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Getting Back Into It

J

jawillroy

SOC-13
I've been getting my toes wet with Traveller again after a year's hiatus or so, and having looked over last year's experimentation I've found myself leaning towards a yet smaller-universe TU than I had before.

Last year, I'd cranked together the Festrian Empire, a non-OTU pocket empire about sector-size. And while I think it takes a step in the right direction, there was still something missing in it for me.

Not enough strangeness. Going from starport to starport felt a lot like eating breakfast at mcdonald's in new york, flying to tokyo, and going straight into mcdonald's for dinner.

I think I'll keep my idea of an Independent Interstellar Scout Service. I'm smashing the Starport Authority... Starports will be either run by the world governments, or by merchant's exchanges where they cannot reasonably be maintained by planetary governments. Pocket empires will be small and scattered.

I'm sticking to LBB's 1, 2, and 3.

Anyone want to help me hash this out? I think it'll be a blast if I can get a few folks into it.
 
If you want to steal a sector, you can look here:
A Proto-Traveller sized ATU

Or, if you have enough room in your inbox, I can email you a spreadsheet that will generate an entire subsector at a time, using LBB6 (so you get an entire system, rather than just a mainworld)
 
I'd love to see the spreadsheet, although for the purposes of MTU I'm going to stick pretty religiously to LBB123. My email for Traveller stuff is jrfesteria AT gmail DOT com. Thank you!
 
You can generate strangeness just by getting players outside of the starport.

Tokyo Macdonalds may be pretty much identical to New York Macdonalds, and there will be great similarities between Tokyo and New York cities, but once you get characters out into the countryside, the towns and villages, experiencing the real culture, you can have as much strangeness as you want. Especially if the air raft breaks down and they have to hitch a lift...
 
Oh, I quite agree. I just want to get more of the strangeness out of the back forty, and out into the front yard if you know what I mean.
 
Sent from my Yahoo account. I figured out I can't send the one I normally use - it's over 10MB zipped. :p Play with it to figure it out - just remember to make a working copy before you do any "Paste Special"s! :) (I do have a smaller version - just one system. Let me know if you want that one.)
 
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10 mb?

Wow.

'Member when the notion of emailing something that big seemed kinda silly? I do. 'Course I also remember when I had to have someone explain how email worked, again. Maybe you too?

do it allatime, now.

oh... Thank you!
 
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Fritz_Brown said:
Or, if you have enough room in your inbox, I can email you a spreadsheet that will generate an entire subsector at a time, using LBB6 (so you get an entire system, rather than just a mainworld)
Click to expand...
...gimmegimmegimmegimme! :D Could you email that to me, please, Fritz? Thanks! :D
 
Well, I am discovering that sending a zipped file this large is problematic. I will send out the smaller one (for one system) tonight to those who have asked (so far: jawillroy, Major B, Gruffty (I think I have your email.... somewhere - nope), and Icosahedron (not one for you either)).

I don't know of a way to further compress the thing than WinZip. I will see about spanning it or something so it can go out in bits. :rolleyes:
 
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Hope this file works for y'all

OK - sent out the single system generator. It has the map tabs included, but they (subsector and quadrant) don't work if the "Sector Data" tab isn't filled in. Let me know what you think.

It takes me about 3 weeks to do a sector with my bigger file:
  • I generate 4 subsectors at a time (4 separate files),
  • input all the data for companion stars and calculate those bits,
  • delete empty lines (where no data was generated - these occupy significant amounts of memory),
  • rearrange the moons so they are in the proper order (I have no automated way to do this :( ),
  • print out the subsectors and look them over (the most amount of time, other than deleting extraneous lines of formulas) for tweaks I want to make (like x867000 in the habitable zone, and somewhere in Mercury's orbit is x100958 :nonono: ),
  • then go change the rolls and recalculate
  • eventually, bring all the subsector tabs into one file so the Sector Data tab can be filled and the maps work!

But, as was said - beats pen, paper and dice. (Especially at work! :D )
 
Oh! And you need the Excel Add-ins loaded! Otherwise, things like the Hexadecimal to Decimal (and reverse) conversions don't work. I forgot that in the emails. :(
 
I hope everyone got the small version finally. There were issues with full mailboxes, blacklisted accounts :confused:, etc. I am working on an instruction sheet for the full-size one so I can post it to the files section here. I have previously never been confident enough in the product to do that, but if you all think it is worth it, I will. :o

BTW, anybody know the size limit for uploading files here?
 
Depends on the file type Fritz.

A .xls file can be up to 195.3 KB but if you zip it you can post files up to 9.77 MB.

Please let us know when you post it. I still can't figure out why my mail account wouldn't take it and I'm looking forward to checking it out.
 
If I can just get it to Hunter, he said he would post it. But, none of my personal email accounts will handle anything bigger than 10MB. I may have to email it from work... :(

BTW, I think I have a way to split it, but it requires some knowledge of Excel to put it back together at the other end.

And, Major B - you still don't have it? I didn't get a rejection notice this time. :confused:
Edit: Nope - got a rejection.... :mad:
 
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