Thanks, Thomas. Does it say what RUs are used for?
From what Whulorigan posted you are right to do so. It seems to be utter nonsens.
Hans
OTU Only: T5SS Semi-Official Thread
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Hans
Thanks, Whulorigan. It doesn't actually define RUs, it just tells us how they are calculated. But what are they used for?
Anyway, it's total nonsens (I'm sorry, it appears to be total nonsense; I suppose it's always possible that there's a perfectly logical explanation that I just haven't figured out). The only way a doubling of an RU score would indicate an economy twice the size would be if P was the population rather than the population level. There's no such thing as negative infrastructure nor negative efficiency. You can't have less infrastructure than none and you can't be less efficient than completely inefficient.
Hans
Why not? It depends how you define infrastructure.
I'm assuming it's the one that goes
in·fra·struc·ture noun \ˈin-frə-ˌstrək-chər, -(ˌ)frä-\
: the basic equipment and structures (such as roads and bridges) that are needed for a country, region, or organization to function properly
: the basic equipment and structures (such as roads and bridges) that are needed for a country, region, or organization to function properly
The infrastructure needed for a country (or world) to function properly can be non-existent, but it can't be less than non-existent. It can't be negative.
And if Marc Miller has decided to make up his own definition, he should do us the favor of telling us before exposing us to it, don't you think?
But hey, I'm perfectly willing to accept any definition that makes sense and works. Do you have one?
Hans
I think it does depend on the "SCOPE" of infrastructure from Marc's frame of mind. Perhaps, I'm going down a different road here, but I'd suggest one alternate view is infrastructure "owned" by the planet versus provided to a "shake and bake" colony on loan. The economic piece of this is not black and white. The world needs it and rents it. It is an economical crutch putting the world into the "red" financially.
What is the payoff period on atmosphere transformation (aka Terraforming)?
That definition you quoted doesn't preclude negative, which would be having less than the needed level.
No. I'm assuming it was imported from other places, but without expanding the explanation.
The best source I can find is the economics section (chapter 4) of T4's Pocket Empires. In this system the four factors (Resources, Labor, Infrastructure, Culture) are all positive. If Infrastructure exceeds Resources, the resources available are reduced, and can be reduced to 0. From this you calculate a GWP in "Resource Units", which is noted as an abstract valuation. The RUs are used to build infrastructure, starports, raise TLs, trade, and build armies.
There's been an implication these two items (T4's PE RU and the T5 RU) are the same. They're similar, but the randomizing effect of the "Resources" disconnects and overwhelms the other factors.
I think the real problem is the GWP calculation description in PE requires five pages of text and another of charts. Rather than 1/3 of a page given to the T5 RU calculation.
My point exactly. A planet may have several points in its history (Lemish after the Vargr attack, the Rape of Trin, for examples) where the infrastructure of basic survival is either destroyed, borrowed, or never existed. In this case, the world might die or suffer a drop in TL.
A negative number indicates a dependency on other worlds and a high risk of tech level collapse.
Not if the mechanism is to multiply by the negative infrastructure. That's total nonsense. The infrastructure isn't negative in such a case, it's positive but inadequate.
You can get negative results in rare cases if you calculate production (and the production is inadequate) and subtract consumption. But not in the numbers and magnitudes these rules imply (15 out of 36 worlds and up to the same amount of negative production as you can get positive production on the most productive of worlds.
Hans
And when that happens (and it certainly doesn't happen to 15 out of every 36 worlds at a time), production falls to near zero if infrastructure has fallen to zero (pretty unlikely that it would be quite that thoroughly destroyed, but it's possible, so let's assume it has happened). Consumption likewise falls pretty sharply to starvation level for the entire population, but it's still going to be a good deal more than nothing, so production does indeed become negative and outside help is required to avoid mass starvation.
Without infrastructure ever becoming negative.
Hans
Didn't PE express Labor in absolute numbers? Labor points in millions of people per LP or something like that1? See, that works. Expressing Labor as population levels don't work.
1 Half my T4 books (including PE) are AWOL. 
Hans
Drakon
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Okay, I have to ask this, this has been bugging me for some time.
Why can't we use credits? I mean, RUs are trying to model the planetary economy. There is already a unit built into the monetary systems to begin with, and that is really what monetary system do.
The purpose of all this is to model the government and military expenses necessary for plantery defense. To give players and GMs a measure of what the planets are capable of fielding.
We calculate ship prices in credits and megacredits. We do the same for crew salaries and, well, everything. There is a lot of accountancy in Traveller, and I feel that a simple conversion factor between RUs and credits would solve a lot of problems.
Why can't we use credits? I mean, RUs are trying to model the planetary economy. There is already a unit built into the monetary systems to begin with, and that is really what monetary system do.
The purpose of all this is to model the government and military expenses necessary for plantery defense. To give players and GMs a measure of what the planets are capable of fielding.
We calculate ship prices in credits and megacredits. We do the same for crew salaries and, well, everything. There is a lot of accountancy in Traveller, and I feel that a simple conversion factor between RUs and credits would solve a lot of problems.
Negative RUs may imply that the planet has nothing to contribute to an interstellar entity.
The Imperium would have to shell out a lot to protect the planet, assuming they feel it important enough to do so, because the world can't do it.
A glaring example that popped int my head: a red-zoned world.
The Imperium would have to shell out a lot to protect the planet, assuming they feel it important enough to do so, because the world can't do it.
A glaring example that popped int my head: a red-zoned world.
No, it leaves them as population levels. But that does make sense as long as the other factors (like Infrastructure) are in the same units/scale. PE does this and explains how that works. I'll need to run several examples to see what the range of values for the GWP(RU) looks like. I find I understand thing better when I try and find the limits of the values.
This is the other reason the RUs from T5 make no sense. There's no relation to anything else. It's a random number.
Hans I am not disagreeing that there is a problem. I'm not certain it's as surprising as we see. Certainly Marc did not generate the Marches with random numbers. Perhaps a guesstimate.
Everyone, generally:
1. Has anyone compared RU in Deneb and the Marches to Massilla or Core? It may be a sign of expansion coreward.
2. The negatives do not only come from disasters, but also from efforts to expand and grow beyond initial resources. This is not a steady growth. Changing the atmosphere of a planet is not a small effort under any circumstance. If that is what is occurring?
3. A negative RU is a subjugation factor. That world is completely dependent on 3I.
4. Credits would not cover the same view. They denote wealth or GNP, but not a comparison of ability to produce and be self sufficient.
Are you sure? I could have sworn PE got that right. I remember working on a play-by-email game set in the Sword Worlds in the Five States Era. I was going to use PE rules for the economy, except that I would use fewer people per labor unit (200,000 per unit IIRC) in order to scale the rules to the population levels in the Sword Worlds in that era.
I suppose my memory is playing me false, but I'm sorely puzzled since I don't recall having any problems with PE RUs nor making any rules changes other than the scale. You'd think I'd remember something like that.
But be that as it may, with the statement that a world with a production of 100 RUs has twice the economy of a world with 50 RUs, RUs becomes inescapably correlated with total population rather than population level. Think about it for a minute. Using population levels you get a situation where (the three other factors being equal) a world with 99 billion people has only twice the economy of a world with 100,000 people. Utter nonsens.
There are other things wrong with the definition, such as the almost total lack of influence of tech level on production (only influence is the adding of belts and gas giants to Resources at TL8+).
For the reasons stated above (and more) I find it impossible to believe that it can make sense. I'm willing to be shown otherwise, but it has to be something more than "I can't explain it myself but I'm sure it must be possible to come up with something". That argument has seldom worked for me and it isn't going to work for me here.
It creates unbelievable results. I just don't believe in a universe where 15/36 worlds subsidize another 15/36 worlds. Not inside the Imperium and certainly not outside interstellar states. It's something that could theoretically be true but would never plausibly be true. The fact that some worlds with negative RUs at the same time are worlds that receive very little or no interstellar traffic is just icing on the cake.
Hans
You seem to be implying that surely there must be some way to explain RUs rationally using those factors you propound. Without challenging any of those factors (which seem to make some sense individually), I don't think there is. But feel free to prove me wrong by providing a rational explanation.
Hans
Hans, Part of my message was a question to everyone. I believe, i did allude to alternative, none of which are in canon, explanations of the RU problems on a sector scale. That being mentioned, the macro viewpoint needs to be explained one step at a time.
Everyone,
Has anyone compared RU in a one sector versus another? Is approximately, 30-50% of the Imperium in a negative RU status?
Here is two more problem with the RU RAW in the T5 core book. It is entirely possible (though improbable) to generate a pocket empire, or a whole sector, where the negative RUs outweigh the positive ones. So how does this empire, or non-3I sector survive?
Second problem, the T5 RUs are clearly a snapshot in time, but with no rules to show how they change over time. What changes to make the RUs more positive or more negative. PE allows increasing RUs via trade, alter economic structures, etc.
I have the T5 Second Survey data, let me write a parser for the RU calculations and see what I can calculate out.
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