep Sector, 'Into the Deep' also provides useful background information for Brett's Classic Traveller PBeM, Reavers' Deep. The game is coming up on its third anniversary and is still going strong.

"The Department" Enters Its Final Week of Fundraising

I have been following developments of the science fiction/film noir themed Skirmish Wargame/RPG "The Department" with interest. With influences as diverse as Blade Runner and the computer game Syndicate, it could be an interesting way of playing out those noir-style Traveller scenarios.

Joseph Dragovich, lead writer on this project, is using an interesting fundraising mechanism, akin to Eureka Miniatures 300 club, where interested parties in effect pledge some cash to ensure the project gets to press.

Joe says,

"We're entering our final week of our Kickstarter drive and we're well on our way to getting to our funding goal.

We have raised over $2000 so far but we still need more pledges if we are going to make our funding goal.

Kickstarter uses an all-or-nothing funding model, so if we do not meet our $3800 goal by the 16th of September, the game will not be produced.

We have a lot of great rewards for backers, such as t-shirts, posters and signed copies of the rules. We're offering Kindle, Ebook, Pdf versions of the game.

Our Kickstarter page


You can learn more about Kickstarter's all or nothing funding here


I've signed up for a copy of the rules as this looks like a game I would really enjoy.