Populations that include transients
- Thread starter rancke
- Start date
a real universe
GT is not canon and neither is the Rice Papers. I have a few GT books including Glisten.
I really expected more details. Although, I do like Darkmoon. But back to the topic. Mirroring a realistic scenario makes Traveller (CT, MT,...or even GT) more exciting and interesting. There have been asteroid colonies, lost world ships and the like since early CT. The UWP system is lacking. Yes, Book 6 has some system information MT has some...I think H&E was popular for trying to coordinate these systems into a useable star system view.
I would say "less mislabeling" and more "building on a weak foundation" without adequate requirements analysis. In requirements gathering, so much has been said in the past of Traveller (canon) that have not been captured in a single document. A single star system has more population than the others in the subsector...for example.
GT is not canon and neither is the Rice Papers. I have a few GT books including Glisten.
I really expected more details. Although, I do like Darkmoon. But back to the topic. Mirroring a realistic scenario makes Traveller (CT, MT,...or even GT) more exciting and interesting. There have been asteroid colonies, lost world ships and the like since early CT. The UWP system is lacking. Yes, Book 6 has some system information MT has some...I think H&E was popular for trying to coordinate these systems into a useable star system view.I would say "less mislabeling" and more "building on a weak foundation" without adequate requirements analysis. In requirements gathering, so much has been said in the past of Traveller (canon) that have not been captured in a single document. A single star system has more population than the others in the subsector...for example.
Yes it is. Ask Don.
But be that as it may, my main arguments are that a) all trade rules and all military budget rules treat the listed world population as the actual system population and b) it is much more useful, for trade and military budget game purposes, for the population to denote system populations.
I've never used any RICE paper as canon. In fact, I try very hard not to use any detail from a RICE paper, since RICE papers are copyright their authors, so unless they specifically permit others to use their papers for setting-building purposes, it's actually against the copyright to do so.
EDIT: I've just had a look at Rhylanor subsector. The six worlds with population levels of 8 to 10 are:
Natoko: 2.0 to 2.9 billion
Porozlo: 20 to 29 billion
Rhylanor: 8.0 to 8.9 billion
Zivije: 4.0 to 4.9 billion
Vanejen: 0.5 to 0.6 billion
Bevey: 2.0 to 2.9 billion
Total: 36.5 to 49.2 billion
According to The Spinward Marches, the total population of Rhylanor subsector is 131.1 billion.
This means that in order to make up the missing billions, you will have to increase populations by a factor between 2.7 and 3.6 using secondary populations. Which, per Scouts, cannot individually have a higher population level than one less than the mainworld. If you assume that every one of those six worlds have populations just under the limit, you could do it by, for example, giving Porozlo 10 secondary populations, each with a population of 9 billion.
I think I'll pass on that one, thank you very much.
Hans
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MT, TNE: it's stated that the norm is the most populous and highest tech level, rather than a hard rule, but in system generation, if not expanding an existing world, the most populous is the main world, which only after all get populations do you then generate gov't, LL, and TL.
In both, each subordinate world's TL is 1 lower than the mainworld unless there's a base.
I don't have the T4 extended gen to hand to double check (it's not in the core book, which I have on disk.).
Not the rules (which were what I meant when I said 'its derivatives'). Modules, adventures, setting descriptions. I don't doubt what the rules say, but you said that the rules are used. Where are they used? (Not a counter-argument, just simple curiosity).
There are a number of system "character sheets" done by the DGP crew, now that I think about it. Any other examples?
Hans
Score one for the other side
Oh, &%¤#"! I just stumbled across an example of a star system where the system population is much bigger than the mainworld population. Cleves/Kerr (Massila 0403) has an UWP of A566422-E/5 (50,000 inhabitants). And p. 176 of The New Era says that
Mumble, grumble... I still say it's a bad idea... mumble, grumble.
I shall have to console myself with the thought that this contradicts Book 6, but it's cold comfort seeing as I always insist that setting details trumps rules.
Hans
Oh, &%¤#"! I just stumbled across an example of a star system where the system population is much bigger than the mainworld population. Cleves/Kerr (Massila 0403) has an UWP of A566422-E/5 (50,000 inhabitants). And p. 176 of The New Era says that
"While Cleves was considered the main world of its system, its [sic] was hardly the most populous, only the most central. Relying on high stellar technology, hundreds of millions lived among the asteroids and the ore rich planets of Veser and Makill. [...]"
Mumble, grumble... I still say it's a bad idea... mumble, grumble.
I shall have to console myself with the thought that this contradicts Book 6, but it's cold comfort seeing as I always insist that setting details trumps rules.
Hans
CT Bk 6 has the rules and two examples (including Regina and Terra). Tarsus and Beltstrike both have systems worked in extended gen (the systems are presented differently, but are a match to the generation system)
MT Ref's manual has the rules, no example systems. DGP materials have several extended gen example systems.
TNE core has extended gen, but no example systems
T20 has extended gen, no example systems
T5 has extended gen.
T4 doesn't have extended gen in the core.
MgT extended gen is much more vague and, as a consequence, less broken but far less informative.
I've always assumed the UWP pop was for the whole system, as the pop in one country also (usually) includes that on islands under its control if they are part of the country (not colonies).
IIRC, when the UPP (Universal Planet Profile) was defined, there was no extended system, only the main planet was described, so it seemed pop on the main world refered to the whole system. Then the acronym was changed to UWP to avoid confusión with Universal Personal Profile.
Should we want to call Universal System Profile (so assuming it's worth for the whole system), using the acronym USP would give once again the problem of being confused with Universal Ship Profile to those using HG, so I guess the acronym UWP would be used anyway.
IIRC, when the UPP (Universal Planet Profile) was defined, there was no extended system, only the main planet was described, so it seemed pop on the main world refered to the whole system. Then the acronym was changed to UWP to avoid confusión with Universal Personal Profile.
Should we want to call Universal System Profile (so assuming it's worth for the whole system), using the acronym USP would give once again the problem of being confused with Universal Ship Profile to those using HG, so I guess the acronym UWP would be used anyway.
What's in a name?
Good point McPerth there is an acronym issue. And I don't want to make it worst by tossing USP around, Universal Ship Profile is pretty old too. However, why would anyone ever take Universal PLANET Profile as a system statistic. My refs and players never did. Per Aramis, as early as CT book6 (1983, 30 years ago) differentiation between mainworld and star system statistics began. Probably earlier from magazine publications but I really don't want to hunt.
Four letters might work better...
Good point McPerth there is an acronym issue. And I don't want to make it worst by tossing USP around, Universal Ship Profile is pretty old too. However, why would anyone ever take Universal PLANET Profile as a system statistic. My refs and players never did. Per Aramis, as early as CT book6 (1983, 30 years ago) differentiation between mainworld and star system statistics began. Probably earlier from magazine publications but I really don't want to hunt.
Four letters might work better...
Because - ummmmm - the UPP's used by other game rules to determine trade statistics for the system?
CT is like building a house one room at a time over several years. We have a few of those out here in some of the rural parts of New Mexico. You end up with this charming little hodgepodge, rooms don't necessarily connect the way you expect, you end up going through one room to get to another, different flooring treatments, strange ceiling heights ...
The CT basic 3 made a fairly simple and straightforward game - and then we added a room, and then we added a room, and then ...
CT Book 6 gave us rules for generating a system, but it didn't give us instructions for modifying the existing body of rules to account for all the new details - and left us struggling to reconcile it with sources like Supplement 3. Of course, that wasn't anything new - Book 5 had a similar result.
trade lines
Yet again good points. Trade was not the topic. It was population.
I agree we have been adding rooms for a long time. I believe i said it a couple comments ago. Still having commerce based on the mainworld could be a government standards of the Imperium. So you can catch up quickly. The last couple pages have been about populations that don't add up.
We could discuss trade? We've beaten population into the ground!
Because - ummmmm - the UPP's used by other game rules to determine trade statistics for the system?
CT is like building a house one room at a time over several years. We have a few of those out here in some of the rural parts of New Mexico. You end up with this charming little hodgepodge, rooms don't necessarily connect the way you expect, you end up going through one room to get to another, different flooring treatments, strange ceiling heights ...
The CT basic 3 made a fairly simple and straightforward game - and then we added a room, and then we added a room, and then ...
CT Book 6 gave us rules for generating a system, but it didn't give us instructions for modifying the existing body of rules to account for all the new details - and left us struggling to reconcile it with sources like Supplement 3. Of course, that wasn't anything new - Book 5 had a similar result.
Yet again good points. Trade was not the topic. It was population.
I agree we have been adding rooms for a long time. I believe i said it a couple comments ago.
Still having commerce based on the mainworld could be a government standards of the Imperium. So you can catch up quickly. The last couple pages have been about populations that don't add up.We could discuss trade? We've beaten population into the ground!
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Yet again good points. Trade was not the topic. It was population.
I agree we have been adding rooms for a long time. I believe i said it a couple comments ago.
We could discuss trade? We've beaten population into the ground!
I wasn't actually discussing trade. That's just one area that gets impacted.
Trade is extremely germane to a discussion of rules for establishing secondary populations. Population affects trade. If a system has a population four times bigger than the population of its mainworld, trade figures based solely on the population of the mainworld are hopelessly off. Whereas if the population of the system is 1.1 times the population of the mainworld, basing the trade on the mainworld population alone is still going to be fairly well inside the ballpark.
Hans
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population and trade
I agree.
Let's face it we have an early version of Traveller that is like Traveller-lite where mainworld populations we're the cat's meow. And systems we're that <10% population. But Traveller matured like scientific understanding and now we have a people that would live on Mars, the Moon or in space habitats.
Traveller ships and communications we're challenged the same as the Great Empires in the Age of Sailing Ships. Slow...slow...
Each ref must decide where we wants his TU to go as in every RPG. The options are there for any decisions. This is why I said we must "agree to disagree". OTU is full of conflicts in statistics.
I wanted to explain the population difference in the documents of Rhylanor subsector and evaluate trade. Rancke is immersed in Sword Worlds (?) a different culture. The popular behavior of the Zho, SW, 3I, and other cultures to living in space could be different.
We have found a TNE instance where system population is greater than mainworld the former 3I. There are others if we look carefully.
I think it's TL, and Environment related. Once you hit TL 11 the sky is the limit. This can easily be addressed.
I also believe many empty parsecs without stars will have stellar objects.
Traveller is 2D that is a big problem. Now that requires a workarounds.
I agree.
Let's face it we have an early version of Traveller that is like Traveller-lite where mainworld populations we're the cat's meow. And systems we're that <10% population. But Traveller matured like scientific understanding and now we have a people that would live on Mars, the Moon or in space habitats.
Traveller ships and communications we're challenged the same as the Great Empires in the Age of Sailing Ships. Slow...slow...
Each ref must decide where we wants his TU to go as in every RPG. The options are there for any decisions. This is why I said we must "agree to disagree". OTU is full of conflicts in statistics.
I wanted to explain the population difference in the documents of Rhylanor subsector and evaluate trade. Rancke is immersed in Sword Worlds (?) a different culture. The popular behavior of the Zho, SW, 3I, and other cultures to living in space could be different.
We have found a TNE instance where system population is greater than mainworld the former 3I. There are others if we look carefully.
I think it's TL, and Environment related. Once you hit TL 11 the sky is the limit. This can easily be addressed.
I also believe many empty parsecs without stars will have stellar objects.
Traveller is 2D that is a big problem. Now that requires a workarounds.
Transplanted from a different thread:
Hans
And it's perfectly possible to speak of the population of an oil rig. Every time a worker is flown in another who were doing his job is flown out. So the populat6ion of the oil rig could be said to be the number of people living on it at any given time. For a Traveller world a company can fly in crew for half a year or a year at a time. But when they fly one in, they fly another out. So the population of the world represents the economic footprint of the transients who live there.
Some transients are more elusive than others. I'm not saying that all transients would count. Indeed, I've argued for transients coming in two kinds, one of which we have no adequate term for.
But the population of Pixie that is counted (less than one hundered people living in anarchy) must be transients too (It's even worse with the one writeup we have, the one in BtC; there they are transients who mine the belt in the Pixie system, not even living on Pixie). Indeed, any attempt to explain Pixie's population in terms of the shipyard and starport workers not counting comes up against the question "Why not"? A problem you get with a lot of other such explanations too. Why is the Imperium accepting 90 people living in anarchy as the sovereign population of Pixie when there's an entire shipyard, owned and operated by a subsidiary of an Imperial megacorporation, and a Class A starport that presumably provide law and (captive) governance for a population of thousands?
Hans
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In that situation I'd assume it's because the starport is orbital, or on a moon or something. The planet gets the benefit and UWP code for the starport because visiting ships have full use of it's facilities and there are regular shuttles between the port and planet, but the occupants don't count towards the world's population because they aren't on the world.
Personally I'd be much more dissatisfied with a world generation system that completely eliminated edge cases like this. Real world systems for categorizing and score-carding places, people and systems often have gaps in their ability to cope with the complexity of the real world. Roleplaying games have always suffered from this, just look at the controversies around treatments of stats like Charisma and Appearance in some games.
I can think of loads of alternative reasons for Pixie having a low population but an advanced starport:
It's an experimental automated facility that's actually rapidly falling into disrepair.
It has high class facilities, but can only cope with one ship at a time (combine with above?).
The facilities are now abandoned and the population code has been updated but not he facility code.
The problem with a system that only ever produces conformal, standardized results that are always consistent is that it produces an unrealistically conformant and standardized universe. The real world is more complex and fun than that, and I'd like to think our SF universes are too.
Simon Hibbs
I'll repeat the question with a small clarification (underlined): Why is the Imperium accepting 90 people living in anarchy as the sovereign population of Pixie system when there's an entire shipyard, owned and operated by a subsidiary of an Imperial megacorporation, and a Class A starport that presumably provide law and (captive) governance for a population of thousands?
Incidentally, if the shipyard and the starport is on or in orbit around a different world, that other world would be the mainworld, not Pixie.
So would I. So I don't advocate such a system.
A shipyard is not enough to qualify for a class A rating. It's necessary but not sufficient. A class A starport has to offer certain facilities. You can go there and order a ship built in a timely manner. You can go there and get an annual maintenance in a timely manner. You can go there and have major repairs done in a timely manner. (Plus some other things that aren't relevant).
That's the "the UWP is rubbish" explanation mentioned earlier in the thread. Why would the entire UWP not have been updated?
Hans
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Why shouldn't they? Starports whether on a planet or in orbit are extraterritorial and govern only themselves.
Sure, I'm not suggesting it orbits a different planet.
The above is my best shot at an explanation, but if I were playing a game and the GM provided a different explanation like those I suggested, I'd be quite happy to roll with it. If the facilities and facts on the ground don't quite match what you'd expect from an ideal exemplar of the UWP code I'd be pissed at the scout service, imperial bureaucracy or corrupt officials behind the discrepancy in-game, not at the GM.
Simon Hibbs
Well, for one thing there are canonical examples of worlds owned and governed by the Imperium. If a small bunch of anarchic drifters were the only other population in the system apart from the starport personnel, I still don't see why the Imperium would treat them as a legitimate sovereign population; it would be like the US treating the fishing fleet on the Dogger Bank as a sovereign population. For another, the starport population would still contribute to the system's trade and traffic. For a third, shipyards owned by an Imperial corporation are not owned and run by the Starport Authority; they're owned and run by said corporation.
Then their population counts towards that planet's population.
Not relevant to my claim that some UWPs are impossible to provide a good explanation for.
Hans
I humbly submit you're looking at this wrong. The Imperium evidently does treat them as a legitimate sovereign population. You're telling me you really can't come up with any conceivable reason why they might do so?
The US treats the peoples of Tuvalu and Nauru as sovereign populations, so why not? There could be all sorts of historical, political or economic reasons why. Undoubtedly some nefarious plot is behind it all, which the players can become embroiled in.
I don't see why the population of the starport is such a big deal. The Imperium has designated this planet the mainworld. They must have a reason to do so, but then UWPs never give us the reason for that. That's not their job. They tell us what is there, not why. We the players and GMs and setting creators have to create or discover that. The UWP code designation committee or whoever can't win in this situation. If the starport population was included in the pop number, that would imply that the government governs that many people, but what if it doesn't?
If you try to describe complex political and economic setups with a simple short alphabetic code, of course you're going to hit worlds that don't fit it neatly.
The most egregious bad UWPs are planets far too small to support their atmospheres. Those are a bit embarrassing. Other than that though, all the examples I've ever seen have been tons of fun coming up with interesting justifications for.
Good explanations are a matter of taste. Interesting and adventuresome explanations are IMHO what we should be looking for.
Simon Hibbs
