Alright! Now that we've done all those calculations, we get something to use them for. Those gravity bands are going to have an effect on ship vectors. Let's see if I got this right. "During the movement phase, lay out the vector of the ship to determine where it will move." Easy enough. "If the exact midpoint of the vector lies in a gravity band, a gravity vector will be added to the course vector to create a new vector." So far, so good. So, if the vector ends up being six inches long, check the three-inch point to see if it's in a gravity band.
"The length of this gravity vector is equal (in inches) to the strength of the gravity band in Gs." Alright, the closer you are the planet, the bigger the effect. Still makes sense. "Thus, a vector dictated by the 0.5 G band of a world is 1.0 inches long." Um, wait. Half a G would be half an inch, wouldn't it? Now I'm confused. I checked the errata file, but it's got nothing. This can go one of two ways. First, it's an error and needs to be changed to '0.5 inches long.' Second, the error is in the first sentence, and the word 'twice' is missing in "to TWICE the strength". Of course, the third option is that I'm just confused and I'm missing something obvious. Maybe someone who has more experience with the rules can explain it to me.
Regardless, the vector shifts by bringing the ship closer to the planet by modifying the vector the appropriate distance directly toward the planet (start from the initial vector's midpoint, then move it directly toward the planetary template center). So, it won't be a major shift, but the closer you get to the planet, the more it will be. That can make for some interesting scenarios, especially if a ship in the gravity gets its engines damaged or destroyed.
Laser Fire! Yeah! This is the second phase in the turn, and it's broken down into five sub-phases. First, pick the target. On an individual ship, turret lasers have to all fire at the same target. If you have multiple turrets, they still have to fire at the same target unless you've got a multi-target computer program running. Geez, Traveller computers just suck. The player does the targeting for all his ships, then moves to the second sub-phase.
In Sub-Phase Two, DMs are calculated for each ship; each ship will have one specific DM. These DMs usually come from computer programs, but damage and other issues can modify the DM as well. Now the targeted player does the same for his defensive DMs. Again, this is done per ship. Sand gets a mention again, because sand can apparently travel at starship speeds in space. Gotta love that sand.
Fourth, throw the dice. As in man-to-man combat, the goal is a modified roll of 8 or better. Each laser weapon makes its own roll. I'm reading that as double turrets get two rolls, one per weapon. Count up the total hits achieved.
Fifth, use the dice to determine hit locations on a table (which hasn't appeared yet), then mark the effects of the ship on the ship's data card. The effects of these hits will take effect before the defending player gets to shoot back, so the defending ships might not get to fire all their weapons (if some got damaged in this phase).
If the attacker wants to shift targets in the middle of the fight (the initial target was already destroyed by earlier fire in the phase) it's a -6 DM on top of any others. So, switching targets isn't likely to be a productive activity, depending on how good your modifiers already are.
Next up...we'll see.
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