Transparantly Bogus Rationale

[atpollard]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Some folks seem to think that realism or a setting that makes sense will get in the way of their fun, but it really doesn't at all. It doesn't matter to the game if you land on a habitable planet orbiting a blue supergiant or on one orbiting a sunlike star.

Please correct me if I am wrong since I have only done a little reading on this subject, but a completely realistic “sector” WOULD drastically reduce the number of habitable worlds and alien life forms. Stars should be further apart in our neighborhood of the milky way – fewer stars per sector. Many of those stars will not support an earth-like world (unstable stars will destroy all life and render an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere almost impossible). Of the planets in the habitable zone of a stable star, most will have toxic atmospheres (lots of ammonia and methane and things like that).

My point is not to get all of the details exactly correct, but to point out that at least some fudge of realism will be needed to avoid a lot of worlds that require a space suit to survive. Complete realism would alter the “feel” of the Imperium.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

That's the reason for Marc's reluctance to fixing the world/system generation rules - doing so would change the OTU beyond all recognition. A case of having to destroy the universe in order to save it.

The "least bad" rules are TNE, which fix some of the Bk6 problems.

 

[Jeffr0]

What's the least you have to do to Book 3 to get rid of the worst offenders?

 

[Space Cadet]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Traveller is full of TBR's that we are constantly either defending or trying to pull down for the sake of "realism." Why not decide whether it is a fun part of the game and get over it, perhaps even play the game instead of trying to run it down?

Because in Traveller's case, that's not all there is. Prime example - book 6 has a whole section on astronomical data. If planetary systems are supposed to not care a jot about realism, then why bother to present data on luminosities and temperature formulae and star sizes and types and so on in the first place?

Traveller's schizophrenic like this. It tries to make tech sound realistic when it's not, it tries to make planets and stars sound realistic when they're actually not, it tries to make trade and economics sound realistic when they're not... if it's one then it shouldn't pretend it's the other - that's what causes the dissonance here. </font>[/QUOTE]So its either hard science fiction or Dungeons & Dragons eh?

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Somethng to consider if you want to make the game realistic, you have to consider biology as well as star system generation.

(Sorry to be a pedant here, but please bare with me.)

In the vast majority of cellular life on Earth, the cells have mitochondria in them. Mitochondria are the cells powerhouses, manufacturing adenosine triphosphate to chemically power the cell itself in an efficient manner. Now, current theory shows that the mitochondria used to be a seperate bacteria that had developed a symbiotic relationship with a single-celled critter far in the past. This symbiotic relationship proved to be so beneficial that it became the dominant structure for cells on Earth. Life that is a higher order than a slime mold can't exist without mitochondria.

Now, mitochondria is considered an important evolutionary fluke, a lucky break for life. There is no guarantee that this same lucky break happened elsewhere. So, no mitochondria, no higher forms of life because the individual cells can't produce enough energy.

Worlds with life may have single-celled critters, but not much larger. No tribbles, no groats, no aliens.

Not much of a fun setting for a game.

 

[Space Cadet]

Originally posted by atpollard:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Malenfant:
Some folks seem to think that realism or a setting that makes sense will get in the way of their fun, but it really doesn't at all. It doesn't matter to the game if you land on a habitable planet orbiting a blue supergiant or on one orbiting a sunlike star.

Please correct me if I am wrong since I have only done a little reading on this subject, but a completely realistic “sector” WOULD drastically reduce the number of habitable worlds and alien life forms. Stars should be further apart in our neighborhood of the milky way – fewer stars per sector. Many of those stars will not support an earth-like world (unstable stars will destroy all life and render an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere almost impossible). Of the planets in the habitable zone of a stable star, most will have toxic atmospheres (lots of ammonia and methane and things like that).

My point is not to get all of the details exactly correct, but to point out that at least some fudge of realism will be needed to avoid a lot of worlds that require a space suit to survive. Complete realism would alter the “feel” of the Imperium. </font>[/QUOTE]A more realistic sector would also be three dimensional. With fewer habitable planets, you need a more capable jump drive with a Jump-1 capable of 50 parsecs, Jump-2 100 parsecs, Jump-3 150 parsecs, jump-4 200 parsecs, jump-5 250 parsecs, and jump-6 300 parsecs. You would draw a map that excludes alot of junk stars without habitable planets, and if you ignore all the non-habitable planets, you might as well ignore them all. There is no reason to have a city under a dome for example, no reason to live on a non-habitable planet when you can just skip over it to the next habitable planet. All the planets in this setting that the PCs will be concerned about will tend to be Earth clone worlds. In one respect the Star Wars Role Playing Game is more realistic than Traveller. The Star Wars setting is spread out over an entire galaxy, skipping over millions of non-habitable planets. The action tends to move from one planet that can support human life to another, they don't even bother to map out where each of the Star Wars planets are in the Galaxy, they simply have travel tables which determine how much time is spent in hyperspace to go from one planet to another. Traveller could likewise adopt travel tables, or jump tables which have a bunch of stars and list how many of each typ of jump it takes to reach each.

On second thought, maybe there is a role for non-habitable planets. Some times the distance between two habitable planets will require more than one jump to get there, in that case, you need a few star systems with non-habitable planets as places in which to refuel.

 

[Space Cadet]

Here's an interesting idea. Lets say we redefined the jump drive such that a jump one travels 1 unit of distance in a week and jump-2 goes 2 units. We don't precisely define what a unit is, then we make a jump table for a bunch of stars with habitable planets.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Valarian:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Malenfant:
What gets me is that over 30 years, there's been little movement to officially correct these errors.[/qb]

Mal, rather than complain, release some fixed UWPs for the worlds/sectors that offend. This could be part of the fix project for the Spinward Marches or an ATU project.</font>[/QUOTE]I'd love to do that. But Marc's already vetoed the idea officially, and I'm not going to waste my time doing it for free for something unofficial. That said, I've done that for the worlds in the GT:Sword Worlds book (I helped with the worldbuilding in that) - and I really had to stretch to get some of them to make sense. Hence why I think it's better to just start from scratch.

I know it's a big project, but pick a sector and start. A gradual release sector by sector could redefine the OTU. [/qb]

It wouldn't though. Like I said, Marc's made it clear he has no interest in realism or in fixing the problems with worldgen at all, even though he's writing a new version of Traveller that provides the ideal opportunity to present those fixes.

 

[Malenfant]

Not much of a fun setting for a game.

Well, that all depends on whether you require aliens and abundant habitable worlds to have a fun setting. DP9's Jovian Chronicles has one habitable world (Earth) and no aliens, (it's set in our own solar system), and that's fun. Ditto for Transhuman Space. And DP9's Heavy Gear RPG is similar (it has habitable worlds, but then it has jump tech that would make rare habitable worlds easier to get to)

So I don't think you need either to have an interesting and fun setting to play in. You don't even need the aliens in Traveller - heck, between the Vilani, Solomani, and Zhodani you've got so much going on that aliens don't even need to be there.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Jeffr0:
What's the least you have to do to Book 3 to get rid of the worst offenders?

I don't have a book 3 here, but I got the basic generation table on p25 of book 6, is that the same thing?

Let's see... off the top of my head:

- relate the starport to population and location. It shouldn't be something random.
- have a way to determine which orbital zone the mainworld is in (Inner, Habitable, Middle, Outer), use that as modifiers for other stats too.
- depending on Zone, limit atmosphere types. If not Habitable, atm can't be 2-9 (breathable). Atm is 0 if size is less than certain value, depending on zone (size 3 is minimum in hab zone for atm 1+, size 4 is min for atm 4-9).
- tie population to physical characteristics. Billions of people are not going to be living on tiny airless rockballs - they're going to be living on the garden worlds.
- government has nothing to do with population size - make it independent.
- tweak tech level mods so that uninhabitable worlds with population definitely have enough tech for people to live on them. Also drop starport TL mods - to have an A starport, you should already have a high enough TL, it shouldn't give you more TL itself. Ditto for population - having tens of billions of people doesn't give you high tech, you NEED high tech to have that.

Stuff like that. Maybe you could just assume that all mainworlds are in the habitable zone, but a lot of M stars don't even have habitable zones that fit into Traveller's orbital definitions so that's a problem right there.

 

[Space Cadet]

First we generate the coordinates of each star. Lets allow for 2d20 stars per subsector, which is an arbitrary space.

I rolled 14 stars, so now we list them:
========== Coordinates
Name ===== (x,y,z) UWP
Routh ==== 1,0,8 = B98A554 8
Frankos == 7,3,3 = D752551 6
Borne ==== 7,2,4 = E76469C 3
Wethe ==== 7,4,2 = B784556 C
Nergal === 6,1,8 = D656420 2
Kopernik = 0,9,2 = B559565 C
Jordeen == 1,7,8 = B969966 C
Tylos ==== 8,7,1 = B78A300 B
Dandaria = 7,0,6 = E45867A 2
Ettel ==== 0,9,9 = A7886AE 7
Horpens == 1,1,0 = A753450 C
Lythor === 2,6,3 = A684100 A
Opeleen == 2,3,2 = A652726 7
Aberoth == 7,8,0 = B755264 7

To roll sizes, I use this table
3d6
Result = Size
3 ====== 4
4 ====== 4
5 ====== 4
6 ====== 4
7 ====== 5
8 ====== 6
9 ====== 7
10 ===== 8
11 ===== 9
12 ===== 7
13 ===== 6
14 ===== 5
15 ===== 4
16 ===== 4
17 ===== 4
18 ===== 4

Atmosphere types
1d6
result = Type
1 ====== 5
2 ====== 5
3 ====== 6
4 ====== 6
5 ====== 8
6 ====== 8

 

[Malenfant]

Tom, please post your ideas in a separate thread. We're just discussing things here, this isn't the place to dump huge tables on people with no explanation or justifications.

 

[atpollard]

Originally posted by Jeffr0:
What's the least you have to do to Book 3 to get rid of the worst offenders?

My personal opinion is that the "worst offenders" in Book 3 are small worlds with big atmospheres. Given enough time and the right machinery/organisms, I suspect that a methane/ammonia atmosphere could be transformed into something breathable - and most OTU worlds probably have thousands of years of history to make the planet a little more Earth-like even without the Ancients. At the most basic level, big worlds have lots of gravity to hold onto an atmosphere and small worlds have very little gravity to hold onto an atmosphere. The simplest fix would be maximum atmospheres for some of the planet sizes, but I don't have enough knowledge to know what size world is the minimum to hold a trace atmosphere, etc.

The second most common problem is low TL worlds with non-breathable atmospheres, but that just requires a minimum TL for some of the atmospheres to fix it.

 

[Jeffr0]

Mal's hit list sounds like the spec for GTIW's planetary generator.

I think First In had suggestions for cleaning this up in a fairly straightforward way... I'll have to dig it up again....

 

[Space Cadet]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Jeffr0:
What's the least you have to do to Book 3 to get rid of the worst offenders?

I don't have a book 3 here, but I got the basic generation table on p25 of book 6, is that the same thing?

Let's see... off the top of my head:

- relate the starport to population and location. It shouldn't be something random.
- have a way to determine which orbital zone the mainworld is in (Inner, Habitable, Middle, Outer), use that as modifiers for other stats too.
- depending on Zone, limit atmosphere types. If not Habitable, atm can't be 2-9 (breathable). Atm is 0 if size is less than certain value, depending on zone (size 3 is minimum in hab zone for atm 1+, size 4 is min for atm 4-9).
- tie population to physical characteristics. Billions of people are not going to be living on tiny airless rockballs - they're going to be living on the garden worlds.
- government has nothing to do with population size - make it independent.
- tweak tech level mods so that uninhabitable worlds with population definitely have enough tech for people to live on them. Also drop starport TL mods - to have an A starport, you should already have a high enough TL, it shouldn't give you more TL itself. Ditto for population - having tens of billions of people doesn't give you high tech, you NEED high tech to have that.

Stuff like that. Maybe you could just assume that all mainworlds are in the habitable zone, but a lot of M stars don't even have habitable zones that fit into Traveller's orbital definitions so that's a problem right there. </font>[/QUOTE]Type M stars do have habitable zones, its just that the smallest standard orbit that Traveller has is too big to fit within a Type M V and M VI habitable zone. I think the way to fix this is to have more orbits inside the orbit of Mercury. You can have orbits 0, 1, 2, and 3, but what about -1, -2, and -3? You can have orbits that always get closer and closer to the center of the star, you could use these same orbits for determining the position of satellites around planets. I think the orbits should basically be exponential in nature For instance for an exponent of 1.8, you have tha values:

-3 = 0.17, -2 = 0.31, -1 = 0.55, 0 = 1, 1 = 1.8, 2 = 3.24, 3 = 5.8 etc. You can always get lower negative numbers or higher positive numbers.

 

[atpollard]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Stuff like that. Maybe you could just assume that all mainworlds are in the habitable zone, but a lot of M stars don't even have habitable zones that fit into Traveller's orbital definitions so that's a problem right there.

Book 3 generates the main world with absolutely no reference to star class or orbits. The only data it gives on the solar system is a simple yes/no for gas giants present.

Your "habitable zone assumed" fix would work with Book 3.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by atpollard:
[QB]Given enough time and the right machinery/organisms, I suspect that a methane/ammonia atmosphere could be transformed into something breathable - and most OTU worlds probably have thousands of years of history to make the planet a little more Earth-like even without the Ancients.

IIRC the 3I has never really been into terraforming much. For one thing it's a mammoth, very expensive long-term project for even just one world. I know there's a world in the Solomani Rim (Hephaistos?) where a big deal was made about how it was being terraformed, so it's not a common event. Plus, don't forget you had the Long Night only about 1100 years ago - that'd be enough to throw a spanner into any long term terraforming project going on at the time.

At the most basic level, big worlds have lots of gravity to hold onto an atmosphere and small worlds have very little gravity to hold onto an atmosphere.

It also depends on how far the world is from the sun (ie the temperature) - Titan in our own solar system has a thick N2 atmosphere, but if you moved it from around Saturn to around Earth then it wouldn't be able to hold onto it at all.

The simplest fix would be maximum atmospheres for some of the planet sizes, but I don't have enough knowledge to know what size world is the minimum to hold a trace atmosphere, etc.

The density of the atmosphere isn't really the issue so much as the molecular weight of the gases it consists of. If you can hold onto CO2, then you can hold onto a little or a lot of it. How much is there depends more on the processes involved in the creation of the atmosphere (eg active volcanism).

The second most common problem is low TL worlds with non-breathable atmospheres, but that just requires a minimum TL for some of the atmospheres to fix it.

IIRC the minimum TLs are there, but not actually hardwired into the world generation - which means you can get daft situations like a TL4 world with a Insidious atmosphere.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by atpollard:
Book 3 generates the main world with absolutely no reference to star class or orbits. The only data it gives on the solar system is a simple yes/no for gas giants present.

Which is part of the problem - ideally one should generate a complete system from the ground up and then pick the most appropriate mainworld from that, then it'd make more sense as part of a coherent whole (e.g. a mainworld with atm C is certainly not going to be the best choice to live on in a given system - even its airless rockball moon would be more habitable than that). But obviously that's time consuming.

I think you do need some extra info there though. Just knowing the orbital zone adds a lot, I think.

Your "habitable zone assumed" fix would work with Book 3. [/QB]

I think that's the intention anyway. But then if you generate an airless rockball for a mainworld, it doesn't really make much practical difference where it is - it's still uninhabitable. So why stick to the habitable zone in that case?

Another problem is that atms 2-9 assume that there's oxygen present, and that's only going to happen for big enough worlds in or near the habitable zone. Obviously a icy body in the outer system can't have an earthlike atmosphere, but it can be generated nonetheless. Realistically in the rest of the system you're either going to have atm 0, A, B or C. (atm 1 is a weird one, it wouldn't cover Mars or Triton whose atmospheres are much thinner even than the Traveller definition of "trace").

Ideally what we need is a pressure-based classification, so for example atm 6 just tells you it's standard absolute pressure rather than a standard oxygen pressure specifically.

 

[atpollard]

I agree Malenfant, but taken at face value most of the book 3 atmospheres are assumed to be nitrogen/oxygen and within the liquid water zone with the bad atmospheres at the high atmosphere numbers and reserved for large worlds. While I abhor the tendency to say "the Ancients did it" to everything, it would not take too great a leap to assume that the ancients may have seeded worlds ripe for a reducing atmosphere with bio-engineered organisms that could speed the process from billions of years to thousands of years. Just a plot device to try to explain why most of the atmospheres within the habitable zone of stars transformed from Venus like to Earth like. It sounded a little better to me than "Boy, do we live in a lucky part of the universe or what?"

 

[Jeffr0]

I'm not sure how far you can change Book 3 and it still be Traveller. Maybe just a couple of small changes to eliminate small worlds with too much atmo or Insidious worlds with not enough Tech or too much pop.

The distribution of the Book 3 rules defines the feel of the Traveller "Galactic Empire", for better or for worse.