UWP's for different eras
- Thread starter chrisr
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EvilDrGanymede
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TNE's the only conscious effort I've seen to change the social UWPs on a large scale.
I ponered a similar question when I saw 'Battle Beyond the Stars' again recently. In that, there's a 'mercenary planet' that is a seedy, decadent backwater world where all the mercs and bounty hunters used to gather. Eventually the people in the systems around them got fed up, moved their militaries in and booted them out of the sector, and the world that our hero find (having been sent there with outdated information) is long since abandoned.
It would be great if Traveller did this sort of thing.
As for physical UWPs, obviously the size won't change. Atmosphere and hydrographics certainly could change between the Ancient Era, Interstellar Wars era, T4, and TNE because of terraforming, rapid stellar evolution (if the star is massive enough), asteroid impacts... Though between CT and TNE you wouldn't find any significant physical changes - it takes thousands of years to register at least.
I ponered a similar question when I saw 'Battle Beyond the Stars' again recently. In that, there's a 'mercenary planet' that is a seedy, decadent backwater world where all the mercs and bounty hunters used to gather. Eventually the people in the systems around them got fed up, moved their militaries in and booted them out of the sector, and the world that our hero find (having been sent there with outdated information) is long since abandoned.
It would be great if Traveller did this sort of thing.
As for physical UWPs, obviously the size won't change. Atmosphere and hydrographics certainly could change between the Ancient Era, Interstellar Wars era, T4, and TNE because of terraforming, rapid stellar evolution (if the star is massive enough), asteroid impacts... Though between CT and TNE you wouldn't find any significant physical changes - it takes thousands of years to register at least.
RainOfSteel
SOC-14 1K
Well, one nice thing would be if the UWP contained a Year/Date entry specifying the survey date on which the data was collected. That way, you could have all worlds from all eras in one database, and then select by which date (or closest date, etc.) you'd like to see. You could even select all surveys for one world and see the change over time. The one thing this still can't do is show the difference between what the actual real & true data was on any particular date, and what the survey data was (so that mistakes by the surveyors are represented). To do that, the UWP would have to contain a Y/N (boolean) entry, where Y = true data (GM only), and N = human gathered (Surveyed Data). With this, you could see both the true changes over time, and the degree of accuracy of surveys.
daryen
SOC-14 1K
And, IMO, they botched it in the Spinward Marches. They did a great job with population, governments and things like that, but they went way too nuts on TL. I just don't buy that worlds which were incredibly static for a THOUSAND years would suddenly increase by up to FOUR tech levels in 70 years.
I do understand that population affects this. It is quite trivial for a low pop (4-) world to almost arbitrarily change its tech level in a decade. But on pop 6+ worlds, that is far, far more problematic. I have a hard time believing that there could be more than a general increase of one tech level, with a smattering of two.
(In fairness, I do want to say that their rules for a collapse transformation seemed to work well.)
daryen
SOC-14 1K
One thing you can look at is published history. I did some research on moving the Spinward Marches back a century (from 1105 to 1000) and there are lots of tidbits that can be used. The civil war on Joyuese. The nuclear war on Asmodeus. Entrope had a much better starport until bombed in the 4FW. A few worlds (e.g. Retinae, Esalin) were lost by the Imperium.
There are many more tidbits like this around.
Even though Hunter apparently rejected my submission, I still had fun looking for the information.
Andrew Boulton
The Adminator
It's actually 150-200 years - the data is from the Second Survey, which was published in 1065 (and begun in 995).
daryen
SOC-14 1K
It's actually 150-200 years - the data is from the Second Survey, which was published in 1065 (and begun in 995). </font>[/QUOTE]OK, that is true. But my point still holds. The vast majority of the worlds in the Spinward Marches hadn't done diddly squat technologically for a thousand years, but then, as a group, the whole sector suddenly lurches forward in a comparatively short period of time.
Don't get me wrong, some of those worlds should show increases, and there should be a general increase of a full tech level across the Regency and Darrian worlds. But what is shown is just way too much, especially considering how much money the Regency is poring into other endeavors.
DaveShayne
SOC-12
Here are a few ideas off the top of my head.
Most of these guidelines are built arround aging planets so you will need to reverse them to find the statistics for the earlier version.
I'll ignore physical stats because except in very catastrophic circumstances there won't be any changes in those that will come even close to being a rounding error on the scale of the UWP. An atmosphere might gain a taint because of some major ecological hiccough but that's about it.
Population.
Depending on the sector involved populations might be advancing, stagnating, or rarely (I suspect) retreating. For the Spinward Marches you can assume that most populations have been advancing. For the Solomani Rim and Core most planetary populations should be stagnant. I can't think of a good candidate for sector wide retreat of population prior to MT/TNE but individual worlds may prove inhospitable.
How much should you adjust populations by?
Assuming a 1% growth rate the population will double every 70 years. So over 200 years it wouldn't be teribly out of wack for populations to increase by any factor up to about 10 (one full digit in the pop code) although doubling or quadrupling might be more likely.
For smaller worlds (say pop 6 or less) growth or shrinkage may be more affected by imigration and emigration than birth and death rates so at the lower reaches much more dynamic changes (both up and down) are likely.
Government.
Almost any planets government can radically change in 200 years but can also stay largely the same.
Some governments are likely to evolve in more or less predictable ways.
Gov 1 is likely to move toward 3, 5, or 8
Gov 2 is likely to gravitate toward 4
Gov 4 and 5 may tend toward 8 (or may not)
Gov 8 will tend to degenerate into 9 or perhaps even to C
Gov A by definition evolves into B
More radical changes are likely the result of revolution and will tend to be somewhat less common than evolutionary change.
Law level.
I suspect Law level will tend to increase with time but as in population the reverse is also possible. If a planet's government changes it's law level should change a similar ammount plus or minus one depending.
Tech Level.
In general you can assume 1 TL difference between 1000 and 1100. This is only a hard and fast rule at TL 14/15 at lower techs it's possible that technology will advance faster (or even slower.) Tech progres should probably be more rapid in sectors with populations that are advancing and slower in stagnant and retreating sectors.
Starports.
Are probably somewhat static though they will tend to advance if they change at all. They are more likely to expand if population and tech level are also rising than if both are stagnant.
As always YMMV
It's actually 150-200 years - the data is from the Second Survey, which was published in 1065 (and begun in 995). </font>[/QUOTE]The evidence for that is contradictory. There is at least one specific world where the writeup notes that the UWP is from 1065 and that things have changed (It's in the Pretoria subsector and was part of the background data in the first TD adventure). There may be others that I'm not aware of. But in almost all other instances the data appears (to me, anyway) to be current as of the date of publication of the specific module. That certainly makes the most sense for mainstream worlds. I can see where the Scouts might only update information about backwater worlds every other decade or so, but I consider it extremely unlikely that data on worlds like Mora, Regina, and Rhylanor would be more than a year out of date.
Also, saying that the UWPs are 30 years out of date may give a lot of leeway for interpreting them but it also makes them much less usefull. Think of the number of revolutions and government reforms you can have in a generation.
Hans
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