Re: TNE - bootstrap

Part of thread: TNE - bootstrap · 1 reply ↳ In reply to Re: TNE - bootstrap — DED Re: TNE - bootstrap — David Jaques-Watson
Ø But, you still haven't answered, what did I do wrong in TNE, what did I
miss in TNE, what did I screw up in TNE so that it still has to be redone?

First, please understand that what I am about to say is not an attack, nor
is it even criticism. You did the best you could with what you had
available. You didn’t have the advantage of listening to EDG. You didn’t
have the advantage of seeing later efforts (e.g. GURPS First In or their
later Space 3). You didn’t have to time to focus on it like I did. So, you
didn’t really “screw up”. You did the best you could and I want to stress
that as the most important point of this message.

I can’t speak for anything outside the RSB. (I also did work on subsectors
A-D in the Solomani Rim, but I don’t think there were any TNE sources used,
so that doesn’t count.) However, as mentioned before, I studied the crap out
of the RSB. The big problem with the stellar data in RSB is that you started
the job, but you didn’t finish. There are *way* too many “D” stars (all of
which should have just been “D” not, e.g., G2 D or some such). There are way
too many habitable worlds around cold stars (or around Giants). So, what I
did was to go back through them all and fix all of the “D” stars by either
changing them to a “V” if they have a planet with an atmosphere around them,
or making them a straight “D” otherwise. I also bumped (or dropped) the size
of stars where the planets needed it.

So, really, you took a few steps in the right direction, but you didn’t go
far enough in the stellar data. I pushed it that extra bit to “finish” it.

I also wanted to fix the planet sizes, but knew that could never be
accepted, so I didn’t. The reason I think it should have been OK is because
no one (really) pays much attention to the planet’s size or gravity.
(Seriously, they don’t, including the adventures.) I actually came up with
an easy way to do it so that things worked on a sliding scale and the
distribution stayed smoother. But I never did it, because I figured it
wouldn’t be allowed.

On a related note, I found several discrepancies in the Spinward Marches
that I had to adjust and fix. (I think a few even made it into the Mongoose
Spinward Marches book, too.) For example, one worthless world in Aramis got
replaced by another worthless world. Regina had its TL retconned. There are
actually seven duplicate world names in the Marches. A couple others I
forget.

In the Trojan Reach, there is even a “phantom” world that exists in the old
“Atlas of the Imperium”, but never appears anywhere else, including the RSB.

But none of this is really a criticism. There are crap-loads of worlds in
the RSB and no one is going to get through them without a mistake or typo. I
guarantee that my effort has mistakes and typos that I never caught. That is
all just too much data for one person to manage.

Mike West