Astronomy

[Spartan159]

I have come to have (blasphemy!) doubts about the accuracy of the tables in both book 6 Scouts and GURPS First in, and so I have been attempting to bootstrap myself to a basic understanding of astronomy. All I can say at this point is arrgh, my brain. o: Is it possible for intelligence to decrease due to an increase in education? I am currently leaning toward using a combination of Book 6 Scouts and World Builder's Handbook, with some GURPS and T5 thrown just to confuse myself. I'm not looking to detail every world in the Traveller universe but I do want to know distances in AU such as habitable zones and jump shadows and basic world data beyond there is x belts, y GGs, and z other planets in the system. Mostly just venting here but if anyone wants to point me at some information I'm all for it. Most notably most of the information I've seen lists information for main sequence (class V) stars but I can't seem to find similar for the other classes. I have also put the book World Building by Stephen L. Gillett on my to get soonest list.

 

[GypsyComet]

CT Scouts is based on the assumption that orbital radius "naturally" drops into a pattern that matches our own solar system. it was already questionable when Scouts was published and has since been entirely discarded by Astrophysicists.

That said, it makes the system detail process a LOT easier to turn into a bunch of tables. For that reason alone, I assume, it remained the working assumption in later Traveller editions.

It is also worth noting that Traveller's UWP process, while receiving tweaks in various editions to remove some of the oddball results of gravity, has actually proven in this era of exoplanet surveys and discovery to be not weird enough. Worlds that routinely see rains of molten glass, gas giants that get so close to their star that they get incandescent, geologic structures we associate with silica being replicated by water ice, a young star with a snow line (the outside edge of the habitable zone, essentially) that is visible from dozens of light years away...

 

[mike wightman]

Traveller has been left behind by many real world science 'breakthroughs' - this is entirely understandable since the nature of science is to question and to come up with new theories and predictions for how this strange universe of ours works.

Astronomy is one of those areas where advances in understanding over the past twenty years has just about rewritten the textbooks.

I always use GURPS 4E Space for extended system generation and then convert to Traveller terms.

 

[tjoneslo]

I would second the suggestion of GURPS 4E Space.

As one of the long time GURPS Traveller playtesters one of the explicit instructions to come down from on high was "You must be able to this (e.g. create a star system) with nothing more than pencil, paper, and three dice (four function calculator optional)".

I sense (perhaps badly) that some of your frustration with First In (and GURPS:Space) may be from this limitation. So how much external compute power are you thinking may be used to generate star system?

https://github.com/makhidkarun/accrete2 -> Accrete is a very old program which generates planets using a 1980s understanding about planetary accretion processes. It creates some interesting planetary systems.

http://www.eldacur.com/~brons/NerdCorner/StarGen/StarGen.html -> An update to the accrete program, with a similar generated