Traveller - video 'unboxing' of Power Projection: Fleet.

https://youtu.be/5yocW-QlyOc?si=YSmiGE67FbDEaE9b

The link to this video was posted on one of the Traveller Facebook groups by Anthony; someone who has just got a brand new copy of Power Projection: Fleet from Ad Astra Games in the USA and was excited enough to post some opening shots. These fascinated me as I've never seen a physical copy (despite having written the book). I'm both excited and nervous that they may post a review having played it.

The Facebook post that alerted me to this video.

What is Power Projection:Fleet?

It was an attempt to blend the easy play mechanics of Full Thrust with the starship design of High Guard and also integrate elements of Fifth Frontier War and Trillion Credit Squadron. It became its own thing. The challenge was scale. When you go between 100dT Scout Ships and 500,000dT Dreadnoughts, there's a huge disparity of scale.

I did it because I wanted something less abstract than High Guard but that felt like it, and something that would let you play a longer campaign.

The movement engine is vector based, similar to that found in MayDay, but with a simplification that came from a player at the table when we were play testing. We added in mechanics for secondary batteries (in honesty, we made these first as the initial release we made was for smaller, escort-sized ships) and then we built the rules for Spinal Mounts (which were appropriately brutal). One tweak we did make was to allow escorts (and fighters) to use their secondary batteries to engage incoming missiles, which suddenly gave them a real purpose because it was a viable tactic to dump loads of missile salvos at targets to overwhelm them.

We used to demo with Escorts and small cruisers at conventions, and it was always a joy showing kids how the vector movement works. They often got it far more easily than their parents! The game engine is brutal for smaller ships, and for any ship that is hit by a spinal.  The biggest battle we play tested with was a reenactment of the Battle of the Two Suns (the climax of the Fourth Frontier War) were we had perhaps 80 to 100 ships and fighter squadrons in play and somewhere between 4-6 players over a full afternoon.

I still love the game - yes, there are tweaks we could do on reflection, but overall I think we hit the right balance. Could you use it with Mongoose Traveller? I suspect so,  as all it would need is the right conversion tables for weapons.

If it interests you, the print copy is still available in the US from Ad Astra: https://www.adastragames.com/products/power-projection-fleet

The PDF is available from BITS on DriveThruRPG here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/132295/power-projection-fleet

The game has a website here which has been woefully not updated for far too long. It's amazing what the arrival of kids does to your gaming productivity! You can find PDFs of scenarios and extra ships there.

The Facebook group is here: Traveller SF RPG (Mongoose Publishing editions). It's a private one so you will need to get permission to join.

So now I'll wait to see if Page 121 do post a follow up...

12 January 2025