Traveller seems to be kind of agnostic about Stellar composition when it comes to deciding what the population of a system is. The Imperium seems to be just as happy to have people on an Iceball around an M9 Subdwarf as it is to have people on a garden planet. presumably they are doing something there, mining, manufacturing.
I rather liked the original method of design.
Yes, we sometimes looked at the data and said "That makes no sense at all!!"
But, neither do many of the places I've been to on Earth
You get to a place where there are under 1,000 or even 500 people living there.
And places where the existing population are mostly dirt farmers.
So, when I get a UWP that makes no sense, I have to invoke my imagination.
One of my players lives on a world at the edge of the rimward Spinward Marches which I largely ignored until we generated her character.
By that time, the world, which is Earth-sized with a standard atmosphere and Hydro of "A" was listed in "Behind the Claw" as "frozen with rare points of melting"
Add to that, it orbits a gas giant! So, it tales HUGE hours just to get to the world from the 100d limit!
So, I had to ask myself what 4,000+ people were doing on an earth-sized icecube o the border of the Glisten Subsector with no military, no trade routes and two parsecs from any civilization doing there?
And the government type is "Corporate Owned"
So, says I... There has to be something there of value to some corporation and it's worth keeping thousands of people alive and working with their tech and tools working or replaced
And the location is so isolated that it is likely "No one" visits unless they're paid to go there.
And once you jump in-system, it is a royal pain in the rump to get there.
So, I said...
What if there was a survey that managed to determine there were a chemistry kit's worth of odd chemicals under all that ice?
But, who cares???
Then, a century or more later, some drug and pharma corporation discovered some drug or treatment that desperately needs one of those chemicals
Next, the C-Suite has the numbers department do the work to determine the top ten solutions to "we need this chemical in massive supply
And, on the one hand, there are annual numbers based on how much we have to pay world A, B, C...etc
- - and once they find out what we're using it for and how much we're raking in.....
And, on the other hand, there is this 'Way out in the middle of nowhere' iceball no one cares about
And where it is HUGE expensive to "Buy" the world, but that is a one-time cost that we never have to pay again!
So, there was buying the world - paying the boot-strap costs to raise up the Greenfield(no pun intended) build-out
And, from there, it is just paying the upkeep and overhead and ----- PROFITS!!!!
So, the starport is a downport only, with many many automated systems and few workers
Connected to it, in what can be called the only City on world, are an automated processing plant, warehouse clusters and the only really "mass social" experiences on-world
Outside that, there were the "mining pods" which were large enough to be healthy social populations.
A small population of traveling support and tech teams made up the rest of the gap
So, from a string of numbers, a suggestion from the GURPS(Yes, I know) Sector book and an evaluation of the local systems....
My imagination said "POOF! Here's the world!"
So, give me weird numbers
Let me come up with "why they work?"
Stop making them more normal - that makes them BORING
