Vehicle Design System, for Cepheus Engine and Traveller

The Vehicle Design System is written in the Cepheus Engine, but works for Traveller too. With it you can design vehicles from the fusion gun armed grav tank through to the horse drawn ballista-wagon (low tech tank?). This is ideal for creating the special vehicles role players occasionally need, such as that up-armoured limo, or the exo-craft for crossing a wild world. You can get the PDF from DriveThruRPG: www.drivethrurpg.com/product/...

[@massimocole9689]

Actually, I forgot a big thing in my comment yesterday, which is that tons in this context are a unit of volume not mass, and uranium is *way* denser than liquid hydrogen. 1 dton in traveler is around 14 cubic meters, the volume 1 ton of liquid hydrogen takes up. In that same space you can fit 250 metric tons of uranium. So the 0.04 volume modifier for fission fuel actually checks out, its 25 times less volume but still ten times as much mass. Wild right?
Though now you are left with the weirdness of a fission powered Traveller ships consuming several dozen tons of uranium a month. Which, is actually somewhat reasonable for some really energetic week long flights between planets where you get up to nuclear bomb levels of kinetic energy. But if you're just sitting around in orbit for a few weeks doing scans or something how on earth is your ship churning through 10 metric tons of uranium a month? That's around 500 gigawatts of power, more than the content of Europe uses! It really makes more sense if you tie the fuel usage to the maneuver drive, cause that really should be the most power intensive part of the ship.

[@massimocole9689]

One thing I find funny with modern editions of Traveller like Cepheus is since they explain the several tons of hydrogen a ship needs for in system operation as being fuel for the ship's power plant rather than fuel for the maneuver drive, they are stuck with making their fusion plants ridiculously fuel inefficient. I mean look at the fission plant fuel consumption at 7:50. Fusion fuels in real life are ten times as energy dense as fission fuels, yet the fission plants in that table consume 0.04 times as much fuel as the basic fusion plant!
I'm guessing it's cause people already know fission plants consume tiny amounts of fuel, so having them go through multiple tons of uranium a month would be obviously silly. But since people aren't as familiar with fusion plants, making those consume multiple tons of fuel a month isn't as obviously silly, even though they actually should be consuming even tinier amounts than a fission plant.

[@jameshenderson4876]

Ha! The cyborg brain is the servitor from WH40K :)

[@Scanner9631]

I'm making a chart for "oddities" about a society/system randomly generated (roll 2d6 twice and consult a 2-12x2-12 matrix with 121 options) I've been having trouble filling some of the extreme elements the "Brains" fit nicely. All sorts of option on it, rapid rotation making the polar diameter substantially less than the equatorial with equator having lower gravity, space effects that change things for jump (greater or lesser distance to jump, energy cost changes, time passage for example) and the "Brains" go in quite nicely.
Still need a few more o finish it off.

[@eolandesandino1776]

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