Ay-Tee-You

[rancke]

See, the difference, though, is that I embrace those peculiarities and don't find them unbelievable or unexplainable.

And yet worlds that you can't explain abound. Worlds with diameters too small to retain their atmospheres. Populated airless worlds with technologies too low to support life. Worlds with populations too low to sustain their tech level. Garden worlds on the edge of Hierate space with no Aslan settlers. Trade hubs with no trade. Boatyards on worlds with no customers. Shipyards on worlds with no aupporting infrastructure. Transient populations accepted by the Imperium as legitimate. Low-population worlds that are being left alone by greedy neighbors. Independent worlds with populations too low too sustain themselves. Worlds with absolutely no correlation between habitability and population.

Granted, some of these worlds can be explained away by invoking the Ancients or once-in-the-lifetime-of-the-universe happenstance. And I'm perfectly OK with that. Every once in a while. But not over and over again. If the rare and unusual becomes commonplace, it ceases to be rare and unusual.

And then, of course, there's the opposite side of the coin, the stifling of any ideas you may get unless they just happen to fit in with the UWPs. You might get a splendid idea for the history of a world and its neighboring colony, only in order to work properly the colony world has to have half a million inhabitants and the UWP says pop level 3.


Hans

 

[jawillroy]

And yet worlds that you can't explain abound. Worlds with diameters too small to retain their atmospheres. Populated airless worlds with technologies too low to support life. Worlds with populations too low to sustain their tech level.

There's a "Lost Rule" from (I think) the Alien Modules that seems to be designed to ameliorate this, which in essence says that if the world's tech is unable to make the planet's atmosphere survivable, you kill the planet: Pop, Gov, Law and Tech all = 0. On the one hand, it erases a lot of the more puzzling worlds apart from their starports and bases, which tend to be C ports and worse anyway. On the other hand, that runs counter to the spirit of LBB3 which encourages you to devise other explanations.

When non-human-survivable atmospheres present themselves with odd combinations of population and tech, it has often occurred to me that one occasional solution is to devise a new sophont that could live in such an environment. It would certainly take the edge off My "MTU is simply crawling with humans" Traveller Universe. But I've been kind of lazy about actually doing that.

 

[HG_B]

There's a "Lost Rule" from (I think) the Alien Modules that seems to be designed to ameliorate this, which in essence says that if the world's tech is unable to make the planet's atmosphere survivable, you kill the planet: Pop, Gov, Law and Tech all = 0.

From the earliest days of CT I just auto adjusted the TL up to make it plausible. I even had written a few "if then" statements to handle them.

 

[jawillroy]

From the earliest days of CT I just auto adjusted the TL up to make it plausible. I even had written a few "if then" statements to handle them.

Back in the day, I did it that way too. For my current TU I'm sorta on the fence. Bumping up the TU like that softens up the subsectors in a way I don't like: makes things a little too civilized for my taste. On the other hand, just wading in like Siva and blasting worlds utterly (as with the Alien Modules) seems a little extreme! I experimented with that and it left a lot of weird gaps.

IMTU, with the whole region recovering from recent wars, it makes sense that a number of non-shirtsleeve worlds might have had their basic tech knocked down to where they can't fend for themselves - and it comes down to whether I consider the Interstellar Gummint IMTU to be beneficent and effective enough to provide relief to those worlds, or if they're indifferent enough to them to let their populations die off or be made refugees.

 

[HG_B]

Back in the day, I did it that way too. For my current TU I'm sorta on the fence. Bumping up the TU like that softens up the subsectors in a way I don't like: makes things a little too civilized for my taste.

A thought (let me know if it makes sense) about basic generation. After deciding on a density factor for star system presence there is a roll (based on a % chance defined) to see if the system thus generated contains a human habitable world. If yes, proceed to world Gen table A. If no, proceed to world gen table B.

 

[captainjack]

Random generation is a good servant but a lousy master.

Yeah baby, QFT !!! I'll be stealing this one, you betcha .

 

[kafka47]

True, but there are times in which the lego approach (ie making things on the fly) simply do not ring true nor necessarily...perhaps one needs a world as a red herring or a world that is there is not supposed to be ie in the Rift or behind one of the Doorways (IMTU). And, that is where Random works best. Having said that, I really hope the tables get fixed in T5 or some sort of Grand Explorations supplement.

As Traveller looks both good and bad. The good part ought to be it is grounded in real world science. The bad is that is clunky. Therefore, my suggestion is once you provide all the best rules...have someone create a computer program that automates the process for a nominal fee. Or throw the whole thing as a java program on the web. Traveller5 = Traveller 2.0 is the equation we need to think of...not a revolution but a paradigm shift.

 

[boomslang]

What if...

<massive snippage>

The easy solution is to simply insert the prefix "kilo-" in front of every instance of "parsec" in the ship design, travel, and map rules.

Which gets you nothing, of course, in terms of extending travel times; all you do is create much-more detailed maps that no one will ever use.

I think your ideas about Low Berths needing to be more reliable are on the mark; I would add that automated ship systems are of course a necessity -- starships should be able to exit Jump, refuel by gas giant skimming, plot a Jump to the next fuel stop, and execute the next leg's Jump completely free of sophont interaction, repeating this cycle dozens of times if necessary, only waking specified crew members in case of anomalies (either internal or external).

Likewise, you really, really, really need rules about deep-space maintenance and repair; starships that are literally months from port need to be able to rely upon on-board facilities to handle any and all mechanical problems. This is my major beef with traditional, over-civilzed Traveller: even Scout starships are far too starport-dependant. Exploration is limited to six months outbound, so vessels have time to return to known space for annual maintenance -- in thousands of years of starflight, it never occurred to anyone that longer trips might be of interest, or even necessity?

 

[Supplement Four]

I started reading John Shirley's Aliens: Steel Egg. It's about the very first contact with Aliens (according to one timeline--another is established by the Aliens Vs. Predator films, which I don't like), pre-the-first-Alien-film.

So far, the book is really good (I love this universe), what I think is interesting is something the author says in his note at the start of the book: The Heim device, by the way, is real--it's still in development. But, there's a good chance it really will provide a kind of "space warp" for real-life spacecraft.

In the narrative of the book, he writes: In 2058, it had beomc commonplace to use the Heim gravity-muting drive to shorten tris within the solar system--essentially creating a warping of space in a field in front of the vehicle, so that they were dreawn into a gravitational-low pressure zone, and so that they could elude the Einsteinian lethal-increase of mass that came with near-light speed--and lately UNIC had sent unmanned drones out to other systems, using the Heim drive to get there in under a year.

Of course, this sounds a lot like the Displacement Drive mentioned in the Colonial Marines book (and not too different from stutter-warp, eh?).

So, I looked it up: Heim Theory.

Interesting stuff.

 

[ShapeShifter]

People can and will live in the damnedest places. We're as bad as cockroaches.

Very sig-worthy!

As always S4, lots of great ideas! Thanks!

 

[JLockett]

The Displacement Drive is taken from 2300 (IIRC, it's been a long, long time since I've read that game). The drive displaces space immediately in front of the ship, and this naturally draws the ship into it. (Isn't this akin to stutterwarp?).

Nope: 2300 AD invoked quantum tunneling, the ability of subatomic particles to teleport from one place to another without crossing the intervening space, on a macroscopic scale, such that the entire ship teleported forward a short distance several times a second.

This drive rarely accelerates the ship faster than 1/3 the speed of light.... The Jump Drive cannot be activated unless the ship is traveling at least 1/5 the speed of light.

Ah, but 1/3 the speed of light in which reference frame and why? That's the physics which causes issues with many such FTL explanations.

 

[Supplement Four]

Nope: 2300 AD invoked quantum tunneling, the ability of subatomic particles to teleport from one place to another without crossing the intervening space, on a macroscopic scale, such that the entire ship teleported forward a short distance several times a second.

It's been 25 years since I read that game...I wasn't sure.

Ah, but 1/3 the speed of light in which reference frame and why? That's the physics which causes issues with many such FTL explanations.

Dunno. Just reporting the various explanations of how things work in that universe.

 

[HiverLord]

Yes, please do work on those [Star charts]! Your stuff is excellent, Aramis.

As an aside, I was considering an alteration to the '1/2-fuel' optional system. Instead of all drives in an ATU using 1/2 fuel of the OTU, when TL 16 drive tech is reached a new type of Jump drive is developed, one which uses 1/2 the fuel. 'Original' jump drives would still be subject to the original fuel requirements, while the new drives have the 1/2 option.
Of course, they would be horrendously expensive at first, and the IN and megacorporations would try to monopolize them.

I haven't decided if this is feasible yet, though.

 

[aramis]

Yes, please do work on those [Star charts]! Your stuff is excellent, Aramis.

Look in my website for the Elestrial Concordat World Gen...
(Cryton: updated it)

It's interesting to note that the 2300 NSL II has been updated to include one carbon star and two brown dwarfs.... I didn't include those.

 

[magnusfalkirk]

Look in my website for the Elestrial Concordat World Gen...
(Cryton: updated it)

It's interesting to note that the 2300 NSL II has been updated to include one carbon star and two brown dwarfs.... I didn't include those.

Just went to your website to check out the World Gen and got a 404 not found error.

Magnus

 

[aramis]

Just went to your website to check out the World Gen and got a 404 not found error.

Magnus

You're having an ISP problem then. Site is up and functioning.

 

[magnusfalkirk]

You're having an ISP problem then. Site is up and functioning.

I can get to your site just fine and to most of the pages but when I try to get the World Gen is when I get this error message:

The requested URL /trav/WC_WorldGen_PDF was not found on this server.

Don't know whose problem it is but I can't find your World Gen pdf.

Magnus

 

[aramis]

I can get to your site just fine and to most of the pages but when I try to get the World Gen is when I get this error message:

The requested URL /trav/WC_WorldGen_PDF was not found on this server.

Don't know whose problem it is but I can't find your World Gen pdf.

Magnus

typo... corrected.

 

[magnusfalkirk]

typo... corrected.

Apparently it doesn't like the correction because here's what I just got, and I tried to download the pdf with both Firefox and Safari.

The requested URL /trav/EC_WorldGen_PDF was not found on this server.

Magnus

 

[aramis]

Apparently it doesn't like the correction because here's what I just got, and I tried to download the pdf with both Firefox and Safari.

The requested URL /trav/EC_WorldGen_PDF was not found on this server.

Magnus

Try again.