Respectfully, you sound to me as if you should vote "yes" above.
S4,
Sorry if I came across as harsh, I didn't mean it that way. It's just that my ideas about UWP are too complicated to be encompassed in a two-option poll.
Generally speaking, Hunter's position is mine:
"Don't change the OTU". However, my idea of the OTU is extremely narrow. I don't count any UWPs in post-
CT materials for example. That leaves us with only
four detailed sectors: the Marches, the Rim, Corridor, and Gvurrdon(sp), plus a handful of subsectors like the Islands, Egryn, and Pax Rulin. Nearly everything else - especially the DGP sectors and maps - can and should be thrown out.
That being said, I'm for a very judicious retconning of some of the UWPs in the areas I isted above.
CT sysgen is over 30 years old and is very broken. The UWPs generated that sysgen - and generated by horribly flawed applications of that sysgen (I'm looking at you DGP and whoever created the Genie data set) - need to be corrected on a one by one basis.
What do I mean by "judicious" retconning? Well, if a UWP has
ever been featured in an article - that is if there are canonical materials beyond a UWP listing depending on said UWP - that UWP should be left alone regardless of how "daft" it may be.
After reading the linked threads, I am not worried that MJD is writing a Marches sourcebook for Mongoose. I
am worried that Dr. Constantine Thomas is handling the UWP updates however. While I will eagerly support any of his changes to the
physical side of sysgen and pre-existing UWPs, I have great reservation about his understanding regarding the
social side of the UWP. His quote about Class A ports on low-pop worlds is just one case in point while another occurred during a thread at SJGames.
Dr. Thomas was working on mapping trade routes for an entire sector. He began a thread to ask questions of the
GT:FT authors and get suggestings from others who had done similar projects. He mentioned in passing a "backwater" world that had a huge trade route passing through it that linked two subsectors. The situation seemed completely implausible to him, so he was going to retcon the world in question a high-pop, high tech system. He was going to change the world into something which made more sense; a high-pop "cosmopolitan trade entrepot".
The fact that he
already more than a dozen of those worlds in his sector; every high-pop world with a port of suffcient size would be a "cosmopolitan trade entrepot", never crossed his mind. The fact that he was going to retcon something
intriguing and
solitary out of existence never crossed his mind either.
I suggested that he might find it better to leave the world alone because it was
different and suggested some Real World parallels. He decided to make the change as the original world or my suggestions made little sense to him. I then wrote up a long post on the nature "tank towns" as they existed both historically and currently in the Real World, but decided not to post the material because I knew from experience I had no possibility of getting the basic idea across to him
whether he decided it had merit or not.
IN MY EXTREMELY HUMBLE OPINION. Dr. Thomas should be allowed to fiddle with the
physical half of the UWP to his heart's content while his work with the
social half of the UWP should be carefully vetted.
Have fun,
Bill
)
