Traveller: rules for side effects of using firearms in a spaceship ?

[werecorpse]

I’m new to running Traveller and am looking for advice.

One of the conceits in Traveller RPG (all the ones I’ve looked at) is that melee weapons are commonly used in combats aboard a spaceship and the reason generally given is to avoid damaging important equipment. Has anyone seen or homebrewed rules for this? Or does anyone have advice on how they have dealt with it?

I imagine a missed attack by a pistol or auto rifle on a pilot near controls could do some damage.

I’m thinking to justify the fairly drastic self defence downgrade of bringing a knife to a gun fight it would have to be a fairly high risk of very significant consequences.

I also could imagine a bullet fired in a spaceship that didn’t hit its target would ricochet around being quite dangerous - not sure how energy weapons would behave.

 

[payn]

I'll try and find the source, but I swear there was some info about slugs being more dangerous for the hull, but energy weapons being more dangerous to the internal equipment.

 

[MGibster]

That's an area I think the latest version of Traveller accidentally omitted. The conceit is that we have cutlasses near the airlocks because it's dangerous to use firearms inside of a tin can in space. But I don't think there are any rules in the basic game to support this. In the Alien RPG, the outer hull has an armor rating. Any gunshot that misses a target in front of an outer bulkhead hits the hull and if it does enough damage that area of the ship suffers from decompression. You can cause problems in other areas as well. For example, if you decide to engage in a firefight next to the reactor core. A miss might result in a lot of radiation suddenly flooding the area.

 

[dragoner]

I have played and run games since the 80's, and I have never seen rules officially for it. Usually spacecraft that get boarded have lost in a firefight anyways, so it is just the players boarding to "loot the corpse" as it were, and not caring to shoot and throw grenades, etc..

 

[billd91]

One thing to consider - if a ship bulkhead would be so fragile that a human-wielded slugthrower could penetrate it, how would it fare against bits of space debris and micrometeors? That said, damage to critical internal systems is a bit more on point. Nobody wants the regulators shot up on their jump drive reactor. But I don't know of any formal system for this in the editions of Traveller I've worked with over the years.

 

[MGibster]

One thing to consider - if a ship bulkhead would be so fragile that a human-wielded slugthrower could penetrate it, how would it fare against bits of space debris and micrometeors? That said, damage to critical internal systems is a bit more on point. Nobody wants the regulators shot up on their jump drive reactor. But I don't know of any formal system for this in the editions of Traveller I've worked with over the years.

A slow micrometeor will be traveling at approximately 11 kilometers per second which is about 25,000 miles per hour. At that speed, there's really no protection short of fantastical devices like force fields which is beyond the tech level of the typical Traveller.

 

[werecorpse]

So hypothesising here: The penetrating the hull problem seems a stretch but a slug fired into the metal Interior would likely ricochet about (whether whole or in pieces) a fair bit until it hit something soft like a person or some damageable equipment. Maybe some energy weapons are similar? So maybe a body pistol or similar low velocity low impact weapon is kinda ok because it doesn’t ricochet much so it’s low risk but a cutlass is even better? Maybe if you miss with a slug weapon (or laser) it loses a dice of damage but can hit something (someone) else (random roll, gm choice?). That seems an idea/explanation that both makes sense and supports the fiction.

 

[R_Chance]

It seems to me you would need to know what equipment / control panels are available to damage in a specific area. A miss by the airlock, for example, might damage the controls rendering it inoperable (from that panel) or, worse yet, cause it to open / close. Any control panels for systems are an obvious possibility. Does the ship have electrical conduits or fluid transfer conduits? Brainstorm a list of possibilities and note the likely spots in a ship for those vulnerabilities. Along with obvious large pieces of equipment of course. A lot would depend on how you imagine / lay out the interior of your ships. And warships should have more internal protection / control redundancy than civilian ships.

Both projectile and energy weapons could foul the air, perhaps the ships "air scrubbers" could malfunction or just take quite a while to clear the air. The junk in the air could interfere in accuracy with guns. Not to speak of breathing it

I've never set up specifics (although I may now). So much fun

 

[werecorpse]

If movies have taught us nothing else it’s that shooting near pipes is 98% likely to cause a jet of steam/vapour and that panels of electronic equipment will xplode.

 

[harunmushod]

There are damage scaling rules (p.157 of MgT2e core rule book), so you could apply a tenth of the damage to the ship every time a personal missile attack missed the individual. Don’t apply armour protection unless fighting in an area that warrants it, and apply the effects of sustained damage if necessary.

Edit: coincidentally I happened to rewatch Seth Skorkowsky's video on Traveller space combat, and he made the same complaint about the lack of rules for the effects of missile combat on a spaceship in the context of the lack of detailed boarding rules, other than abstracted ones (from 34 minutes).