Traveller GM Process Issues

[LordNanoc]

MBM is doing a great job here. He has his hands full. And it's not just adventures and/or rulebooks like high guard. It's the constant evolvement of the ruleset as a whole. You want high guard, you need to adapt the ruleset. You want space battles, you need to adapt the ruleset.
Additionally, there are adventures like Drainax etc. which have so much data, that you sit days and weeks just to enter it. And then you have more and more additions to the ruleset with an adventure like this, as there are new aliens and new careers to introduce.

It is a mammoth task in the best of times. And having a job and family, this means there is not that much time left.

So kudos to MBM who is the superhero of Traveller here.

[Sylvesr]

Brief history of spacecraft.

In the beginning there was Traveller MGT1 and Starfinder, both built on CoreRPG and both needing a spacecraft system.

SmiteWorks figure it would be good to add vehicles to CoreRPG to support these and potentially future rulesets, so they hired a developer to do it. The plan was build for Starfinder first to get it working. This was probably around Spring of 2018.

The developer worked on it for awhile but never finished, SmiteWorks hired another some months later and also dropped off the radar. There was sadness here on the Traveller forums because SmiteWorks had blown their budget on the first two developers and wasn't super enthused to do that again.

MadBeardMan turned his attention to Central Supply Catalog and High Guard became a hopefully someday.

The Unity Kickstarter did super fantastic enough that SmiteWorks hired two full time developers (as opposed to community developers) one of which was SuperTeddy57. His first (I believe) task was get the Starfinder starship system completed. I don't play Starfinder but I spent a lot of time watching the development and testing, It was really a great system. Sadly CSC required a lot of changes and High Guard was still on the horizon.

Note, it was decided early that starships would go into High Guard because ship design wouldn't come around until then so made sense to develop all those systems together so as to prevent having to redesign systems over and over again.

So where we are now

Now CSC is almost in the rearview and High Guard is in testing, the components are all finally in place to implement starship combat. Like CSC components will be added into High Guard over time.

What has happened with major releases is the foundation comes out with a basic update plan. Then we all drop list upon list upon list of what cool stuff we want to see. MBM reads our list, begs for mercy and then does his best to implement what can be done, thinks about what can't be done, and then sometimes surprises us by figuring out how to do it. It takes time, we don't always get everything, but we get quite a bit.

So that, in a nutshell is why we couldn't have spacecraft combat sooner.

I need to learn not to type long messages on my Kindle.

Mind blown. I didn't know anything about the process. Thank you for bringing me up to speed.