You know what? There's a huge chunk of Charted Space that hasn't been written up in canon. And for each of those worlds, your program's output may as well be canonical!
Introducing TravellerWorlds
- Thread starter OjnoTheRed
- Start date
I'm so sorry, I totally missed this reply until now. (Note to self: make better use of 'go to first unread'). Thank you for your praise of the tool, and I'd add my voice to Aramis - I'd love to see anything people produce using this tool.
Yes, temperature. I'm going to put out a video and add it to the help library showing 'how to fiddle with it to produce a setting that makes sense'. Because sentience-evolved-from-extremophiles or genetically-modified-for-extremes gets old really quick and often doesn't match the picture of the world we have in our heads.
But, briefly: temperature is calculated using the Book 6 Scouts formula, which uses luminosity of the star, distance from the star, greenhouse effect and albedo. Any of these variables can have a big impact on the final result.
The decisive factor is distance from the star. This is because what the generator does is looks up a table of all the stars and finds the habitable zone from that table in terms of which orbit to use. It then applies a random minor adjustment to that orbit, and then calculates the temperature result (with a lot of other things). The HZ tables are approximate to start with, and the random minor adjustment means that worlds are usually given temperatures outside the range of human habitability - which in astronomical terms are astonishingly narrow. I'm thinking of adding an option where the HZ is calculated based on the luminosity of the star rather than an HZ table.
This is also where Referee or worldbuilder fiat comes in. All orbits can be adjusted, and so can the albedo and greenhouse values. I'm going to build in luminosity adjustments as well in the future. This allows the Referee to produce conditions that fit what he or she probably imagined when they read the UWP.
There are two other temperature problems that come up a lot. Red dwarfs (M0 V to M9 V) stars are the most common, and their habitable zone is closer than Orbit 0 in many cases. This leaves a lot of frigid tidally locked worlds that often have the trade classification "Ag" or even "Ag Ri Ga". It would be nice for the poor farmers to actually harvest crops rather than watch them freeze or burn. This is such a widespread phenomena that I added a 'remove twilight zone' rule that allows the worldbuilder to ignore this consequence to produce a standard map and standard temperature table.
The second problem relates to thin atmospheres. I use Grand Survey and the MegaTraveller World Builders' Handbook to produce global temperature maps that account for latitude, axial tilt, and day and night. Thin atmospheres release their heat much more rapidly than standard atmospheres - and so night time temperatures often plunge to more than 100 degrees below zero (celsius). This is enough to freeze water, carbon dioxide and ammonia. I have no idea what weather patterns this would produce.
This is where I get conflicted about this tool: because why not just use that time you spent fiddling by directly creating the world as a setting for the adventure you had in mind? Players at the table are never that worried about the finer details of habitability - it's more concrete: what protection do I need? How might the environment harm me? I suppose the only answers are that (a) you still get a star system with everything placed relative to each other after you've fiddled with it; and (b) there are extra objects out there to provide more stuff to play with for settings. Also, it's all generated and calculated at the touch of a button, saving hours of manual calculation. But I'm making the slogan of this tool: "A good idea for an adventure setting trumps a bunch of numbers every time."
You know what? There's a huge chunk of Charted Space that hasn't been written up in canon. And for each of those worlds, your program's output may as well be canonical!
:rofl: we're both online at once! Yay for forums being a real-time chat!
Helping Referees quickly generate what they need to run a game in charted space is absolutely the idea, and I hope it helps more Traveller get played.
I was also chuffed to see a recent(ish) Mongoose publication use output from TravellerWorlds for a world map. I forget which one - although, of course, they'd edited it heavily to make it look nicer.
AtlanticFriend
SOC-12
Damn that level of dedication is something out of these 11,000 worlds! I am currently re-discovering Traveller after 30 years, and I'm floored by the amount of hard science that was put in the game.
Excellent resource
One thing that puzzles me is the temperature values... you have a hospitable and otherwise nice planet BUT with an average surface temp of 167 C and 70% water hydrosphere.
the temp seems to be outside of habitable range on most of the batch I generated, even though the raw UPP seems like a garden world (rather than ceti alpha V).
One thing that puzzles me is the temperature values... you have a hospitable and otherwise nice planet BUT with an average surface temp of 167 C and 70% water hydrosphere.
the temp seems to be outside of habitable range on most of the batch I generated, even though the raw UPP seems like a garden world (rather than ceti alpha V).
It's an average. If it were me, I'd say that only the poles are comfortably habitable, high latitudes are tropical jungle swamp, and everything closer to the equator is uninhabitable. Weather patterns should be nicely energetic...
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
I have been trying to generate a map for Kelpie, C769672-6, a world in my Out Rim Sector. I get a world with Ice Caps, a few spots of mountains, the space port in the middle of the ocean, and a lot of ocean. The ocean appears black in my screen as well, which makes seeing the few spots of mountains more than a bit difficult.
My apologies for not replying sooner. This kind of issue is on my "to-do" list. What the generator does is follow the T5 system generation rules and put the main world in the HZ as listed in T5 tables. This is very approximate when it comes to actually calculating temperatures. Miller's design principle is to keep it relatively simple - on the system generation rules you've got enough to say roughly how friendly the environment is, a few tropes generated by the UWP. and relative distances that are good enough. That's enough to have a game.
Of course, I'm taking things WAY beyond that, and probably for no good reason except I like worldbuilding in detail!
When you apply the formula that uses luminosity, distance from the star, albedo and greenhouse effect, you often get a really hot or cold temperature. This is where you then mess with the orbital distance and albedo until you get a temperature that fits with the picture of the world you have in your head based on the UWP. Obviously oceans can't exist if the temperature is more than boiling point. And if the atmospheric pressure is high enough to make boiling point more than 167 degrees celsius ... shudder.
My fix will be to calculate a temperature of around 15 degrees celsius, and then calculate orbital distance from the star, and put that as the default. That will save users some editing.
Also remember you can edit all the details and save a copy on your local computer, and load it later. Even editing in all the names of objects in a system is a lot of work.
Try going to View > Preferences, and using the "Result to default" - I had a bug in there that messed with the colours, but you can get the default colours back. Let me know how you go!
One facility to help you get a map you'd like is the facility to regenerate the map using a new random seed - you can just keep generating until you get something you like.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
I hit "Reset to Default" and now get a mix of frozen tundra and baked lands. I think I will stick with my Civilization 3 editor for world maps.
