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Physical Description
This is a hardcover book, weighing in at 176 pages. The cover's got the standard Traveller minimalist "little black book" cover motiff. Inside the book is well laid-out, with very readable type & stat-blocks. Art is black & white & sparse, but what is there is generally pretty good.
New Vehicle Rules
This section is thankfully short: about 5 pages long. It includes vehicle range bands & difficulty profiles for combat, how the maximum speeds & ranges work (if you cruise at 75% maximum speed, your range goes up 50%), and it explains the basics of the vehicle fill-form. There's also rules for wind-powered vehicles & muscle or animal-powered vehicles, including a chart of animal statistics as they relate to vehicles. The section closes out with an optional rule for estimating vehicle mass.
Vehicle Design System
Right after the introduction there's an overview of the design process: it's six fairly easy steps, some of which are optional: 1) Pick a chassis type 2) Apply chassis modifications 3) Add armor 4) Add weapons & weapons mounts 5) Add modifications 6) Total everything up & fill out the vehicle roster.
The heart of vehicle design are the chassis types: each given type has a set of basic design parameters. This includes a range of sizes, structural & hull points by size, base modifiers, and cost. Vehicle's are initially sized in "spaces": the space needed normally for a single crewmember or passenger (or a quarter-ton of cargo). Various chassis types have a conversion factor for "shipping size:" the amount of space the vehicle will take up in the cargo hold.
There are 20 pages of vehicle types. There's the usual Traveller standbys: Airplanes, boats, grav vehicles, ground vehicles, helicopters, jets, ships,& submersibles. Airships, trains,& walkers (from the older Mongoose supplements) also make a comeback. There's a selection of low-tech vehicles: Bicycles (& rickshaws), wagons, ballooons, and non-powered boats & ships. Aerodynes are a new concept. These are aircraft that use vectored thrust instead of aerodynamics: I'm thinking things like the flyers from Ghost in the Shell.
Many of the chassis types are in light & heavy varieties, and overall I can see the ability to pretty much create any vehicle I can think of.
Performance characteristics are indexed to technology level for each chassis type: this always includes speed & range, and may include other characteristics such as maximum crush depth for a submarine.
Chassis modifications are custom-tailored by vehicle type. They include things like the Armored Fighting Vehicle option for heavy grav, hovercraft, & ground vehicle types, to more exotic things like super-cavitation drives for submarines.
Armor selection is, again, based on tech level. The armor table lists the base armor, which is the minimum for all but open-framed vehicles. Unlike earlier Traveller design systems, there's not a ton of different options for carbon fiber, crystaliron, or unobtanium (although there are "flavor" descriptions of possible materials used at each given tech level). Vehicles can add additional armor layers, up to a limit of 5 times the base level for most vehicles, and 15 times base for AFV's.
The weapons table is a fairly broad array of mid & high-tech weaponry culled from the Central Supply Catalog. From what I can tell looking at my copy of the CSC, a few weapon stats have been changed slightly. There's also figures for adding additional ammo to the various weapons. However, they neglected to put prices for the ammuntion. While this information is easily gleaned from the Central Supply Catalog, it's the most annoying error in the book.
Weapon-mount options are handled pretty straightforwardly, and fire-control enhancements are handled as a simple attack roll modifier for a given price rather than going into technical details of weapon stabilization, laser range-finders, etc.
Finally, we get to the Universal Options section: this is only 9 pages, long, but its chock full of options that you can add to just about any vehicle. There's a variety of performance & structural enhancements to tweak the performance of your vehicle, life support options, and all sorts of electronics. The communications & sensors use the standard range bands introduced for vehicle weapons, and like the fire control systems don't go into exhaustive detail on maser, laser, etc. Power plant options include the ability to add fusion or fission power, and some suggestions of what types of power plants are used as standard at a given tech level. Crew accommodations include things like high-capacity seating (so you can give your players the proper "mass transit" experience) and a variety of luxury options including hot-tubs & enterainment centers.
The design section closes out with two design examples: a ground car and a G-carrier (a sort of grav-APC). The examples do a lot to clear up some questions about how the design system works. The Ground car example was pretty critical, because I still can't find anywhere else in the book that explains how "spaces" of cargo convert to tonnage. From the design example I inferred that it's 1 ton per 4 spaces.
Power Armor
The section on power armor is pretty direct: you pick a chassis ranging from ultra-light (a pretty minimalist "exoskeloton") up to what amount to small mecha. You can create power armors with a tech level as low as 9, and at fairly low prices for Mongoose Traveller battledress. Each chassis has a given number of "slots" as well as Strength & Dexterity modifiers & a maximum armor rating. There's a broad array of weapons & options, but again they didn't put ammunition prices in!
Sample Vehicles
The rest of the book (120+ pages) are a variety of sample vehicles. This includes not only a selection of generic vehicles, but vehicles from previous Traveller supplement & setting books: the various alien modules, Project Steel, Strontium Dog, Judge Dredd, and Hammer's Slammers. In total, you get over 200 vehicles with this book. My only gripe with this section is that it had no sample aerodynes: I would have really liked to have seen some examples of them.
Overall Impressions
In general, I think this is an excellent addition for Traveller Referees who are looking for more detailed vehicles for their games. The vehicle design system is rather intuitive & fast. My first attempts took me about 15 minutes to create a fairly simple ground vehicle (a race car), and the rather more complex grav vehicle inspired by H. Beam Piper's "Four Day Planet" took me about an hour. With practice I could cut these times in half, and if I decided to automate it on a spreadsheet I'm betting I could crank out vehicles by the dozen very quickly.
Some people used to earlier Traveller vehicle design systems like "Fire, Fusion, & Steel" or the design systems from Megatraveller or Striker are going to howl at the lack of technical detail. This system is much more concerned with in-game effects. Honestly, I like the Vehicle Handbook's approach better. There's just enough technical detail & options to make things interesting, without getting so mired in minutiae that a scientific calculator & spreadsheet become practically mandatory.
That said, the book has flaws: if you're looking for a pretty book, this one will disappoint you greatly. As I mentioned before, there's not a lot of art. There's also the usual Mongoose editing snafus: there's the aforementioned lack of ammo prices, and a few things that aren't explained in the text well. I found one instance of a repeated paragraph, and there's also some contradictory information in the chassis type section (mainly some tech level differences listed for the chassis type being contradicted in the performance section).
Comparisons to the previous Edition
People who purchased the original vehicle handbooks may ask why they would want to buy this one? In my case I only purchased Civilian Vehicles, and felt I was pretty badly burned. The design system seemed pretty broken to me: Airships were unrealistically small, a lot of the rules seemed needlessly complex, and there were some huge gaffes with powerplants (fusion was pretty much inferior on all tech levels).
In general the design system in the new book is much more intuitive & easier to use than the originals. You don't need to calculate ground-pressure for an off-road vehicle, and indexing vehicle performance or range is much simpler. In the previous edition you might end up re-doing a design several times to get a particular performance level because of the way the maths worked.
On the sample vehicles, I only have the civilian vehicle handbook for reference: there are fewer of them than in the older edition. However, the reduction is often the result of cutting out redundancy. The older editions had various different tech level examples of the exact same vehicle. Plus, the performance numbers seem to make more sense. I didn't see any off-road vehicles that move slower than a running human.
Who this book is for
Referees who are looking for a fast, easy-to-use vehicle design system that emphasizes in-game effects over technical detail. If you don't mind doing some extra work, you could easily adapt this system to design vehicles for other game-systems.
Who this book isn't for
Gearheads who just HAVE to know the vehicle's weight to the kilogram, and the exact electromagnetic frequency their detection gear works on. Grognards who can't stand sourcebooks that contain non-OTU information.
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