CHARACTER UPDATE: Moving to Second Edition Mongoose Traveller

As we have reached a point in the game where the various party ships are being assessed and possibly upgraded, I have decided to upgrade the game system to Second Edition,

Differences: very few, and they are outlined below.

TLDR: I'll update your character sheets and ship stats and present on Friday. There will be some decisions to make at that time, but only really very minor ones.

Characteristics

No change. The six characteristics, their value ranges, their bonuses, and how you get them are all unchanged

Careers

Minor changes that have no impact on your characters. The careers are more or less identical, as are survival rolls, advancement rolls, etc.

Skills

The actual skills in game are for the most part unchanged. There is some rationalisation of some skills, and some more subtypes for others. I think it's an improvement overall.

• Unchanged: Admin, Advocate, Astrogation, Broker, Carouse, Deception, Diplomat, Explosives, Gamber, Gunner, Investigate, Jack of All Trades, Language, Leadership, Mechanic, Medic, Melee, Navigation, Persuade, Pilot, Recon, Seafarer, Stealth, Steward, Streetwise, Survival, Tactics, Vacc Suit.
• Changes to subskills: Animals (Riding and Farming replaced by Handling), Athletics (Flying removed), Art (Acting and Dance merged into Performer), Drive (Hovercraft and Walker added), Engineer (Electronics removed), Flyer (Airship and Ornithopter added), Gun Combat (now only Archaic, Energy and Slug are the three types), Heavy Weapons (now Artillery, Man Portable and Vehicle), Trade (renamed Profession and adding Belter to the list of examples).
• Significant Changes: Electronics added, which merges in as subskills Comms, Computers, Remote Ops and Sensors. Sciences now replaces Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences and Space Sciences. Electronics is no longer a subskill of Science, and Astronomy and Cosmology have been added.
• Removed: Battle Dress is removed, and the armour requires only Vacc Suit skill to use. Zero-G is removed and instead you use Athletics (Dexterity) to move around in zero-g environments.

Skills Limits

There are some skill limits in place, which we'll either ignore for current characters (i.e. max level of 4 for a skill) or are not relevant as we are nowhere near the limits (max number of skill levels known is nowhere near impacting anyone).

Training Skills

Great improvement!
In order to train up an existing skill or learn a new skill the character needs to commit to one or more Study Periods. A Study Period is equal to 8 weeks of study and practice. The 8 weeks of a Study Periods need not be consecutive, but each week needs to be a full 5 days of 8 hours a day learning and practising. NOTE: Usually this is only possible when Jumping, so I'll count jump weeks only.

• NEW SKILLS: Once 8 weeks of training is complete a Study Period is complete. At this point you need to make an Average (8+) EDU check. Success means you've learned a new skill at level 0.
• EXISTING SKILLS: If you are improving an existing skill above 0 the number of successful Study Periods required is the skill level you want to get. So learning Vacc Suit-1 means one Study Period, and Broker-3 means three successful Study Periods.
• FAILING: If you fail a Study Period check you have to commit to a new Study Period, but you gain a cumulative +1 DM for success checks for that skill.
• Note: Learning or improving Athletics uses the appropriate characteristic (STR, DEX or END) in place of EDU.
• Note: Jack of All Trades cannot be learned or improved, but having Jack of All Trades adds the JoT level to success checks. Your innate ability to pick things up is to your advantage. (This means Lady Nitrane gets +3 DM on Study Period checks).
• Library: the Harrier has a Library which means that every week of learning and practice counts as two weeks towards a Study Period.

Failure doesn't necessarily indicate that you don't understand it. You might be distracted, or the captain is having you do extra chores.

Combat

No changes here.

Equipment

No real changes here.

SpaceCraft

Big changes to how drives work. This is in fact the stimulus for me converting to the new system.
No longer are there "Type A" and "Type D" drives. The drives now take up a percentage of the hull depending on the rating you want. Manoeuvre and Jump drives use Power Points, which unsurprisingly are produced by the Power Plant.

What does it all mean? I'll convert over the Harrier, Far Scout and Frontier Trader and see,

Space Combat

Improved and slightly simplified. Rather than a Hull Value and a Structure Value which are reduced slowly by weapons fire only if those areas are hit, there is a Hull Value that works more like hitpoints. These are removed by damage from weapons and reduced to 0 means 'ship dead'. If the attack has an effect of 6+ (ie you roll 6 more than you needed, after all mods are taken into account) then you get a critical hit, which is the traditional 'you hit a drive' or 'you hit the fuel tanks' that are more common in the first edition and classic editions.

Weapons are now handled slightly differently - the values for damage are about the same as now but stacking is different (i.e. more than one in a turret) and the modifiers are different (e.g. pulse lasers get a +2 to attack, beam a +4 even though they do less damage).

What effect this will have in combat I'm not sure - I expect that you'll breach the hull and take the ship out a lot quicker most of the time. I'm sure an opportunity to try it will arise.

Trade

The extreme ends of the purchase and sell modifiers are less extreme. No more "you get 400% of the base value" as it maxes out at 160% but other than that it's more or less the same. We'll be using the online tool anyway.

Planets and Systems

No change to planet stats, although it's a little clearer in the book what happens with law levels and you lot ignoring them

That's about it.