Native Intelligent Life

[morfydd]

So far Ive seen a very cosmopoliton lay out in the Marches ..5 Major races in (humanitii I only count as one) the Region 6+ minor races and references to ~20+ more Minor-? SO how many Races are in the Marches? and how well do they get along ? and at what point do we say stop there are to many Native to the marches? (not just transplants) I am discussing sophonts from Tech zero + Natives to worlds and satellites and minor worlds in the marches?
Opinions ideas ?

 

[Jame]

I'd say that most of the 20 or so minor races there ought to be transplants - more than 6 but less than 26 for a sector that size seems reasonable. So call it 10 to 15 native races total, and 11 to 16 transplants.

 

[Plankowner]

I use a flat 10% chance if the atmosphere is 4-A and 1% chance if the atmosphere is 1+.

If you take Earth's history as a guide, in the 4.5 Billion years the world has been around, intelligence has only been around about 1 million years, that is about 0.002%, but that is WAY to boring for a sci-fi game.

I wouldn't expect more than 1-2 intelligent races per subsector. The Marches may be an anomaly due to interference by the Ancients.

 

[FreeTrav]

This is a topic elsewhere - possibly in a semi-non-public area of this board - and I took much the same position as Plankowner - except that I came out in favor of an average of no more than 1 per subsector, and probably lower.

Fundamentally, there are two extremes, as I see it: Asimovian, as in Foundation, where there are nothing but humans, and Roddenberric, as in Star Trek, where it's pretty much "turn over any wet stone and find an intelligent nonhuman race".

I don't like either extreme, but I visualize my Traveller as being closer to the Asimovian extreme than the Roddenberric extreme. To pick two examples that are a little closer to the center of that spectrum, I see Traveller as being more like Piper's Terro-Human Future History than like James White's Sector General universe.

 

[Whipsnade]

Gents,

Just to get everyone up to speed and volts, here's a little background on the question.

Part of the proposed T5 sysgen often produces worlds with Native Intelligent Life, i.e. NIL. How often? Well, depending on how you crunch the numbers, the current best estimate would put the number of worlds with NIL in the Marches at around one hundred.

To further illustrate the point, one hundred NILs per sector puts roughly 1,600 NIL races in the Imperium and roughly 11,700 NIL races in Chartered Space. The problem should be readily apparent now.

Leaving aside the purely retroactive and politically expedient thinking behind the label "Major Race", how can any of the Majors be said to be major if they're swimming in a sea of NILs? Regina would have humans living on it, but the majority of the canonical population would be made up of the Regina NIL race. Ditto Mora, ditto Trin, and ditto every other hi-pop world with a biosphere that isn't a Major Race or Human Minor Race homeworld.

In this model, the OTU is no longer Asimovian or Piperian. It isn't even Roddenberrian because, while humans are a significant minority in the Federation, the numbers of humans in this version of the OTU would be tiny in the overall scheme of things.

The number of NILs and the levels of their suggested populations beg the question of just how the Majors control their empires. Given the thousands of years of history in the OTU, any technological edge the Majors hold over the NILs would eventually degrade if not wholly disappear. Mull over this question: How do a few million humans on Regina keep the Regina NILs in check and fight Frontier Wars against the Zhodani at the same time?

There is no question that the number of NILs produced by T5 is a fundamental setting breaker for the Official Traveller Universe.

That being said, oddly enough I personally don't think the NIL portion of T5's sysgen is "broken" or "wrong" or anything even approaching that. This is because T5 is a set of rules and the OTU setting is something completely different. It's best to think of T5 as something more akin to GURPS or d20. T5 is a set of rules which will be used to create multiple settings.

When we use the rules to create settings, we modify the rules in question. The NIL portion of T5's sysgen will simply be ignored when creating the OTU setting.

NILs can be part of T5 and not part of the OTU at the same time.


Regards,
Bill

 

[rancke]

As I mentioned in another thread, the canonical number of minor non-human races in the OTU[*] averages out at about one per 3 subsectors. The eight (or 14 if you count BtC) canonical minor nonhumans in the Marches is already a bit over the average (14 is considerably over the average, though not impossibly so).

[*] around 100 in the Imperium, around 400 in all of Charted Space.​

Hans