Port2Jump Resurrected

Having got the Gushemege Guide effectively completed and now just struggling to find the best way to get it out into the big wide world I can turn my attention back to Port2Jump which I haven't worked on since 2016 - but this will be the Winter I get it working and out there!

Port2Jump is a player/GM helper app for the Traveller role-playing game which takes you through the whole sequence from loading up at a starport, heading out to jump, jumping, and then dock back in the new system. I hope it will also be far more than that and become a way of adventuring in the Traveller universe quite independent of a "physical" game. Whilst it was initially very text centric I started adding still images and am now looking at adding WebGL 3D visualisations. Who knows where it will end up.....

First challenge, completed today, was to get the 3 yr old code running on Visual Studio 2019. Next is to start publishing to Azure so that I can open it up to alpha testers sooner rather than later. Then I'll start actually adding new features.

Earlier Perl Version

Ad Astra *

I got to see Ad Astra last night. I can't say I was expecting much, and I certainly wasn't disappointed. I was going to list some of the tech issues with it but when I got to a dozen I stopped. I know its a film, but I'm sure I read somewhere that the director wanted to make the most realistic space film ever, and if you are setting a film in the "near future" then I think you have more responsibility to make the tech accurate. We already seem to be at the point where Elon Musk science-fact looks more impressive and futuristic than much of SF! The film nods a lot to Apocalypse Now and 2001, but whilst I realise its all meant to be about the inner journey of the main character I'm afraid I just didn't really see any of that, and the ending was decidedly anti-climatic.

Anyway the one bright spot was the most realistic looking moon surface I've every seen in an SF film. Odd that they only had 1970s era Moon Buggies to drive on it though, and were escaping "moon pirates" who otherwise played no role in the film.

And of course that got me to thinking of my GZG Moongrunts and now that my 3' moon/asteroid play mat has arrived I really ought to get the troops on the table!

SpaceX Starship Assembly

Spent most of the last week watching the Lapadre Live YouTube feed of the assembly of the SpaceX Mk1 Starship. All week it seemed like they were about to mate the two halves, and you've never seen so many cranes and in the end I managed to be out at the shop for the 5 minutes it took to lift the nose section up!

This is just before assembly as they put the 2nd canard on the nose cone. That big yellow crane in the middle was used to do the main lift. Great (clean) chatter on the YouTube channel with all the cranes named and the different types of worker.

The finished result the next day after Elon Musk's presentation where the forward plan seems to be:

• Nov - first flight (10s of km) of Mk1
• This year - 200km flight of Mk1
• Mk2 then probably takes over testing, still suborbital, no heat shield
• Mk3 makes first orbital flight ~ 2Q20
• Mk4 joins testing programme
• Work starts on the first Super Heavy booster
• Work starts on a "production" generation of Starships
• Lunar orbital flight ~ 2021
• Lunar landing ~ 2023 (prob before NASA)
• Unmanned flights to and landing on Mars (and return?) before human landing

BAOR Game Revisited

One of the things on my to-do list is an operational set of mechanised rules for use in WW2 (Desert especially) and "modern" - in particular BAOR of around 1987 when I was there. The aim is to not only have them as a game in themselves but to use then to generate tabletop scenarios. ConnectionsUK got me back into thinking about the rules and the BAOR game in particular, especially how over complex (and expensive) Next War: Poland seemed to be.

I dug out my existing "modern SPI" collection, the original SPI Next War monster, Modern Warfare's take on WW3 and one of their recent Putin games), but these were all with Corps/Bde manoeuvre units, and I wanted Bn. The original SPI BAOR is very close to what I want and I've now assembled the hi-rez map, counter sheets and rules electronically, but a few things have stopped me from just printing it all out and playing that:

• The Orbat is more like 1984, when BAOR was going through the Field Force phases, and 24 Inf Bde was not yet airmobile
• The map has been turned 90 degrees!
• I don't know/trust the provenance of the Attack-Defend scores
• The CRT looks like a fore-runner of the Poland one!
• I'd rather wait til I find a paper copy!

So it's definitely going to be roll-my-own. I started off a while ago with a set called FreeHexBlitz, and I think I've already completely rewritten them to get something which is a hybrid of the board gaming and table top gaming approach. I've also decided to play it all out on Roll20 (using the BAOR map but my own pieces) at first til I know it all works ( I keep redo'ing activation cards, don't want to have to do the same with 1/2" counters!).

Will report back as it develops.

ConnectionsUK 2019

Finally got to go to ConnectionsUK, the annual conference for professional wargamers (i.e. those supporting MOD, Government and other organisations). Over 20 countries were represented so a very international crowd. It was a very participative conference with very few sit-and-listen sessions, instead almost the whole time was spent playing various types of wargames (committee games and matrix games very common, but also SPI style).

I got to play a whole day megagame with ~ 15 a side on a "russian" attack on somewhere looking remarkably like Vilnius. This was played double-blind, so running my special force cell all I knew was what my troops on the ground (via umpires) and other HQs told me. Our opening heliborne operation against the main road bridge was a great success and we held it until relieved by ground forces. The weirdest moment though was as the Spetznatz commander briefing the real UK Secretary of State for Defence when he visited.

There was a session on game design where my group had 45 minutes to create the outline of a game on Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD), one of the real naval warfare buzzwords at the moment. Luckily we had some experts in the group and ended up with a good sounding card based game.

Having to miss Thursday my Wednesday afternoon was spent playing the opening scenario from GMT's Next War: Poland. We managed to get through all 3 moves, but it has a horrendous turn structure and the CRT seems overly complex with column shifts, ratio changes and die-modifiers - see next post!

So a great conference, very much along the lines of COW I expect, and can't way to get to it next year (although capacity wise they may have to go back to limiting attendance).

A couple of other games that caught my eye:

Waterloo! There was also an Ancients game, so not all Modern

Battle of Mosul

Cyberwargaming with minifigs!

Some good photos of the events and games on Twitter at https://twitter.com/hashtag/ConnectionsUK?src=hashtag_click

Western Desert "Combat Wait Out" Playtest

The Crusaders are late to the game!

Over the Bank Holiday weekend Nick and I got the chance to playtest my Combat Wait Out Mechanised Warfare rules in a Western Desert scenario - more on that below. It was a scratch force on either side, 1 model = 1 tank, so about a squadron plus on either side, and no check as to in service dates!

The Grant hull gun did untold damage on the PzMk IIIs

Whilst CWO had played well in the last "Baltic" play test it seemed very unbalanced this time round. The -2 TM for fighting in the desert was just too much (on a D10) and the Brits were hitting every time (woudln't have been so bad if Nick hadn't spotted the Matilda's range limitation). Penetration was also too easy for guns below the armour class (only +1 per difference), and initially I made the mistake of having over-powered guns automatically penetrate (which also meant kill).

The final tank melee, with tanks flying everywhere - which seems realistic!

Day 2 we made changes and the whole thing played much better, but by then it was all over for the Germans! Question is are the rules now too unbalanced at the cluttered terrain/modern kit end. Will try again in a few months, and also mature my Desert Force.

Pesky Matildas too - shooting well beyond their 1000m range!

Scenario Generator

One of the reasons for the game was to play test the MechWar scenario generator I've been working on. I love the pre-game in Blucher and wanted something similar but a) more suited to MechWar and b) added even more rationale rather than just collide with and kill the other guy. I think it worked pretty well - Nick was trying to move in line of march along the coast whilst my German's had a seek and destroy mission, so we weren't sure where the battle woudl take place, and I managed to get all my troops on the table early on whereas his Crusader's really only turned up when it was all over!

We'll give the model a bit more testing and then I'll hopefully get it into one of the wargames magasines.

More or less the only German kills, two humble Honeys

Starhopper Flight

That Starhopper flight was just awesome. May take was obviously the same as Scott Manley's - it hung in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't (TM Douglas Adams). As with most things that Eoln Musk does it looked like something straight out of SF (50s SF at that), and you can just imagine a bunch of Imperial Marines storming out into the dust cloud as it lands! Can't wait for the 3-engined Starship launch, hopefully this side of Christmas.