Driving: Half-Track - Reassessing Defaults

I have yet to run a game where the Driving skill - as given on GURPS Basic p. 188 -  has been used.  Thus, I've basically never really taken a look at it.  However, while working on some yet-unpublished content related to my Tiberian Dawn era campaign, I found myself dropping by the skill for some information.  I found what I needed, but in the process discovered something a little peculiar, if perhaps trivial - the default on Driving: Automobile, Halftrack, and Tracked were a bit weird.

Guy With a Half-track Mind

I'm certain all of you are at least passingly familiar with the half-track - a vehicle that has wheels in the front and continuous tracks in the rear.  You've seen them in World War 2 era games, movies, or what-have-you.  Not obscure.

The purpose of the half-track is to create a vehicle that can carry or pull heavy loads with a lessened risk of bogging in soft ground.  Tracks are great at this because their surface area reduces ground pressure, allowing more weight to be carried without the increasing risk of bogging down.

Unfortunately, heavily tracked vehicles such as battle tanks are specialized equipment, and need to be specially trained for.  They don't handle like cars at all (rather they use levers to steer and propel while pedals are only usually various types of brakes.  Further, as a rule tank visibility is really restricted, which limits your ability to get a good and ready "feel" for how your vehicle occupies space.  All the vehicular exposure we get growing up basically counts for nothing when operating anything covered by Tracked.

A half-track doesn't have this issue.  With a half-track, you basically have the tracks providing propulsion, while the front is all steerage - all in the familiar steering wheel, gas pedal, and stick-shift manner you see in cars.  It has a wide field of view, as well, allowing it to handle far and away more like a civilian wheeled vehicle than a tank.  That's basically the whole idea of this vehicle class, really - to provide something with the load-hauling capacity that a tracked vehicle provides with a minimum of training time for their operators.  That the heyday of the half-track is concurrent with cars being overwhelmingly rear-wheel drive is a bonus, too.

With that in mind, I believe the skill should have the defaults reassessed.

Driving:  Halftrack - A Revision

Presently, the Halftrack specialization of Driving defaults to Tracked-2 or any other Driving specialization at -4.  This is ill adjusted for a few reasons, primarily because a Halftrack is driven much more like (but not exactly like) an Automobile or Heavy Wheeled vehicle than a Tracked one.  It definitely handles more like an Automobile than a Motorcycle, and those two have the same Default from Halftrack!  This includes weirdos like the kettenkrad as it is a Trike and that falls under Automobile.

To correct this, I assert the Halftrack defaults should instead be Automobile-2 or Heavy Wheeled-2, with all others at -4 (or I suppose -5 for Construction Equipment and the other Special Ones).  

Specializations like Motorcycle, Trains, and Mecha probably should have their own defaults reassessed, but that's not the subject at hand here.

The Case for Case-by-Case

Added 2016NOV22 as an edit to the original article

It seems I may not have been clear as I had hoped in my original post - these rules are more towards an era where Half-tracks are in their heyday, and where contemporary tanks were rather differently steered than a car or truck.  As pointed out, some later tanks DO start to use more familiar controls to modern-day autos, which would ease training between the two and allow a closer default than the stock -4.

Closing

This isn't a major issue that fundamentally breaks GURPS, but it was a point that I felt to comment on.  This article has actually been in draft for well over a month now, but I've been going through a dry spell for blogging and pushed this one up and out to make it appear as if I'm still active - which I am!

For those following my Tiberiun setting stuff - and there are actually a couple of you - more will come.  I'm piecing through a number of articles for the setting that are related and that I'd like to publish in short order from each other (like what I did with the land mines and some other bits of equipment).  It's slow going as life keeps me busy (that I'm pushing this out at 0100 on a Tuesday morning is something else) - the relative complexity of the articles and my back-and-forth on how I want to present them not withstanding!

Until next time!

Cheers!