Space Combat - having trouble setting up battles

[Cuirassier]

Hello, I am trying to set up my first space battle for Traveller in FGU but am having a number of problems/questions. Any help on the following would be appreciated:

- How is sustained damage managed? Critical hits work but no critical hit effects occur when a ship suffers 10% hull damage.

- Is there a method to manually adding critical hit effects or rolling on a critical hit table?

- Is there anywhere that outlines the effects of weapon traits?

cheers

[adzling]

when we ran our many space combats:
1). Critical hits were recorded for sustained damage (10% of hull points) iirc
2). We had to manually apply a few criticals, we did this by rolling on the table and/ or just typing the critical into the field on the ship record in the combat tracker
3). not sure tbh, it should be on the rule book itself (high guard or core) and we did notice that the effect for the weapon trait was being applied iirc

[Cuirassier]

Thanks for the feedback Adzling. I can confirm that a critical hit is automatically recorded in the combat tracker when a single hit delivers damage of 10% or more of the target ship's starting hull points.

I have been playing around further with the Spacecraft Combat Tacker and have some further observations (my party has acquired a ship and we are about to have our first FGU spacecraft combat, hence the questions):

- FGU appears to only apply one critical hit for a single shot. Hence if a shot scores a critical hit and does enough damage to exceed 10% of the hull FGU only records one critical hit.
- FGU does not appear add critical hits of over a severity of 1 (or increasing an existing critical effect severity by 1).
- I could not locate a way to add a critical hit using the space combat trackers critical hit system. The only way was by adding an effect (which is seperate from the FGU critical hit system).
- The effects of all critical hits are a text description only. This is generally good but some effects could be automated and this would improve play. As an example, a critical hit to the armour provides a text message telling you the armour has but it does not modify the armour value of your ship in the combat tracker.
- There does not appear to be an easy way to increase the severity of an existing critical hit effect. You can manually increase the severity of the effect but this does not update the text description until the next time that exact system is damaged by a further critical hit.
- The effects of critical hits are listed separately from the effects section of the spacecraft on the combat tracker. This is not really an issue, just an observation.

Recommended Improvements to Space Combat Tracker

Overall the Space Combat Tracker has some very good features but also appears to have some real weaknesses holding it back. It appears to be only partially automated, requiring a system of keeping separate records. Hence I have the following recommended improvements:

- Modify the critical hit system to record critical hits of greater than severity 1 (as per the Traveller rules).
- Add the ability for the GM to manually add specified critical hits with effects to ships (ie. a drag and drop process from a table). A table for critical hit locations exist but the output is text only and cannot be assigned to a ship.
- Add an "increase" severity button to existing critical hit effects, similar to the "reduce" button that already exists.
- For critical hits to armour, automatically rude the armour value for the target in the combat tracker based upon severity.

Please let me know your thoughts and whether I am missing any existing FGU functionality in relation to the space combat tracker.