I'd add Book 8 to that. Robots. As for ships I separated naval ships into 3 broad classes. Escorts (destroyers, frigates, and corvettes) were a 1,000 tons and under and armed with turrets. Cruisers ran (roughly) 2-10,000 tons and had bays and turrets. Capital ships were 20,000 tons and up (typically maxing out at 100,000 tons) and had spinal mounts, bays, and turrets. It seemed a fairly reasonable division.
There are 8 books. 13 supplements
Yeah, HG allows for up to 1 million ton ships, but I'm not sure what the sweet spot is, its been 30 years since I messed with it. In any case, you just have to decide what makes sense within the milieu and is fun. I always thought the smaller sizes of ships made things more interesting, but if you take your cues from Star Wars, well the big boys might be pretty interesting, though in that genre they are more plot devices than anything else.
Well, Book 5 has a lot nicer starship construction system than Book 2 does. So we generally utilized that (especially since we had the '77 vintage core books, and the first version of Book 2 has some issues). As far as really huge High Guard starships ala TCS, smaller empires are less likely to have such budgets, and you can always imagine the political situation such that they're not really an achievable type in practice (you could also set the general tech level a bit lower, it doesn't have to be TL15).
And a lot worse a combat system... the sub-1000 Td ships just don't rate very well for either bk-5 (and the two versions are quite different there, but both suck at those scales)...
Yeah, I don't recall that we had much use for that combat system, as it is heavily geared towards running battles with dozens or 100's of ships on each side. As I remember though, the system IS kind of interesting in that a 1000 T ship, or 100 of them, will be like flies to a 1 megaton Imperial Dreadnought, but 10 100k T ships will eat that dreadnought's lunch in a trice (It will fry one with a spinal mount shot, and the 10 return shots will turn the big boy into scrap). This dynamic continues down the size scale, 10 of those 1000 T ships will rip a 100k T ship to bits too. So there's a weird kind of dynamic there. What you need to do is VASTLY outsize your enemies, and then they're helpless, but if you only outclass them by a marginal amount, you're better off building a whole lot of mid-sized ships. IIRC the winning formula was pretty much to build a carrier that carried 5 ships of 1/10th of its own tonnage each, plus a spinal mount. That gave you 6 spinal mounts for your tonnage, and the carried vessels, being short-ranged and without jump, can be pretty bad-assed.
Mayday is nothing but Book 2 on a hex-grid, with easier movement tracking. I've found over the years that Bk2 is the third best ship combat system I've run for an RPG... Second is from the 3.2 draft of MGT 1E (but doesn't resemble what was in the released book), and first is Gorilla Games' Battlestations.
Oh, you can have MUCH more tactically interesting battles, but they won't be particularly realistic. Honestly though, neither is Traveller combat, Marc clearly wasn't particularly knowledgeable about how sensors and such really work.
It's cool for cats. Looking at data sheets from NASA, the likelihood of space battle would be enhanced radiation weapons, neutron bombs, exploding hundreds of kilometers away, and doing crew or electronics kills on the vehicles. Fairly grim or unsatisfying imo. Sort of like when stuff gets put in the van allen belt, except no, that is a raging river of radiation. I'll give on the technical side to let the players have agency in how it all works out vs you did your math wrong and now the enemy weapons drone has the drop on you.
