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Why I don't overly worry about system generation

because we keep finding new things that should not happen by current models.
Heck, right now I throw 1d6/2 for number of potential "worlds" Plus the presences of belts and gas giants... For the worlds I use a general affinity roll and resource roll to figure out the population. Leaving the details for later.
 
J1407b has entered the conversation.

I recall the early days on the TML, when more than one armchair astrophysicist would argue that the Traveller world and system generation process had results that were too weird. Since Hubble and other projects started finding exoplanets, the opposite is now true: Traveller is not weird enough. Or at least, the possible list of details to assign to Atmospheres A-C has grown.
 
J1407b has entered the conversation.

I recall the early days on the TML, when more than one armchair astrophysicist would argue that the Traveller world and system generation process had results that were too weird. Since Hubble and other projects started finding exoplanets, the opposite is now true: Traveller is not weird enough. Or at least, the possible list of details to assign to Atmospheres A-C has grown.
I'm old enough to remember when the theory was no GGs could exist in inner orbits. :eek:
 
I'm old enough to remember when the theory was no GGs could exist in inner orbits. :eek:
Remember when everyone thought that planetary systems around other stars would "basically look like ours" so we could just assume that what we Solomani have here in the Solar System was basically representative of everything everywhere else (copy/paste/done).

And then we started detecting exoplanets around other stars.

And after confirming THOUSANDS of exoplanets ... almost NOTHING looks like the planets we know about in the Solar System.
If anything, the Solar System now seems to be INCREDIBLY WEIRD compared to the types of exoplanets we've detected around other stars.



So if anything, the Rare Earth Hypothesis is actually starting to look more and more likely to be the case ... :oops:
 
J1407b has entered the conversation.

I recall the early days on the TML, when more than one armchair astrophysicist would argue that the Traveller world and system generation process had results that were too weird. Since Hubble and other projects started finding exoplanets, the opposite is now true: Traveller is not weird enough. Or at least, the possible list of details to assign to Atmospheres A-C has grown.
Traveller system gen is too weird... because it's weird is in the direction of "Insufficient mass for the atmosphere"...
while real world has given us "Way more hot gas giants than Traveller," "Rogue Planets which traveller lacks," and "Only T5 has brown dwarfs, and not enough of them." Not to mention "no provision for tidelocked worlds."
 
When I catch myself trying to force Traveller to be "realistic" I find all I end up doing is getting a headache. So I just accept that in the fictional place that is my Traveller game, things are the way they are. Then when I feel so moved, I toss in some of the stuff I read about here or just add a system if I want something. I know, horrible of me, but I just want to run around and have fun during my game time, not have to do work towards a Doctorate in Astrophysics or some other science field. 😄 :ROFLMAO::LOL:😄:)(y)
 
Captain Obvious (a fake name): I was looking through the Traveller rules and have just discovered that in the OTU water is wet! Isn't that amazing?

Light of CotI (another fake name): Now wait just a moment! Using current scientific formulas, water in our universe isn't actually wet.

Captain Obvious: I know water isn't wet. I'm actually looking through my Traveller rule books and the Traveller Wiki to find out what wet actually is and how it affects the game. I haven't found much on it yet, but I just think wet could be something interesting to throw at the players in my campaign to liven things up. I mean, if water being wet is important enough to mention, why are there no rules about how it affects the game? I just thought the concept of wet is kind of amazing, which is why I posted.

Back to reality.

There are hundreds (?) of posts of new scientific discoveries on the CotI and then discussions on how they make Traveller less 'real'. The way I see it, the Traveller Universe is internally real to it's self and doesn't really need to be compared to our universe or vise versa. The sciences, physics, and natural laws of Traveller are similar to our universe, but there are subtle differences. And that is what makes Traveller such a fun place to play.

Lastly, I actually enjoy reading most of the discoveries posted and linked in the forum, and sometimes I've gone looking for information for my own edification, and understanding of both the real world and Traveller. I'm bookwyrm and I like reading Sci-Fi. I also find the discovery of new scientific knowledge to be fun. And I do my best not to let my scientific knowledge interfere with my enjoyment of Sci-Fi or let my reading of Sci-Fi make me reflect badly on science in general. And the same goes for Traveller. The only really big change I've made to my system generation is to use the Gas Giant modifiers from the Gas Giant post in Freelance Traveller.
 
Captain Obvious (a fake name): I was looking through the Traveller rules and have just discovered that in the OTU water is wet! Isn't that amazing?

Light of CotI (another fake name): Now wait just a moment! Using current scientific formulas, water in our universe isn't actually wet.

Captain Obvious: I know water isn't wet. I'm actually looking through my Traveller rule books and the Traveller Wiki to find out what wet actually is and how it affects the game. I haven't found much on it yet, but I just think wet could be something interesting to throw at the players in my campaign to liven things up. I mean, if water being wet is important enough to mention, why are there no rules about how it affects the game? I just thought the concept of wet is kind of amazing, which is why I posted.

Back to reality.

There are hundreds (?) of posts of new scientific discoveries on the CotI and then discussions on how they make Traveller less 'real'. The way I see it, the Traveller Universe is internally real to it's self and doesn't really need to be compared to our universe or vise versa. The sciences, physics, and natural laws of Traveller are similar to our universe, but there are subtle differences. And that is what makes Traveller such a fun place to play.

Lastly, I actually enjoy reading most of the discoveries posted and linked in the forum, and sometimes I've gone looking for information for my own edification, and understanding of both the real world and Traveller. I'm bookwyrm and I like reading Sci-Fi. I also find the discovery of new scientific knowledge to be fun. And I do my best not to let my scientific knowledge interfere with my enjoyment of Sci-Fi or let my reading of Sci-Fi make me reflect badly on science in general. And the same goes for Traveller. The only really big change I've made to my system generation is to use the Gas Giant modifiers from the Gas Giant post in Freelance Traveller.
Again, Traveller is a sci-fi story sim not a space science sim.

Makes a good story and adventure, use it. Not fun or challenging fun, discard it.
 
Now wait just a moment! Using current scientific formulas, water in our universe isn't actually wet.

 

I now know why I've observed water behaving differently on different surfaces. I wonder if I'll think of what I leaned the next time I see water on a flat surface.

For those who are wondering, I do know that water is wet. My previous post is a humorous look at how some threads take a turn down a side road before connecting back with the original post.
 

As someone who paints models and makes terrain, I am very aware of "wet water" - the addition of just a little bit of surfactant really does help.
 
Again, Traveller is a sci-fi story sim not a space science sim.

Makes a good story and adventure, use it. Not fun or challenging fun, discard it.
The irony is that many think it "hard SF"... not hard space-opera. And it's not really even hard space opera in most editions.
Then again, For many, Traveller wasn't hard enough, and so Marc et al made Bk 6...
and Bk 6 sysgen was essentially in core in MT, TNE, T4, and (much expanded) T5.
 
Hell planet:
https://www.livescience.com/space/e...planet-with-an-atmosphere-that-shouldnt-exist

from the site:

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted a distant exoplanet that should be impossible. The ultrahot super-Earth, named TOI-561 b, is surrounded by a thick atmosphere of hot gas that blankets a planet covered by a broiling magma ocean.

Astronomers have been surprised by several of the hell planet's features, which don't match what we've found elsewhere in the universe. The discovery could reshape what we know about the types of planets that can form and evolve.

"What's really exciting is that this new data set is opening up even more questions than it's answering," study lead author Johanna Teske, staff scientist at Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington D.C. said in a statement from NASA.
 
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...oplanet-defies-the-rules-of-planet-formation/

Astronomers have found what appears to be one of the strangest known worlds in the universe. It orbits a type of rapidly spinning neutron star called a pulsar – this in itself is unusual, but it is far from the weirdest thing about the exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b.

Michael Zhang at the University of Chicago and his colleagues spotted the odd planet, which is more than 2000 light years away from Earth, via the James Webb Space Telescope, and immediately noticed that something about it was unusual. The spectrum of light they measured coming from it didn’t show the usual water and carbon dioxide we would expect to find on a Jupiter-mass world like this one, but instead molecules of carbon.
 
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...oplanet-defies-the-rules-of-planet-formation/

Astronomers have found what appears to be one of the strangest known worlds in the universe. It orbits a type of rapidly spinning neutron star called a pulsar – this in itself is unusual, but it is far from the weirdest thing about the exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b.

Michael Zhang at the University of Chicago and his colleagues spotted the odd planet, which is more than 2000 light years away from Earth, via the James Webb Space Telescope, and immediately noticed that something about it was unusual. The spectrum of light they measured coming from it didn’t show the usual water and carbon dioxide we would expect to find on a Jupiter-mass world like this one, but instead molecules of carbon.
I also want to give this Post a 😲. I automatically started wondering what other unusual/weird shaped planets are going to be found. As big as our universe is, if there is one planet like this, there just has to be a few more with mystifying/abnormal shapes.
 
I also want to give this Post a 😲. I automatically started wondering what other unusual/weird shaped planets are going to be found. As big as our universe is, if there is one planet like this, there just has to be a few more with mystifying/abnormal shapes.
if it has a non-zero probability, then it exists in an infinite universe.

but yeah, we've no idea what is really out there. always neat to see these things (and since I click on these, along with cat memes, my newsfeed tends to steer that way). and to repeat the title of the thread - why I don't worry about system generation. And leaning to it is not strange enough now!
 
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