Common Sense: Evaluating UWPs

[Flynn]

Good afternoon, All,

I'm starting this thread to ask you what you look for when you are evaluating UWPs for logical or realistic numbers. I've been working "off and on" on a sector generator, and am looking to develop some logic that will evaluate the UWPs it generates, to create somewhat reasonable UWPs for the sectors.

For that, I need the help of those more experienced at such than myself. I've had the usual exposure to items such as JimV's Alternate World Generation method, and of course, I've been working with Malenfant on his More Realistic Stellar Data Generation method. But I'm hoping to discover a few more things that can just add the final touches that might make the generator that much more reliable and usable.

For example, I'm looking at implementing a check against a minimal TL needed to survive based on a world's atmosphere. Inspired by Galactic, Hard Times, and TNE, I see how this makes a lot of sense to me, and produces more logical UWPs. Kinda prevents those "Barbarians on a Vacuum World" scenarios that pop up too often with straight random generation.

I'm also including Amber Zone and Red Zone generation based on a combination of law level and government codes, ala MT's rules on the process.

I'm wondering if there's other things I could put into my evaluation subroutine to check and possibly even correct UWPs that might not make sense at all, but are possible under the UWP generation system(s) that are out there.

Thanks in advance for any observations or assistance you might be willing to share,
Flynn

 

[Malenfant]

There are a few things to consider regarding atmospheres... for starters, worlds that are about size 2 or less shouldn't be able to hold onto any kind of atmosphere if they're in the habitable zone - they're too small, even if they have mercury-like densities (about 5500 kg/m3).

I did some calculations on one of the JTAS boards (which I foolishly didn't save for myself, so I can't access them anymore) for Chris Thrash that IIRC concluded that worlds in the habitable zone would not be able to hold onto N2 and O2 unless they were about size 4 or greater and had earthlike density. I'll have to recalculate all that, probably, unless someone from JTAS can repost them here. It was quite the eyeopener though.

You should certainly never be able to find a world that is size 1 that has any atmosphere at all (especially not a standard one). Even if they're terraformed, they're going to be leaking oxygen and nitrogen into space very rapidly indeed. One of these worlds came up in the Sword Worlds book - Enos - and the only way I could explain it there was as a "cannonball" world; the remnant of a larger world's inner core with a very thin veneer of silicate rock on top, that had all the really dense (and rare) elements in it (the average density of the world had to be about 22,000 kg/m3 to hold onto oxygen in its atmosphere!). That explanation might work once, but no way is it going to happen as many times in Charted Space as the UWP generation system would have you believe.

 

[Flynn]

Mal,

How would you state these suggestions in game mechanics terms?

If Size<3, then Atm can not exceed 3?

If Size=1, then Atm=0? or at most Atm may not exceed 1?

Thanks,
Flynn

 

[Malenfant]

I'll have to crunch the numbers again to be sure...

However, if size=1 then atm is definitely 0 though (even atm 1 is too much). Unless your mainworld happens to be in the frozen depths of the outer system (where it's cold enough for it to hold onto gases), but IIRC it's assumed that the mainworld is in the habitable zone.

 

[Michael Taylor]

I know we can't fix Canon UWPs. My biggest concern in Canon is Stoner (100A??-E) having 80 billion population. I'm having to think up all kinds of excuses about why there are so many people on Stoner while writing the Grand Duchy Sourcebook.

 

[Malenfant]

More than 10 billion people on a planet is utterly ridiculous - especially on a tiny vacuum-baked rockball where there can be nowhere near enough food-growing resources to support that population (yeah, they could import it, but the traffic would be enormous, and the whole planet could be held to ransom very easily). Heck, with Stoner you'd have to have many cities that had the same population of the entire USA (or more!).

maybe one could tweak things by saying that pop 8 was population in multiples of 100 million, pop 9 wsa population in multiples of 500 million, and pop A was population in multiples of 1 billion? I mean, any pop A world is crazy really.

 

[Michael Taylor]

I agree, but when I talked to MJD about it he said pop A is canon for Stoner, and that's it. Perhaps bringing the index back to 1 (ie: 10 billion) would be the most sensisble thing to do - at least the first part of the UWP is being left as it is.
But, canon is canon, and Stoner is 80 billion, regardless of how I look at it. What it does do, however, is give the Duchy, (along with Gazala which is also a 20 billion pop world with 1 size) a total population of 102billion, or 36% of the entire population of the Glimmerdrift Sector. This means the duchy can afford all kinds of naval gear (esp SDBs) to defend its vast fleet of mega-freighters attempting to feed the teeming billions on Stoner.
It's all a bit of a problem however.

 

[Malenfant]

Could that be the population of the SYSTEM, rather than just the mainworld? That might be a bit more sensible...

 

[Straybow]

Not so fast. Impossible depends on tech for one thing, and Traveller assumes tech considerably beyond our present means. The stretch to superdense population might not be excessive.

Earth has around 6 million mi² cultivation. Hydroponics and such are at least 50-100 times the productivity per unit area. A 1000mi asteroid is about 3.2M mi² surface area. Room to spare.

Likewise, a population density equivalent for a major city expanded to the surface of an asteroid can easily reach 80G. NYC is 8M in 320 mi², times 10,000 for the surface area of that 1000mi asteroid is exactly the right size.

Hmmm, maybe that's no coincidence...

Expensive? Perhaps initially. Different mindset from normal sub-aerial planetary life? You bet. Same can be said for lots of things in any Traveller milieu.

 

[Morte]

Some things I always look for:

1. Comparison to the neighbours. Why would people (not) live here, given that the world next door is(n't) as attractive? Seems like trav's most fundamental worldgen failing -- it ignores the other worlds.

2. Starport grade vs population and/or TL.

3. Population vs atmosphere. In particular I want to see the -2 for non-breathables applied. [Really, I want to see the population raised to the power 0.8 when the atmosphere is not breathable, so that it will rein in the hi-pops without wiping out the lo-pops.]

4. The bigger political picture. If this world is part of a pocket empire which is described as a "bastion of democracy", it should probably have government code of 2 or 4. If it's part of a "wealthy trading federation", it should probably nor be "Poor". And so on.

 

[Flynn]

Morte,

I understand your concerns regarding neighbors and such, particularly living on more habitable worlds as opposed to living on rockballs, and a little bit of that can be done to some extent. In fact, JimV's alternate world generation points that out by modifying population based on the world's physical conditions. All of this goes without looking at any of the worlds about it, and operates on the assumption that people live where it's more comfortable.

I could implement a MSP ala TNE, that would do the same thing, and cap out the population on nonhabitable worlds. Hmmm... must consider which way I want to approach this issue.

As for starports, generating starports after determining population is just a good idea. Again, JimV's method modifies starport rolls based on population. This approach is mimiced, though albeit in a modified way, in T20's world generation. So I definitely think that using a process that modifies population based on physical conditions, followed by starport selection modified by population, will give me more reasonable results before I even have to evaluate the UWPs.

As for the bigger political picture, this assumes that I want to create the logic that defines how to identify and create pocket empires into my sector generator. While that's cool, I think that's the realm of the Referee, and besides, I don't know how to program all the variables I look at into the generator. Alas, I won't be automating your last point.

But I do appreciate the other feedback you've given me, and it confirms the pathway I'll be taking to create reasonable UWPs.

Thanks,
Flynn

 

[Flynn]

Michael,

Regarding the Stoner issue, I happen to agree with Straybow. At TL14, you've got 80 billion people living like sardines, probably under the surface of the rockball, and using the benefits of such a high Tech Level to provide food stuffs for the populace. I think it's tight, and there's little to no privacy, but I think it's doable... but it requires a lot of underground hydroponic farms... lots and lots of such farms.

Given it's high law level and the fact that it's a Charismatic Oligarchy, I'm assuming that the Stoner family line encourages a caste system that rewards nobility, and provides enough happy juice as part of the food supply to keep people from getting too edgy. Privacy is a rare quantity, and people are rarely, if ever, truely alone.

Think very large cities the size of the Dallas-Ft Worth area, or Houston, or San Antonio, or Los Angeles, etc, that run deep below the world's surface, with an average population density of Tokyo or worse. The rest of the world's surface and what lies beneath it are pretty much dedicated to the hydroponics farms that supply food and refresh the oxygen.

Vast areas would be given over to huge hydroponic farms, and providing these manufactured food stuffs is one of Stoner's biggest industries. However, because of the size of the population, there's very little left to export.

Or let's look at it more statisticly:

Stoner's world surface is approximately equal to 4 X pi X the square of the radius, or 4 X 3.1415927... X (500)^2, which is equal to 3,141,592.65-ish square miles.

Given a population of 80,000,000,000, that's a density of 25,464.8-ish people per square mile. (For those more comfortable with the metric system, that's 9836.2-ish people per square kilometer.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density

Notice that Monaco and Macau are both more densely populated, by far.

Okay, now we've established that the people will fit on the world, using Real World data to support it. Now to see if they can survive...

In 1990, the US population was dependent on 964,469,626 acres (or ~39,03070.1 square kilometers) to feed a population of 248,709,873. That's roughly ~0.015693266 sq. kilometers per person.

Hydroponics or similar methods can provide the food source (and oxygen replenishment) necessary to support this world. A quick glance on the internet shows that, at TL8, hydroponics ranges from 3 to 20 times more efficient than surface farming in many cases, sometimes more. Assuming that by TL14, hydroponics might be 100 times more efficient (and that's a conservative estimate, I'm sure). That's ~1.5693266 X 10^-4 sq kilometers per person.

For Stoner, that's ~12,554,612.8 square kilometers needed to support a population of that size.

The surface area of Stoner (3,141,592.65-ish square miles, or 8,133,209.52-ish square kilometers) is definitely smaller than the above. That implies that the hydroponics levels are stacked, just to make them fit. Since the measurement is in square kilometers, we haven't even taken layers into account for farming purposes, so that's very easy to picture 100 levels of farm, reduce the surface area requirements by 100, or ~125,542.13 sq km. That leaves a surface area of 8,007,667.39 sq km for Stoner's population. That's still a reasonable population density of ~9990.41 people per square kilometer.

I'd dare say that the population refers, then, to the system, including orbital communities, etc., and Stoner probably imports a significant amount of food stuff and other life support materials.

Either that, or those farms run deep, over several hundreds of levels, and are extremely efficient...

Whichever works best for you.

Hope this helps,
Flynn

 

[Morte]

A thought...

The UN estimated back in the 70s, working from fundamentals of land gradient/drainage and so on, that Earth could support a population of about 130 billion provided they lived on cereals or about half that if they wanted some meat once in a while.

That was at TL7, and the figures came from an agency with a long and inglorious history of scaremongering over environmental/population issues to pump its own budget.

So I'd have no problem believing in the abstract that Stoner could survive at TL14. The hard part is how you portray it as specifically working.

[Aside: I've long suspected that the reason we don't see many setting books that describe every world on the map -- by far the most desired approach in a recent JTAS poll -- is that bottom-up worldgen is so broken that authors simply can't do it.]

 

[Flynn]

Out of curiosity, Morte, how would you design a top-down worldgen?

(I know it's off-topic, but the results may tie back into how to evaluate common sense UWPs.)

Thanks,
Flynn

 

[Malenfant]

Well, the default Traveller bottom-up worldgen (ie roll dice to get a UWP that is supposed to make sense) is broken - that doesn't mean it's impossible to make such a system that could work though .

I presume top-down means "take an existing UWP and explain it". Which is a lot harder anyway, especially when it's broken in the first place!

 

[Nearside]

Harder, maybe, but interesting and inspiring...

 

[Psion]

Okay, you have all said this already, but let me distill down what I view as the biggest problem with the UWP system:

Population is not dependant upon habitability.

Now I can see exotic exceptions, but I'd be for a random system that makes them the minority. Such as "if atm not habitable, reroll any results of population over (arbitrary) 1/2 size. Keep 2nd result."

As for Stoner:

First off, I predict the name being a problem in groups with low guffawing thresholds. (Dude! Where's my starship!)

Second, is this Stoner guide going to be an official thing? Has much been said about it in Epic 1? Because really, in that high tech a community, I could see such a world having large chunks of population be in B5 style orbital cities. (I know it's not canon anymore, but the World Builder's Handbook included orbital habitats in the UWP.) Larry Niven has a fascinating little article on space habitats like this.

You could also assume that perhaps a world like this with a high pop uses the original concept of a dyson sphere -- not a closed shell, but spaced habitats around a star. But that sounds more like something you'd do with an high tech asteroid belt like Glisten.

 

[Malenfant]

Yeah, if you started to implement negative pop modifiers for worlds that weren't habitable (on top of the -2 to the 2d roll that's already there), then you'd get much better results.

Perhaps something like this?:

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Atm Pop mod Max Pop
0 -4 6
1 -4 6
2 -3 7
3 -3 7
4 -1 9
5 -0 A
6 -0 A
7 -1 9
8 -0 A
9 -1 9
A -3 7
B -4 6
C -5 5
D -2 8
E -2 8
F -3 7</pre>[/QUOTE]

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Stephen Herron:
Harder, maybe, but interesting and inspiring...

Actually, having done it several times - and as a planetary scientist at that - I can safely say that "interesting and inspiring" are not phrases I'd use for working back from a broken UWP

.

"annoying and frustrating" would be more appropriate, I think.

Plus it means you end up with a universe full of exceptions rather than rules, because that's the only way to get many of the UWPs to work - and I hate that, it's just... utterly inelegant.

 

[Flynn]

Mal,

To me, Morte is implying that building UWPs without a sense of context within the sector is a broken process. I didn't get the impression he was talking about explaining a UWP. I'm just curious how he would approach a solution to that perception.

Hope this helps,
Flynn