T20 star system/world generation rules

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
...Traveller spacecraft are also much easier to land on planets than aircraft, since the former don't need a runway. Considering that any large patch of grassland...

You touch down in the savannah and smoke begins to surround your craft. It's the dry season and your landing has ignited the tinder dry grass

Originally posted by Malenfant:
...or desert...

Your craft settles to the surface and continues to settle, and continues, the sand is now up to the cockpit viewport, you seem to have landed in a sinkhole or quicksand

Which is just my way to say that not all surfaces are ideally suited for sitting several hundred tonnes of craft down on, especially with the canon tiny footprint of the landing pads meaning several thousand tonnes per square meter (just a guess)

If you park anywhere but solid bedrock you'll probably have problems, imtu at least

Anywho, my take on it, the difference between a type X and type E, has always been this:

A type X listed for starport means just what it says, no work has been undertaken to make safe landings in the system. There is no starport, no beacon, no nothing. The IISS has done, at best, a cursory survey, probably in passing with long range sensors from an adjacent hex, a long time ago. There is no traffic through the system on any regular schedule, if you go there you will likely be very alone for a long time.

A type E listed for the starport means the IISS has at least made a routine survey in the actual system and placed the minimal marker beacons to flag hazards and at least one solid landing point, and record the little traffic the system sees. There is a small shack, standard IISS porta-port, beside the natural or cleared bedrock in a relatively stable area. The shack contains the gear for the field beacon. There is no regular traffic but the place does see some visits, from the DD (detached duty) Scout assigned to do maintenance on the porta-shack, once a year, more or less.

But that's just been mtu, take what you like from it

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by far-trader:
Which is just my way to say that not all surfaces are ideally suited for sitting several hundred tonnes of craft down on, especially with the canon tiny footprint of the landing pads meaning several thousand tonnes per square meter (just a guess)

If you park anywhere but solid bedrock you'll probably have problems, imtu at least

I always wondered by ships in Trav had landing pads when they have antigrav and thruster plates to hover on...

 

[jgreely]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
So if you consider anything MWM says anywhere to be canon, there you go.

It will do until something better comes along, certainly. I think for MTU, what I'll do is allow my worldgen system to create X ports, but any that end up non-aligned (long digression on my alliance-generation system for random sectors deleted) are suppressed on the printed map because they're not part of a public survey. Aligned X's get changed to E if the rest of the UWP suggests a good reason for going there, otherwise they're considered restricted by that alliance.

Yes, it's funny how many Red Zones have starport X isn't it. "Strongly Discouraged" would be an Amber Zone.

I thought about that, but decided against it, because Amber and Red are assigned by TAS (at least in T20), not the survey teams who create the UWP.

-j

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by far-trader:
Which is just my way to say that not all surfaces are ideally suited for sitting several hundred tonnes of craft down on, especially with the canon tiny footprint of the landing pads meaning several thousand tonnes per square meter (just a guess)

If you park anywhere but solid bedrock you'll probably have problems, imtu at least

I always wondered by ships in Trav had landing pads when they have antigrav and thruster plates to hover on... </font>[/QUOTE]I always figured they threw off a lot of heat, igniting people standing too close type of heat so you had to shut down once you landed before you could go out or anyone could come close. On a vacuum world you could probably get away with it but if anything came too close, maybe near contact, POOF

There's also the problem of doing maintenance on the systems, you probably want them shut down and cool for most of that too.

 

[BetterThanLife]

Actually a Class E starport was originally defined, LBB2 as a "marked spot of bedrock" which would be a little more difficult to find than a bare patch of ground. After all on a world that is all swamp you wouldn't want to land and let the craft sink into the bog. (Without Yoda around to get it back for you.

)

Originally posted by Malenfant:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by J Greely:
Ah, but it's a surveyed bare patch of ground. Solar systems are extremely large, and if you don't have co-ordinates, you might spend months wandering around in a system looking for a flat place to land (years, if it's just an asteroid belt and a few gas giants). X would then mean that the survey team either didn't find one, or didn't bother to look because the place was so dull.

How hard can it be?!
You could find a flat enough place to land anywhere, you don't need to do a survey to find one. </font>[/QUOTE]

 

[BetterThanLife]

Hovering will also use fuel. And means the engine is running. Not neccessarily a good thing during ground refueling operations. (A Static charge may not make the reactor run away but it certainly might set the hydrogen in the fuel lines off.) Which would mean it was safe to skim a gas giant but not refuel a starship from a ground installation without the ship being grounded. (In more ways than one.

)

 

[BetterThanLife]

Up until the other day I would have made one other comment. I have never seen a Class X starport on an official Traveller map that wasn't interdicted. I saw one the other day. (But it is the only one I have ever seen.)

Ley Sector, Gamma Quadrant, On the Reaching Arm main. (Makes even less sense.) Matarishan Subsector, Adigigi 1523 X200441-8. It is an airless, waterless rock. Perhaps the surface is unstable. (Like landing on shale.)

 

[Malenfant]

Still... fly over any planet that isn't a 100% waterworld, and it is 99.99% likely that you WILL find a patch of bedrock to land on somewhere (especially if you're smart enough to know a swamp from the air when you see one ).

But the actual point is... why would having an X starport mean you suffer a -4 TL? You don't need interstellar trade to have high TL. Samiqys manages to have a TL of H (17), and still has starport X after all. (in fact, a high TL and starport X may mean that the local technologies are not even compatible with Imperial technologies).

 

[jgreely]

Originally posted by Bhoins:
Up until the other day I would have made one other comment. I have never seen a Class X starport on an official Traveller map that wasn't interdicted.

There are 19 "X without R" in Gateway to Destiny, according to Flynn's transcription of the data: 1 in Crucis Margin, 2 in Gateway, 11 in Glimmerdrift Reaches, and 5 in Ley.

Of them, I rather like the two extremes: Cinder (2140 X710200-9) and Nadia (1526 X766778-0), both in Gateway Sector. One has a hundred people living in a near-future anarchy on a pretty dismal planet, and the other has ten million stone-age savages living on a perfectly wonderful world in which the balkanized governments have managed to agree on universal sword-control.

I don't know how accurate my SEC file for The Spinward Marches is, but all of the X ports in it are also R. Not all R have an X, though (2 C, 1 E). That would make the "X implies R" pretty darn canonical for CT, but in T20 you have to deal with official maps where only 5 of 23 X worlds are also R (the other 6 R's are D or E).

-j

 

[Malenfant]

Cinder (2140 X710200-9)

That's an odd UWP. Did something happen there to blow off the planet's atmosphere? Or is it in the inner zone or something? The lowest atm a size 7 world should have in the standard UWP generation system is 2, not 1.

 

[jgreely]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
That's an odd UWP. Did something happen there to blow off the planet's atmosphere? Or is it in the inner zone or something? The lowest atm a size 7 world should have in the standard UWP generation system is 2, not 1.

Yup. Jumped right off the page at me. It was apparently like that in the MegaTraveller version of Gateway as well, except it had Pop 0 then. There's no writeup in the current book to explain how it got that way, though.

I found a similar one in my Spinward Marches data: A800231-A (Binges, 1635).

-j

 

[Malenfant]

I think the only way the Marches on can be explained is if the primary star is a white dwarf - maybe Cinder might work like that too. WDs have a habit of blowing off atmospheres when they form after all. Cinder might still be volcanically active and that might be why it has a trace atmosphere.

 

[jgreely]

No luck.

Binges is listed as "F0 V", and Cinder as "A7 V".

-j

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by J Greely:
No luck.

Binges is listed as "F0 V", and Cinder as "A7 V".

I wouldn't trust the star data in any official UWP anyway .

Let me put it this way, if you want to make the system more reasonable, then set the primaries as WD stars. The planets were formerly in the Middle Zone of the system (between habitable zone and snow line) and had their atmospheres stripped during the transition from red giant to WD. In the process of mass loss, their orbits expanded outwards, so they're now frozen solid and are well within the outer zone (probably 3 - 4 AU from the WD).

 

[far-trader]

Wouldn't it make more sense in these cases to presume that the error was made in the generation or transcription of the base UWP? If by the rules such a result is impossible then the most logical deduction is that the mistake is in the UWP not the Stellar type.

 

[Malenfant]

That'd work too.

But that said, these are examples of worlds that you could actually find around WDs. You could expect to find large, massive terrestrial worlds without significant atmospheres there, and you can't usually generate those in the current UWP system. So why not highlight them as such?

 

[jgreely]

Malenfant, how's this for an explanation of the "X but not R" systems in the published Gateway data: on p377 of the T20 book, where X is defined as "No provisions have been made for any ship landings.", change it to "This system has never been directly surveyed, so there is no known starport. Its Population, Government, Law, and Tech Level codes are based on second-hand information."

Which would make Earth an X, unless some of those UFOs were real.

-j

 

[Malenfant]

Starports are built after worlds are surveyed though.

I dunno. I just say "attempt no landings here or else" and leave it at that.

 

[jgreely]

I'm trying to find the smallest rule change that clears up the inconsistency, and I don't like the "stay away or else" idea, because it overlaps substantially with red zones, as you pointed out. And while I can easily accept the MWM quote as canon for other editions, especially given the Spinward Marches data, existing QLI products make it a problem for T20. If upcoming products are being designed with the same assumptions as the rulebook and Gateway to Destiny, your change would "stick out more", if you see what I mean.

It doesn't mean your version is bad or likely to cause fighting in the halls at GenCon (speaking of which, anyone else going to SoCal GenCon? we're running a big D&D/MasterMaze event), simply that I think it wouldn't be the best OT(20)U rule.

-j

 

[chrisr]

How many of these starport X worlds without red zones are within the imperium?
I think any X with a population should automatically be zoned within the imperium, red indicating a possible emerging society. Any xenophobic populations would be amber zones instead.