Support Vehicles

One of the most exciting developments for me in the past few years has been the advent of the Support Vehicles rules for BattleTech. Although it seems ludicrous to have so complete a set of rules for essentially non-combat vehicles in a wargame, I think they are fantastic. Vehicles not built for military use, or even just not built for front-line combat, are ubiquitous, and as such regularly should be stumbling into the often very creative and impromptu battlefields of the BattleTech universe. In addition, the Support Vehicle rules give me an opportunity to flesh out the minutiae of players' more mundane travels without having to pull combat statistics for them out of the clear blue sky.

For instance, Technical Readout Vehicle Annex contains at least two fixed-wing airliners that you'd expect to see on a planet with significant population -- having those aircraft available gives great detail for things I'd need to know about what the average civilian aircraft is built like, and if my players try to use one, either for its intended purpose or any of the many and varied alternate uses that players are oh-so-very good at coming up with, I can tell how it will interact with the other key pieces of the game. Frankly, almost every vehicle the players are likely to come in contact with for the foreseeable future, from Clark's pickup truck to the TerraSec search helicopters, are best handled by the Support Vehicles rules. For games on the A Time of War level, I find almost everything I want is easily constructable with these rules.

The one major complaint about these rules is that I have to construct so many vehicles to get what I want, because the published library of vehicles is so small. Perhaps I'll start putting together standard record sheets of some of my more commonly used Support Vehicles. Right now they are largely key statistics written on notebook paper. The record sheets are varied and exciting enough that writing a simple program to fill them out is likely impractical, but perhaps I'll take a swing at it for the most commonly used vehicle types. Although I find satellites fascinating, I rarely find a use for them in my campaigns.

I guess the point of this post-cum-love-song-for-Support-Vehicles is that if you're running A Time of War, I strongly recommend going over the Support Vehicle construction rules. They can really help you in quickly putting together statistics for the various civilian-grade gear your players will drive and ride in, and as we all know, giving a party a record sheet for a vehicle suddenly makes them much more interested and involved in what happens to it. Conversion from a line in an inventory list to a mechanical element of the game adds a great deal of attachment, and I hope you find the same results by fleshing out these kinds of vehicles that I have.