Common Sense: Evaluating UWPs

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Psion:
I really can't see how you can have 80 billion people living on a rockball with no atmosphere either.

That is a horse of a different color. Hard to imagine =/= impossible.
[/quote]

True. But I remain to be convinced that it is possible. If someone crunches numbers and tells me how much food needs to be imported, how closely packed the population is, what the hell to do with the biological waste coming from 80 billion people on a world that's smaller than Luna, what's so attractive about an airless rockball that 80 billion people would want to live there, how a society would be so totally irresponsible about population growth... then I may be convinced.

Heck, if if everyone breathed out at once, you're dealing with between 200,000,000 and 400,000,000 cubic metres of CO2 exhalation to process right there!

Was it upthread or elsewhere somebody pointed out that there was a study estimating that, given far less meat consumption, Earth could support 130 billion?

it's not just a question of how much food you need though. Like I said, it's what you do with the waste, what the standards of living are like, the infrastructure you'd need to support that, etc.

In fact, I think you have just given me an explanation on why the Galian Federation isn't so implausible. On Earth it amazes me the rate at which we are expanding. We need some biomass to support us, and we are encroaching on our environment with our living space. Perhaps they NEEDED to move people offworld to feed them. Perhaps the habitable planets are basically giant farms.

Which begs the question - why allow the population to get so large in the first place?

 

[Psion]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
True. But I remain to be convinced that it is possible. If someone crunches numbers and tells me how much food needs to be imported, how closely packed the population is, what the hell to do with the biological waste coming from 80 billion people on a world that's smaller than Luna, what's so attractive about an airless rockball that 80 billion people would want to live there, how a society would be so totally irresponsible about population growth... then I may be convinced.

Wow... you're hard to please, aren't you?

And here little old me just has trouble swallowing why grav plates would work (oddly enough, I have maneuver drives handled, just not gravitics...)

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Which begs the question - why allow the population to get so large in the first place?

You pretend society is neatly managed?

If experience is any indicator, society tends not to change until someone makes a mess of things.

 

[Malenfant]

I don't think that's being particularly "hard to please". I know Traveller isn't 100% realistic, but things like that tend to snap my suspenders of disbelief very easily. If other people don't consider those to be problems, I suspect it's because they haven't given much thought to what is actually involved in solving them. I'd be interested to hear what answers people can come up with - especially for why you'd put so many people on a small airless rockball if there are habitable worlds in the same system, or why the whole society hasn't collapsed under its own weight yet. Hell, with that many people in a closed environment, disposing of the waste heat that all those human bodies generate may be a problem too.

I may be convinced that 80 billion is the total population of the whole planetary system, which is obviously still pretty densely populated (we're talking 10 billion people on or around each planet, if there are 8 worlds in the system), and you could put even more in any asteroid or kuiper belts, but the high population would have to be reflected in the system's history - but this would be more like what one would term a "core system", not some podunk system in the middle of nowhere on a frontier.


And I strongly suspect that society would change nearer the time that the population hit 10 billion, not 80 billion.

 

[Flynn]

Mal,

I hate to say it, but I think you're going to go to your grave never being satisfied with Stoner's UWP, and I don't think anyone is going to convince you of a means of accepting that UWP. I also don't think anyone should have to convince you, though, to make it valid for them, so it might be amicable just to let the matter drop. You either like it or you don't. It's cool, either way.

Ultimately, it's all just a game.

My thoughts, anyway,
Flynn

 

[Malenfant]

Well, no. If I had my way I'd drop the population by several orders of magnitude and that'd satisfy me

.

All I'm saying is that if we ARE to have worlds that have populations in the tens of billions - and there are quite a few of them all over Charted Space, from frontiers to core - then we'd better find a way to explain them. Why are they so densely populated? How did the population grow so much? How are all those people supported? Are they all living on one planet?

Some people are happy with pop A worlds as they are, but that doesn't mean that nobody should try to come up with a rational explanation for them that actually works. Maybe it'd be better if I started a separate thread on this?

 

[Psion]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
I don't think that's being particularly "hard to please". I know Traveller isn't 100% realistic, but things like that tend to snap my suspenders of disbelief very easily.

Hmmm. For me, once you get past the 2D starmaps, it's all downhill...

If other people don't consider those to be problems, I suspect it's because they haven't given much thought to what is actually involved in solving them.

Now, I don't think it's fair to say that nobody but you has considered them. We just aren't coming to the same conclusion you are. I just beleive that by TL13, handling waste and feeding issues is not an insurmountable problem. (WBG suggests that by TL 15 you could move the whole population into orbit.) And I think the end result is cooler. To me, traveller is more about cool stuff with a smidgen of reality. Otherwise, we could all kill ourselves trying to use CORPS VDS or GURPS Vehicles to make our ships instead of assuming antigrav and thruster plates.

When contemplating what might be possible at TL13 (5-6 TLs ahead), put yourself in the shoes of someone exposed only to TL 2-3 society if they saw today. They might wonder how a plane is possible.

As Flynn said, I don't see convincing you. If someone working for the UN suggests that 130 billion is possible, then that's good enough for me.

 

[mike wightman]

Mal, have you seen the JTAS article on Azun, a high pop world in the Solomani Rim?
It's written by MWM and JAK.
Azun has a UPP (when did they become UWPs anyway? ) of B-476ABC-B, population 26 billion.
The population is housed in huge arcologies, 1.5million+ people in each one (that's a lot of arcologies).
If this is possible at TL B then we have to start thinking about the sci-fi reasons that a huge population can be supported.

 

[chrisr]

I personally think it's important to consider population density as much as overall population. How many people could fit on Earth?
What if we created more land mass ie reduced hydrographics?
The point i'm trying to make is there has to be a cut-off point where a world can no longer sustain its population. This will vary with size, atmos, hydrographics, TL and probably surface temperature.
I also take UWP's as snapshots in time. They were correct once but maybe not when the PC's arrive.

 

[Malenfant]

I've started another thread on the Pop A worlds, which you can find here. I've got a load of questions and points there that people can address individually - I'd be interested to know what answers people come up with...

I do think the whole problem stems from the fact that the default way to generate mainworld population does not depend on any environmental factors (or indeed any factors at all - it's a straight 2d-2 roll with no DMs). If such factors had been included originally, then I'm quite sure we wouldn't have ended up with billions of people living on vacuum-baked rockballs and corrosive atmosphere worlds today.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by rancke:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
my little ideal UWP project includes an Imperial Block of stats which lists the total transient population from off-world.

My ideal UWP project includes someone going over the randomly generated numbers and changing those that don't make sense.


Hans </font>[/QUOTE]I will second that motion.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Psion:
Gateway to Destiny has an interesting precedent. One world is described as being "overdue for updating starport and tech codes." This implies to me that UWP codes can be wrong.

And in the case of extra-imperial worlds, they probably are frequently so. I'm just imagining an independant world pulling an "Enron", misrepresenting its appeal as a trade port to draw in more traders.

This is a license set forth in official rules for GMs to modify their UWPs as they see fit.

For my own personal use, I modify anything as needed. However, when discussing the OTU milieu with other people here, say, when presenting write-ups for common use (like, say, a Landgrab, should I ever chose to do one), where you've altered the Hydrographics up by 5-7 points to make the Atm 6 explainable on a particular world may leave the write-up vulnerable to mass rejection based on the change.

 

[FlightCommanderSolitude]

Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Psion:
Gateway to Destiny has an interesting precedent. One world is described as being "overdue for updating starport and tech codes." This implies to me that UWP codes can be wrong...

This is a license set forth in official rules for GMs to modify their UWPs as they see fit.</font>[/QUOTE]I think it's more than that; recall that Adventure 0: The Imperial Fringe is an entire campaign devoted to resurveying the Spinward Marches because the old data needs updating. As ChrisR mentions earlier, the system profile is a snapshot in time ... and a pretty crude one at that!

Obviously, things like planetary size probably aren't going to change, but population and government are likely to change at some point, tech level is bound to fluctuate, and the starport type could change overnight due to some kind of disaster.

On a differnet note: what might be the smallest/least significant tweaks to the basic, Book 3 generation sequence that produced the most improvement in results? What about for the Book 6 sequence?

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
I do think the whole problem stems from the fact that the default way to generate mainworld population does not depend on any environmental factors (or indeed any factors at all - it's a straight 2d-2 roll with no DMs). If such factors had been included originally, then I'm quite sure we wouldn't have ended up with billions of people living on vacuum-baked rockballs and corrosive atmosphere worlds today.

On that much at least I can agree 100%.

I'm fuzzy minded at the moment but have I seen you over on the JTAS discussion boards? A lot of this has been argued there as well and there may be some points worth importing if I can find them.

 

[Malenfant]

For the book 3 system, I think probably the most important small change is to state that hydrographics = 2d-7+SIZE, not +ATM as stated (this is corrected in book 6, but some people seem to think that Book 3 takes precendence).

Using atmosphere as a DM is flat out wrong and totally unrealistic - it means that worlds with exotic atmospheres are somehow more likely to have more hydrographics. It also means your DM can range from +0 all the way up to +15, which means that an atm F world will always be 100% water covered and most worlds that have exotic atmospheres will have a high hydrographics percentage.

 

[Malenfant]

Dan - you probably have seen me over there. I left a few months ago, but before that I was there doing all sorts of planetary stuff on the Delphi board (I was posting there as Constantine Thomas).

 

[far-trader]

Right, foggy muddled brain was grasping for that

Know where I can get a quick upgrade for the old wetware?

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by FlightCommanderSolitude:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Psion:
Gateway to Destiny has an interesting precedent. One world is described as being "overdue for updating starport and tech codes." This implies to me that UWP codes can be wrong...

This is a license set forth in official rules for GMs to modify their UWPs as they see fit.</font>[/QUOTE]I think it's more than that; recall that Adventure 0: The Imperial Fringe is an entire campaign devoted to resurveying the Spinward Marches because the old data needs updating. As ChrisR mentions earlier, the system profile is a snapshot in time ... and a pretty crude one at that!

Obviously, things like planetary size probably aren't going to change, but population and government are likely to change at some point, tech level is bound to fluctuate, and the starport type could change overnight due to some kind of disaster.

On a differnet note: what might be the smallest/least significant tweaks to the basic, Book 3 generation sequence that produced the most improvement in results? What about for the Book 6 sequence? </font>[/QUOTE]Oh, I agree completely. It's a wholesale license to change everything completely.

Now I'm tempted to Landgrab and change something considerably, just to see. Say, a resurvey based on the discovery of a major 2nd Survey error? Eh, maybe I'll see something to work on somewhere. <scratches head>

 

[Morte]

Mandatory reading:

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/cgi-bin/comic.pl?comic=94

 

[Psion]

Advise:

What do you mean "Landgrab"?

Edit: Never mind. Google answered the question for me. Guess I need to subscribe to TML again, eh?

 

[Malenfant]

They don't appear to be talking about Traveller much on the TML nowadays. I was on it for a bit and gave up after about a week because there was so much off-topic chatter.