The Travel Move and "Pushing it"
 

I'm re-doing Italian Tracked APCs, and I happened to be working on the C-13 (don't worry if you haven't heard of it -- it's obscure). The maximum road speed is 70 kph, which would seem to indicate a Tr Mov on road of 280. But Tr Mov works out on road to 198.

So what are crews doing with the extra time? I think that Tr Mov is not continuous, straight-line movement. You have to dodge obstacles. Someone has to stop to take a leak. You just need to stretch your legs and get out of the vehicle (believe me, long marches in a tracked vehicle are exhausting, even if you're just sitting there monitoring the radio). You have to stop sometimes to orient yourself to the map, and compasses don't work so well in an armored vehicle unless your compass is designed to compensate. You need to barf because of sea (land) sickness due to the rocking of the vehicle. The vehicle's making some strange noise and you need to check it, but it turns out to be inconsequential.

Suppose you need to get somewhere FAST. How far can you push the Tr Mov and not destroy your vehicle's components? How far can you push your crew and expect them to be combat-ready? How much extra fuel and lubricants do you consume?

I would think there would be need to be some tables for things like parts breaking, more or less fuel consumption, drivers falling asleep etc. There is no simple answer. Vehicles will already be running on duct tape and bailing wire, they probably can't run at there top speeds, and even brand new vehicles don't run at top speed all the time. With the table, the farther and faster you push, the more rolls for things to go bad.

I wouldn't worry much about crew fatigue. Anybody still alive in the year 2000 will be used to little sleep/rest and will be ready when the bullets start flying.

I've been looking at travel move recently while looking at adapting another game's rules for technicals, and came up with a rough idea of how to estimate Tr Mov using a vehicle's top speed and (Traveller) tech level, since there's an obvious discounting of the top speed across all the late-era GDW games. It increases with each tech level as vehicles become more reliable and better able to handle minor problems.

I start with TL 4 (1900) vehicles having Tr Mov of based on half (0.5) of their top speed being the long-term travel rate. (note: this is what I use for my Vespers War WW1 vehicles).

TL 5 (1930) vehicles base their Tr Mov on 0.6x their top speed.

TL 6 (1950) vehicles can use 0.7x their top speed.

TL 7 (1970) vehicles can use 0.75x their top speed.

TL 8 (1990) vehicles can use 0.8x their top speed.

TL 9 (2000) vehicles can use 0.85x their top speed, and are the last TL potentially relevant for canon T2K.


As far as pushing it goes, I'd allow a Difficult roll to allow them to add 0.1x top speed to their Tr Mov, and a Formidable roll to add 0.25x, up to their top speed. Failures would mean a mishap along the way as per pushing Com Mv. You're just not going to be able to push a 1930s sedan to its top speed for four hours straight without something going wrong, but you might be able to eke out 85% of its top speed if you're lucky.

That dovetails nicely with the Tech Levels I've been using; I used Tech 3 for the Civil War weapons I developed, and Tech 3 minus a little Fudge for Revolutionary War Weapons or Napoleonic weapons.

According to Fire Fusion & Steel, TL-2 is 1600 and TL-3 is 1800, but each tech level slowly blends into the next. It's not like December 31, 1899 is TL-3 and January 1, 1900 everything becomes TL-4. The World Tamer's Handbook adds the concept of TL-2M and TL-3M, where the M is for mature tech levels - the example it uses is that brass cartridges, percussion caps, and rifled artillery are TL-3M, while the flint lock is TL-2M. To me, the English Civil War is TL-2, the American Revolution is on the cusp between TL-2M and TL-3, the Napoleonic Wars are TL-3, the American Civil War is TL-3M, and the Spanish-American War to World War 1 is TL-4. The Spanish Civil War is the first thing I've looked at that would be TL-5 (but with a lot of leftover TL-4 equipment).