QLI gets license to do Honor Harrington with T20 engine

[Merova]

Ship to Ship Combat

Hi all!

This is pretty cool. Thanks for posting the link, Psion.

I haven't put T20's space combat to a solid playtest yet, but I wonder how well it can handle the tactical style presented in the "Honor" series. Dramatically, the "Ship to Ship" scenes are the highlights of the series, much like the Hornblower books from which they take inspiration. While the T20 advanced vehicular rules do give a strong base for adjudicating piloting, do they allow for equal treatment of gunnery?

In any case, this is sweet news. Kudos to QLI for bringing Honor to the gaming world.

---Olivia

 

[Unseelie]

The Solarian League is really big, really old, and complacent in their technological superiority. Basically, the Solarian League is bigger than the rest of humanity put together.

The Republic of Haven is the second-largest empire around. They've been staving off complete financial collapse via wars of conquest, gobbling up smaller star systems.

The Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Manticoran Alliance is where the main character is from. Manticore is an incredibly wealthy system due to an abundance of wormholes and hence a particularly vigorous trading economy. Most of the series is about the war that takes place when the Republic of Haven thinks they should be able to quickly snap up Manticore with their vast numerical superiority... but it turns out that Manticore's R&D is far in advance of Haven's, and for much of the series, their tech (military, at least) has actually advanced beyond that of the League.

The fourth major power is the Andermani Empire, who we haven't seen much of, but who look to become more prominent in the next few books. They've butted heads with Manticore for decades over the trade in the Silesian Confederacy, a loose-knit region of systems with virtually no serious government and riddled with corruption and pirates.

Or, to shorten things... The Manticoran's are the English, the Havenites are the French. I can't pin down who the others are. I'm told that this is less explicit in later books as they grew into backgrounds of their own, but in the early books it's quite apparent that this is the case.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Or, to shorten things... The Manticoran's are the English, the Havenites are the French. I can't pin down who the others are. I'm told that this is less explicit in later books as they grew into backgrounds of their own, but in the early books it's quite apparent that this is the case.

Well, with Rob S. Pierre in charge of the Committee of Public Safety, he wasn't exactly trying to hide it

-Hyp.

 

[DMScott]

Or, to shorten things... The Manticoran's are the English, the Havenites are the French. I can't pin down who the others are. I'm told that this is less explicit in later books as they grew into backgrounds of their own, but in the early books it's quite apparent that this is the case.

The Andermani seem to be somewhat German, though unlike the historical analogue it's the Manticorans who are in Haven's path and the Andermani who are somewhat protected by astrography. The Solarians don't really map, early on they're basically a plot device for Haven to make tech advances when they fall too far behind in the arms race.

It'll be interesting to see what sort of changes they make to the starship combat system. I haven't read T20, but in most versions of Traveller ships have acceleration ratings from 1G to 6G. In the Honorverse, it's about 100 times that. Fuel consumption doesn't seem to be nearly as much of an issue - Traveller ships usually arrive in a system without enough fuel to jump out again, so they have to secure a refueling source; Honorverse ships often turn around and leave, even on very long trips. The Honorverse has much longer engagement ranges with missiles, more ECM/ECCM, etc. Be interesting to see if they concentrate on the fleet-scale combats as in the novels.