Seasoning UWP's to taste...

[rancke]

Everyone can use the basic UWP, but how it is interpreted means everyone will probably see the same thing in a different light. Take world size: 8 = 8000 miles. Depending on how you interpret this: is it EXACTLY 8000 miles, or 7500-8499 miles?

It's the range. That has been stated somewhere.

Unless somewhere in canon it gives the exact same size, people are going to have different interpretations.

Yes, but the point of having an OTU (as opposed to everybody's personal TUs) is that once someone (someone official, that is) has written up a world and included the exact size, subsequent authors are supposed to stick to that.

And once you release your gamers into the OTU, they may impact it in ways that changes that universe; so to paraphrase: no OTU survives contact with players...

And as Robert Prior once wrote: "The very act of writing a Traveller book closes the doors on possibilities. Any game supplement does that, assuming the publisher cares about internal consistency."


Hans

 

[rancke]

The shipyard could be worked mostly by robots. Robots could do the food production as well if necessary.

First of all, there's a limit to how few people you can have. Robots needs to be supervised. I really doubt that anyone in the Imperium would tolerate AI's running shipyards. Secondly, that just moves the question to why someone paid for having robots instead of people. Robots costs money too. And it's still going to be more expensive to have the shipyard on a world without adequate infrastructure than on one with adequate infrastructure.



Hans

 

[moout_diablo]

Hans,

Does being able to build an entire ship necessarily equate also being able to manufacture each and every component and subassembly that make up said ship?

The Real World answer to that question is a definite no.

I can safely say that because I can also safely say that I am most likely the [only former shipyard employee here (Shop 275, Nuclear Test Office, Electric Boat, Groton, CT, USA) and the only member who regularly visited shipyards worldwide while employed by companies other than EB.

Now all that being said...

Have fun,
Bill

Define regularly visit?

My ships were pretty old beasts and I saw time in shipyards during both my hitches in the Navy. I wasn't employed by a yard but I had lots of contact with the SIMA yard-birds, being that I was a Deck Ape.

As for the UWP,

I'd probably season the starport to a B or the population would grow.

 

[coliver988]

It's the range. That has been stated somewhere.


Yes, but the point of having an OTU (as opposed to everybody's personal TUs) is that once someone (someone official, that is) has written up a world and included the exact size, subsequent authors are supposed to stick to that.


And as Robert Prior once wrote: "The very act of writing a Traveller book closes the doors on possibilities. Any game supplement does that, assuming the publisher cares about internal consistency."


Hans

So, if you don't have all the supplements, and use a system that is written up but you are unaware of it, and set your world size at the upper end whereas the supplement detailed it at the lower end of the range, you are no longer in the OTU. You just don't know that it no longer is.

All I'm saying is that once you start playing in the OTU, unless you keep up with everything published, your OTU moves into YTU. Heck - even if you managed to keep up with everything officially published, any actions the players do may disrupt that pristine universe into something else. I know my games often had deleterious effects on the occassional, never to be visited again, starport

(and one of these threads mentioned a very small pop world where the trader managed to fit everyone on-board, leaving the world at pop-0.)

For me, it was important to have a standard starting point, but once you started playing, it was never OTU.

 

[Able Baker]

Pop 0 means up to 9 persons.
Pop - is REALLY uninhabited.