More of the Armed Packet

Type UG-CA33 Armed Packet.

We recently played a session of our Into the Interface Traveller game, but unfortunately didn’t have a lot of time to run a proper adventure. (It ended up being a heavy D&D weekend.)

The PCs entered the Stanko (Magyar 2810 A555649-C) system, where their ship was briefly detained by the Imperial Navy. An intelligence officer debriefed them about their recent excursion into the Solomani Confederation and their encounter with a pirate in the Kench (Magyar 2510 E310584-9) system. The Starjammer then landed at the mainworld, where the crew sought out a second engineer for their ship. After interviewing a variety of candidates, they hired a promising ex-Navy hand, Vladan Merritt, as Chief Engineer.

As I prepared for the session, I asked around to see if anyone would be able to take my hand-drawn deckplans for the Starjammer and translate them into something a bit neater. Both Adrian Ford and Ian Stead were good enough to help out, providing really nice renderings that I was able to use. Ian had also done some nice drawings of the packet ship for Traveller⁵, and he used the deckplans to update his model (seen above).

I had designed the Starjammer as an Armed Packet, a 300 ton, jump-3 ship described in early versions of Traveller⁵ as a Type UF-CA33, offering “unscheduled passenger service for those in a hurry. The crew can be trusted, but these little ships still find themselves jumping in harm’s way.” No other details were provided. The latest version (dot10) of Traveller⁵ included details on a “Packet” as one of the stock Adventure Class Ships. But this ship, a Type U-EA42, is rather different than the Armed Packet: larger (500 ton), with only J-2 capability.

I find this larger, slower Packet to be much less useful as a PC ship than the old Armed Packet. Why the change? I grew curious whether the old Armed Packet could be created in the latest version of Traveller⁵. But instead of running through the entire design sequence, I used the wonderful ShipBuilder, a simplified Traveller starship design system described in issue 1 of Rob Eaglestone’s Xboat fanzine. Rob has a great facility for compressing very fiddly, complex systems down to their essentials. With ShipBuilder you add up a series of components built around a standard 1,000 ton hull, and then scale the results back to your ship.

I changed the mission modifier code for the Armed Packet from “F” to “G” for “Gunned/Upgunned” per the chart on page 68 of Traveller⁵. Walking through the ShipBuilder steps:

Type UG-CA33 Armed Packet (UG for short).

• The UG starts as a 1,000 ton streamlined design, for MCr62.
• The UG is a J3 M3 vessel, so it has a crew of 15, has 423 tons free, and costs MCr310 so far.
• The UG has a bridge and 3 triple turrets, which reduce tons free to 363 and increases its cost to MCr325 (310 + 5 + 10).
• The UG is 20% cargo, 80% passengers, so the cargo hold is 20% of free space (72 tons) and there is room for 0.2 x 363 = 72 passengers with standard accommodations. The ship’s cost increases by 0.1 x 72 = MCr7.26, to MCr332.26.
• Finally, the UG is actually a 300 ton ship, so all values are multiplied by 0.3.

Putting all of these details together, you get the following:

Pemami deck plan.

The Pemami-class Armed Packet (UG-CA33)

• Volume: 300 tons
• Performance: Jump-3, Maneuver-3
• Crew: 15 x 0.3 = 4 or 5
• Bridge: 50 x 0.3 = 15 tons
• Emplacements: 10 x 0.3 = 3 triple turrets
• Cargo hold: 72.6 x 0.3 = 21 tons
• Passengers: 72.6 x 0.3 = 21 passengers, standard accommodations
• Cost: 332.26 x 0.3 = MCr99.678

Overall, the UG design seems to work using the latest version of Traveller⁵. And the results are surprisingly close to what I got using Mongoose Traveller’s High Guard rules. If you add in the costs for the three triple turret weapons (one beam laser and two missile racks), the final ShipBuilder cost of MCr103.978 is nearly within 7% of the MgT cost of MCr111.885.

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