One for the canonistas: Regina system stats?

[The Shaman]

Originally posted by Andrew Boulton:
No, Shaman was right - G Survey had rules for detailing the physical stuff, and G Census covered the population-related bits. WBH combined them and updated everything for MT.

Thanks.

 

[Hemdian]

When I ordered the MegaTraveller CD from FFE it arrived with a few sample 'trading' cards. There was one for Regina that had some information I haven't seen elsewhere. How canon you want to view this information is up to you, but I scanned the card:

Regards PLST

 

[Malenfant]

Hm, thanks - not much more useful info in that, but the picture's pretty at least

 

[Liam Devlin]

Off topic briefly to hemdian:

Nice bit of "chrome" the demographics of the world broken down there (Humans/ Amindii/Vargr/Aslan)..

back on topic, sorry folks....-->

 

[Malenfant]

well the topic's mostly spent anyway, I got an answer to my question

I wonder who did the art on that card? It looks "old school" for some reason, like it was done in the 70s (but then maybe that's because the layout of the whole thing looks somewhat old-fashioned). I must say I think I like how Assiniboia looks in it, just this featureless, haze-covered ball.

What other cards did you get with it, Hemdian? (EDIT: Usefully, the URL at the bottom of the Regina card is a dead link, and I can't find any info at all about them on the FFE site).

 

[Malenfant]

After totting a few numbers up from the data provided in the sources linked here, I've found something that doesn't surprise me in the slightest - the values provided in Grand Survey make no sense at all.

For starters, if you look at the mass and diameter and density provided, they don't agree with eachother - if you assume two are as stated, you can't get the third value. So someone did their maths wrong when compiling that data for Grand Survey.

The other howler is that if you take the orbital period of Regina shown there then you can determine the mass of Assiniboia (you also need to know the orbital radius, but that's provided in the CT data as 55 radii, and we'll assume that Assiniboia's radius is 80,000 km which is as big as a gas giant or brown dwarf can actually be)... but when you do the calculation it turns out that the maximum mass that the gas giant can have is only 0.1388 Jupiters, which is just under half that of Saturn! That also means that the gas giant's density is utterly impossible - a mere 123 kg/m3, far lower than possible for a gas giant of that (or any) size.

So even the paltry data we have makes no sense at all!

 

[Spiderfish]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
For starters, if you look at the mass and diameter and density provided, they don't agree with eachother - if you assume two are as stated, you can't get the third value. So someone did their maths wrong when compiling that data for Grand Survey.

Perhaps it would be useful to make a note of the mistake and attribute it to some sort of clerical error within the Grand Survey.

Let us say you wanted to nudge your players towards Regina, but you don't want it to be so obvious David Blunkett could see it. Well perhaps some shiney arse at an IISS base a few parsecs away notices the discrepancy in the figures and pings some poor DD scout who was just stopping over for the free fuel at His Majesty's expense for the gash job of investigating the error.

Doubtless a rather dull seeming task but it gets the PCs in the right system and who knows what could happen there?

 

[Malenfant]

Well it'd be a pretty huge error for a trained Scout to make... kinda on the same scale as looking at a red dwarf like Proxima Centauri and reporting that it had the mass of the sun. If the Scouts are that incompetent then the PCs have will their hands full recataloguing the universe!

The reality is that someone at DGP did their maths wrong (or the data is copied onto the website incorrectly). Since probably none of the DGP stuff is canonical anyway, the easiest way to fix it is probably to just correct the data or replace it with something else.

 

[Spiderfish]

Well that is why I said clerical error Mal.

As you say it is unlikely a trained Scout would miss such an obvious mistake during the data collection process but it is perhaps possible that such an error could occur during later administrative processes.

 

[Merxiless]

That's a most wonderful explanation, Spiderfish.

A whole scenario could be developed from that, leading to perhaps all new discoveries, as more is uncovered.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Spiderfish:
Well that is why I said clerical error Mal.

As you say it is unlikely a trained Scout would miss such an obvious mistake during the data collection process but it is perhaps possible that such an error could occur during later administrative processes.

Then a desk clerk clearly needs to be shot somewhere.

It's funny how people react to this sort of thing. I mean, here we have data that most likely isn't even canonical, and yet instead of shrugging and discarding what is clearly flawed data, you still tried to explain it within the setting even though the explanation has to be somewhat contrived and unlikely to work at all. I know the default expectation in Traveller is to come up with wacky explanations for anomalous data, but sometimes what's provided to players is just plain wrong (like here), and in such cases I think it's even more futile to try to concoct some kind of in-game rational explanation for it.

This isn't an important, setting-shattering issue anyway - I was just amused to notice that even the most basic data we have on Regina is flawed, and if that was how it was in Grand Survey then it doesn't say much for the proof-reading and data-checking in that book.

 

[Hemdian]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
What other cards did you get with it, Hemdian? (EDIT: Usefully, the URL at the bottom of the Regina card is a dead link, and I can't find any info at all about them on the FFE site).

The 'trading' cards I got were: Regina (world), Reference (world), Depot (world), Norris (person), and MegaTraveller (advert for CD-ROM). There were also two postcards: one advertising the JTAS reprints on one side and all the reprints on the back, the other advertising T5 for June 2007 on one side and 'what is Traveller about' on the back.

I agree that the FFE site is very poor. At best it contains little information and has poor aesthetics, at worst what little information is there keeps disappearing in a perpetual series of redesigns. I get the feeling that whoever runs the site (Marc?) doesn't have a clear idea what he wants to do and is using the live site for experimentation. I think it might be offputting for someone considering getting into Traveller.

Regards PLST

 

[Spiderfish]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Spiderfish:
Well that is why I said clerical error Mal.

As you say it is unlikely a trained Scout would miss such an obvious mistake during the data collection process but it is perhaps possible that such an error could occur during later administrative processes.

Then a desk clerk clearly needs to be shot somewhere.

It's funny how people react to this sort of thing. I mean, here we have data that most likely isn't even canonical, and yet instead of shrugging and discarding what is clearly flawed data, you still tried to explain it within the setting even though the explanation has to be somewhat contrived and unlikely to work at all. I know the default expectation in Traveller is to come up with wacky explanations for anomalous data, but sometimes what's provided to players is just plain wrong (like here), and in such cases I think it's even more futile to try to concoct some kind of in-game rational explanation for it.

This isn't an important, setting-shattering issue anyway - I was just amused to notice that even the most basic data we have on Regina is flawed, and if that was how it was in Grand Survey then it doesn't say much for the proof-reading and data-checking in that book. </font>[/QUOTE]Well my first reaction actually was more along the lines of shrugging and saying "well it should probably be fixed but it would be easier and less time consuming to follow my SOP and just ignore it" before discarding it.

Infact it wouldn't even need to be discarded because I don't think I even have the relevant publications and if I do they would be in some tatty self-storage facility or a garage somewhere being eaten by rats or some kind of weird fungus.

Best to avoid working it out becase to paraphrase Ricky Gervais "It was all that thinking what
turned Steven Hawking mental".

 

[Liam Devlin]

As you said, Mal, you have gotten your answers, and the stellar data doesn't jive.

Looks like drawing board and ending this thread time.

G'night folks,

pleasant dreams...