Originally posted by GypsyComet:
I, on the other hand, find it vaguely amusing that not one of you has seen fit to froth over the removal of Type VI stars from the stellar table, and the near-removal of white dwarves as Primary stars, since these obviously invalidate all that nice MT-era sector data...
I don't have any complaint about that since 1) it follows a similar change made in TNE, 2) it was done for legitimate realism purposes*, 3) I'd known beforehand (from posts on this board) that it was coming, and 4) I've never paid a whole lot of attention to the canonical stellar data anyway. FWIW I'm also not complaining about the fact that worlds in the Outer Zone can no longer have Atm A, or the reversion to CT's 2D-7+Atm (instead of MT/TNE's 2D-7+Siz) for Hydrosphere, or the various small changes on the T&C available cargo & passengers tables (though I did notice all of them).
*legitimate in that AFAIK Bk6 was written to approximate RL scientific understanding of the time, which has evolved in the years since Bk6 was published. No similar claim can be made for the population or starport rolls, which are both purely imaginary and were also deliberately** allowed to be 'unrealistic' from the start so as to provide a wide variety of interesting and unique world combinations for Travellers to visit, explore, and adventure on. Devising explanations for the 1 or 2 'anomalous' worlds that will likely come up in a hand-generated subsector is
fun and sparks valuable plot ideas -- the 'problem' only arises when trying to explain the
dozens of anomalies that come up when generating entire sectors (or domains, or the entire Imperium) on a computer. IMO the
real problem then lies not in the system itself but in those trying to use it for a purpose ("detail the
entire universe") for which it was never intended.
**I'm surmising that, but since starport type, physical environment, and population would so
logically be tied together, making them all mutually independent
must have been a deliberate choice. And that, I think, is really the core of my discontent with this rule change -- it doesn't represent an actual 'correction' of a previous error or oversight, but rather a shift in design-philosophy, away from "produce a wide possibility of results to inspire referee creativity" towards "produce something more or less scientifically plausible." In doing so it favors the gearheads, grognards, and armchair historians over those who actually
play the game, and moves Traveller a little further from its 'hard space opera' roots (Tubb, Anderson, Asimov, etc.), and is thus IMO a bad move.