I Combat Turn = 4 seconds.

1 Combat Segment = .8 seconds

A person can take up to 5 "movements" in a combat turn, depending on their Dexterity.

Some things are faster than people....

The problem with the system as read in TM 1-1 is there is no way of determining "who goes when". Most people probably assume that all else being equal, Joe with a DEX of 19 goes before Ivan with his DEX of 12. That's probably OK with everyone. It starts getting interesting though when you get to the next level.

The guy with the 19 DEX has 5 actions; the one with 12 DEX has 3. Does the faster bloke get to go TWICE before the slower fellow? Or perhaps even three times?

Originally we split the turn up into 5 segments, and a character could take an action on any segment equal to or less than their maximum number of movements. The turn started on segment 5 and went backwards to 1. Thus in our example Joe goes on segment 5, then again on 4. Both go on three, two and one. On segments where more than one person went, we had the faster DEX go first. Thus, Joe would go before Ivan on segment 3 also, making it a total of 3 actions he could take before Ivan could do anything. Ivan didn't care much for this as Joe could draw his .45, take a segment to aim and then shoot Ivan in the nose before Ivan could so much as twitch. It was obvious here had to be a better way.

There is a better way. When a local company called Hero Games started selling their new game Champions at a local Con in Oakland back in the early 80's, I bought a copy and have been playing on & off ever since. I adopted their staggered speed chart, shown below, into my MP game. Their system uses 12 segments per combat turn where I had been splitting up a turn into 5. The top row of the chart shows the character's speed (the number of actions they may take per turn) and the left column shows the 12 segments of the turn. The character may take an action any time there is an "X" when their speed & the current segment is indexed. As GM you start with segment 1 and work your way up to 12.

Now to throw in a twist, let me say I use BOTH the charts above. I normally use the "5-speed" chart for MP, but I use the 12 segment chart for special occasions....

The thing about the 12-segment chart is that it lets you fit in things that can do more than 5 actions in a combat turn. What kinds of things? Well, perhaps a mutant cougar or a hyena on speed would have 7 actions it could do a turn. Besides critters, there are many other possibilities, like computers. Computers can do many things WAY faster than a human, and if they control remote weapons it's quite possible that they could have an effective number of actions per turn much greater than a normal human does. A computer-controlled gun turret, or an armed android perhaps, can potentially damage a lot of targets in a very brief amount of time & create incredible havoc.

There are other issue to using these charts, mostly minor, which can be handled by the GM with a little thought common sense. I'd go into some of these here but I've had two margaritas and I'm pretty darn tired.