The Travel Move and "Pushing it"

[Vespers War]

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.

[pmulcahy11b]

Originally Posted by Vespers War

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).

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.

[Vespers War]

Originally Posted by pmulcahy11b

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).