From BITS (British Isles Traveller Support)

PowerProjection.net

 

Power Projection is BITS High Guard and Full Thrust
inspired game of starship combat in the classic Traveller RPG universe. 

Power Projection has been a long time in coming, with work starting back in 1998. What is it? A Traveller Space combat game, designed to be used on a table top and aimed at capital ship engagements. The rules are based upon the popular Full Thrust system, modified to reflect the Traveller universe and the feel of High Guard. The movement system is a simple, intuitive vector based one.

12/19/2006 - Ken Burnside of Ad Astra Games has made the following announcement:

Ad Astra Games is pleased to announce that we've just signed deals with Far Future Enterprises and BITS to bring Traveller miniatures to the starship combat scene!

First, we will be printing Power Projection: Fleets (a Traveller adaptation of the Full Thrust rules set) in the US; our first order of business is dealing with the backstock of orders outstanding in the retail tier.

Our second deal is that we're taking over the Traveller line of miniatures from MegaMiniatures, and will be creating new miniatures for starships of the Traveller universe; our first run of miniatures will be matching the ships found in Power Projection.

More information on this will be coming along shortly.

 

12/13/2004 - The latest word from Dom Mooney:

"Just a quick update. At the moment there are a group of us working to pull together a new Power Projection book. This has the working title of 'Task Forces' and will contain about 30-40 new ships and SSDs with High Guard stats for Vargr, Sword Worlds, Imperial Colonial (and thus Solomani), Zhodani and Imperial Main Fleets. The looks of the ships will tie directly to the GZG models we are basing them on.

We are planning to have this out for Salute in 2005 (which is April). I'll keep you posted - hopefully the publishing gremlins won't strike again along the way."

And later he mentions:

"The Aslan are missing because we have further plans for another book. This book is aimed to boost the Spinward Marches material."

3/28/2004 - Power Projection: Fleet seems to be selling well in the US.  Warehouse 23 has sold out of their initial shipment and has ordered more.  The other US source, Mystic Station Designs is already on their second shipment of PP:F.  If you are in the UK, you should be able to get PP:F from any store stocked by Esdevium.

PowerProjection.net has been recently updated, the file size of the pdf counter sheets has been greatly reduced, 3 scenarios were added for PP:F, and a Quick Reference sheet for PP:F was added.

 

1/22/2004 - Power Projection: Fleet is now available for pre-order from Steve Jackson Games Warehouse 23.  It lists February 15th as the scheduled release date.  Order your copy HERE.

 

12/20/2003 - Here are some sample counters from Power Projection: Fleet:

 

12/13/2003 - A limited run of Power Projection: Fleet has been printed and will be available at Dragonmeet in the UK this weekend.  A much larger print run will be done soon so enough copies will be available for the public worldwide.

Dominic Mooney states: "PP:F is 72 pages long, and has a further 2 pages of B&W counters and 2 pages of colour counters. It includes all the rules you could want for fighting Traveller starship battles including spinal mounts, black globes and fighters. It also has crunchy goodness like campaign and strategic rules (think of a melding between TCS and FFW) and more than 20 new SSDs for capital ships."

7/15/2003 - Dominic Mooney has announced that the PowerProjection.net website has been updated and includes information on the status of Power Projection: Fleet along with some sneak preview images like the SSD of the Azhanti High Lightning, a 60,000 dT cruiser.

 

2/16/2003 - The shipment of Power Projection: Escort has arrived in the US and is now available from Steve Jackson Games' Warehouse 23 (http://www.warehouse23.com/item.cgi?BITSRPPE).

 

2/12/2003 - Several new items have been added to PowerProjection.net; a list of changes from the Lite to the Escort version, 2 sheets of counters as pdf files, and an FAQ.  Also Escort is now on Steve Jackson Games Warehouse 23 store, but they don't have copies available yet.

 

1/19/2003 - Steve Jackson Games' Warehouse 23 has sold out of PP: Lite.  I got a copy of Escort in the mail and this does look like a quality product.  Mark Siefert has posted a review of Lite up on his webpage.

 

12/31/2002 - Dominic Mooney announces that a limited number of copies of Power Projection Lite are now available for sale in the US at Steve Jackson Games' Warehouse 23. http://www.warehouse23.com/item.cgi?BITSRPPL

He also states that there is no information yet on the ETA for the updated PP: Escort since it depends on orders being placed etc. All changes from Lite to Escort will be added to the website by the end of January

 

10/22/2002 - Power Projection Lite is being renamed Power Projection: Escort. Too many people saw 'Lite' and assumed either 'free' or 'not worth buying until the full version' even though this game has all the rules it needs, it just doesn't cover larger ships.  Escort will be available at Dragonmeet 2002.

 

The expanded version, now titled Power Projection: Fleet has been postponed to March/April 2003.  It will be BITS first 'professional' published book and they want it done right and available for Salute 2003.  It will include rules for capital ships, High Guard conversion rules, and campaign rules.

 

8/27/2002 - Power Projection Lite will debut at GenCon UK this coming weekend. The author is Dominic Mooney, editor Andy Lilly, and cover by Jesse DeGraff.  The book has B&W counters (2 sheets) included, plus stats for 13 Imperial and Zhodani vessels up to 10,000dT, A4 format with probably 28 pages. You will need the full edition to play with spinals and design ships etc.

The full edition of Power Projection (much, much bigger) will be launched at Dragonmeet in November/December.

 

4/25/2002 - I've received the following announcement from Dominic Mooney of BITS (British Isles Traveller Support):

'Power Projection' is the planned title for the BITS Traveller Full Thrust game, which will be completely stand alone in the vein of the Earthforce Sourcebook for Babylon 5 RPG.

It's been some 5 years in the making and grew out of an irrational urge of mine to try a conversion of Full Thrust to Traveller, called 'Fifth Frontier Thrust'. This didn't have quite the feel I wanted and so I started to develop a more Traveller-specific version (in particular trying to capture the feel of 'classic' Traveller's (CT) 'High Guard'). Jon Tuffley of GZG was really helpful about the whole thing, lending us miniatures and a GeoHex map, and making the odd suggestion.

Where is it now? Think of it as being in a late beta stage.

Key features include:
- Vector movement (inspired by CT 'MayDay', similar to the 'Fleet Book 2' rules (from Full Thrust, not Greg Ellis' 'FOTS: TCOM'). No calculations needed, only a tape measure.
- Extremely deadly spinal mount weapons.
- Battery damage table for secondaries (this is a CRT but was the only way to avoid gadzillions of dice rolls as Traveller has so many defense systems).
- Massed fire table (statistically derived spread of results so you can mass fire a big ship like a Tigress Class in 40 rolls not 400).
- statistical resolution for threshold checks  (i.e. like the Tigress example above, you can roll 400 threshold checks in 40 rolls)
- Ship conversion sequence (ships are designed using CT's 'High Guard' system).
- Stats for all ships in the CT supplement 'Fighting Ships'.
- Simultaneous movement, initiative based firing.
- Inertial sand clouds and EMP bursts which mess sensors up, giving space terrain.
- Gravity effects.
- Black Globe forcefields.
- Psionics rules.
- Crew quality rules/experience.
- Fighters by squadrons (pseudo-vector vector movement).
- Missiles with multi-turn duration (pseudo-vector movement).

Still to be finished:
- Campaign system.
- Some minor rules.

We hope to release it later this year - GenCon UK or Strange Days are our working targets and it is likely to be in a different format to the usual BITS books - with GZG's help it will hopefully more closely resemble a standard Full Thrust book.

An engagement with a number of ships (i.e. 4-8 cruisers+) should be fightable in just a couple of hours - it does depend on how heavy your players get working out positions etc - the game does encourage this as
spinal mount weapons only fire every other turn, and the EMP bursts play with range.

We've been playing it using GZG miniatures (NSU, FSE and OU ships), which look nice and Traveller-esque.