Mongoose Traveller 2022 has fixed the worst issue it had

 

The new cover, which I don't like as much as the 2017 one.

I generally liked Mongoose Traveller's second edition (see review here) but the one thing that really wound me up was the 'dogfighting' rules, used when fighters etc get within 10km. It meant that any starship suffered a -8 DM on a 2d6 roll for attacks if it lost the dogfighting opposed pilot skill test. If you won the test you had a - 6 DM. In most cases this was always going to be the case. This changed the dynamics of Traveller combat from previous editions; fighters were never this dominant. It really irked me (as much as having HEPLAR plasma engines and not changing the way starports and docks looked did in Traveller: The New Era).

They've fixed it in 2022 by deleting the following statement: "In addition, spacecraft of 100 tons or more are not designed for this kind of ‘knife-fight’ and will suffer DM-6 on all attack rolls they attempt."

This means that you're not facing a base -8DM if you're in a dogfight in a starship and lose the opposed piloting roll. You only get the normal -2DM if you lose the opposed pilot roll, which is fine. Turrets can face anywhere. Happy with this resolution.

It's still quirky in that you use the difference in your opposed roll to determine a modifier for the second and subsequent turns, but I can live with that. It should really be treated like a task chain (so your mod is based on the effect of the winning roll) to be internally consistent. However, it works and I'd happily use it as it's presented now.

What it did remind me is how close the ranges are in Mongoose Traveller. Distant range is only 50,000km, a sixth of a light-second. With directed energy weapons like lasers and decent sensors, I suspect that combat could easily be started at a much longer range. Lasers travel at the speed of light, and there's no real reason what they'd lose coherence in space that I'm aware of. It becomes a game of tactics and probabilities, as ships fire salvos of laser shots over a volume of space looking for a shot to intersect a target.

Overall, a change for the better. More on the update once I've assimilated it.

20 December 2021