A Thought On Vetting Weird Population Results.

[Lapthorn]

How about: worlds with Atm 5, 6 or 8, and/or with Starport A, roll Pop on 1D+4.

Other Atm with Starport B or C roll Pop on 1D+1.

All other worlds roll Pop on 1D-1.

As another alternative, I like the Mongoose rule that relates starport to population. The table is inverted from CT so that A is 12, etc. You can then roll Starport using (2D-2+Pop).

So then you could roll "garden" planet pop on 1D+4, other worlds on 1D-1, and roll for starports after pop.

 

[rancke]

I don't think it's possible to come up with a 100% automatic world generation system, nor do I think it's desirable, for two reasons:

First of all, no system can account for the astrographical neighbors nor the historical interactions. Like Thomas' example of the crappy system with the class E starport situated between two major worlds. It wouldn't have a sovereign population of 67 with a participatory democracy. It would have a class C starport with a support population of several hundreds who all worked servicing traffic between the two worlds under a type 6 government; it would, depending on the area's history, be a colony of one or the other major world or possibly a joint colony. (It would also have 67 squatters living their own lives outside the starport).

Secondly, I don't want to eliminate the possibility of odd worlds. I like the occasional low-population garden world and high-population hellworld and even the odd size 3 world with breathable atmosphere. Not to mention worlds and systems like Jack Vance's Big Planet and Rigel Concourse.

I just don't want them to be as common as the vanilla world generation system makes them.

For these reasons I think that any world generation system HAS to have some sentient being go over the results and change this bit and that to improve the raw results.


Hans

 

[jawillroy]

I don't think it's possible to come up with a 100% automatic world generation system, nor do I think it's desirable.... I think that any world generation system HAS to have some sentient being go over the results and change this bit and that to improve the raw results.


Hans

Hear, Hear.

Though, during the course of my latest slog through missile rules (I will never learn) I find this throwaway gem:

Special Supplement 3, p14: "Non-industrial worlds cannot produce missile components and they are not available."

Should this be taken as gospel, then either no world with a population less than 7 has any business having a type A or B port, or it should be established that not every A or B port is capable of building ships...

 

[aramis]

Hear, Hear.

Though, during the course of my latest slog through missile rules (I will never learn) I find this throwaway gem:

Special Supplement 3, p14: "Non-industrial worlds cannot produce missile components and they are not available."

Should this be taken as gospel, then either no world with a population less than 7 has any business having a type A or B port, or it should be established that not every A or B port is capable of building ships...

SS3 is well known to have issues.

 

[jawillroy]

SS3 is well known to have issues.

Oh such issues.

Oh our shattered hopes.

 

[nobby-w]

...
Should this be taken as gospel, then either no world with a population less than 7 has any business having a type A or B port, or it should be established that not every A or B port is capable of building ships...

For a Traveller game 'taken as gospel' isn't a terribly useful concept unless you're publishing something that might have might have clashes with other published material. Even then, this is getting pretty far into the realms of angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin, and something that you could quite safely frig to your heart's delight IYTU without needing anyone to make a canon-wide decision on it.

Rules like that might be relevant to a game of something like Trillion Credit Squadron, where they could affect the production capacity of a side and thus have a bearing on game balance. However, this is also something that could be adjudicated by the referee at the time.

 

[jawillroy]

Rules like that might be relevant to a game of something like Trillion Credit Squadron, where they could affect the production capacity of a side and thus have a bearing on game balance.

Or to a regular spacefaring Traveller campaign where ship repair or resupply (or replacement) might be an issue...

But point taken.

 

[salochin999]

GT:First In made a stab at this with the Maximum Sustainable Population Rating (MSPR). I think a version of this would be useful in more Traveller generation systems.

The other big flaw in the entire system is there is no consideration of population (or TL or starports) in relation to other nearby worlds.

For example, if you have two high population worlds J4 apart with a small, underpopulated world with a low grade startport exactly between them. In a real world economy there will be investment in improving the starport, building out infrastructure (increasing the TL) and more people arriving at the small world all the time.

A small population world in isolation is fine. But in the some circumstances the world becomes harder to explain. And we need a system of modifying population, starport, and TL based upon relationships to other worlds.

I agree it happens a lot and maybe too much and people should change whatever they like etc bur personally I like it.

In your example i'd make the world itself jump shadowed with settlers who moved there specifically to get away from it all and have the truck stop investment be a space station around a gas giant on the edge of the system.

For me things like this create the OTU I want where backwoods worlds can co-exist with large freighters traveling between Coruscant type worlds.

.

The other thing I'd mention is i take the world stats as the state of things when the game starts so a class A star port with zero population could be just after a virus - players land in a ghost town star port, bodies everywhere

and then the bodies start to move....

 

[nobby-w]

Or to a regular spacefaring Traveller campaign where ship repair or resupply (or replacement) might be an issue...

But point taken.

I don't mean that it isn't sensible - It would be very expensive to build and run a shipyard on a world that didn't have a substantial economy and industrial base in its own right. However, if you're rolling up a subsector for a campaign you can just frig this stuff manually to deal with the worst of the doesn't-make-sense stuff.

You could either frig it so the starport was sensible W.R.T. the world's economy or make up some reason why there's a shipyard and jump drive factory out in the middle of nowhere. In the latter case it might just be some special case (maybe some kind of skunkworks factory) so you wouldn't expect to see more than one or two examples of this situation.

I'm not sure you need to try and prevent it happening in the world generation system itself; you can just apply a reality check and tidy up the results later.