DED--
Thanks for the reply, and please forgive me for a couple things:
1. I'm still trying to grasp the details of the failure,
2. The confusing nature of the running commentary in my previous message.
My running commentary was me free associating a number of
cross-cutting/contradictory pressures from back at the time on the way to
recapitulating the question, "what was the failure?" Re: "failure," please
be assured that I know you're not picking on me. But I have heard several
times from EDG, you, and others, that TNE tried but failed to fix the
problems, and I just want to understand where we fell short, because it's
a big, complex issue. I don't take it as negative criticism, but as the
guy that tried to fix it 21 years ago I just want to know where we dropped
the ball. "I'm the navigator, I have a right to know where we are." (Donn
Eisele, Apollo 7, attrib.)
Also you probably noticed me switching back and forth between first ("we
do/we did") and third person ("they should"), showing my head being
variously back in 1991-95 when I WAS the guy who "had to make the call"
and the criteria I tried to balance, and now as as a formerly-interested
observer. When this has come up previously my head was not as fully
connected to the 1991-95 period as it is now, and I couldn't grasp the
failure and gave up trying. Now, while my head is more fully connected,
I'm trying to get a handle on it, because if not now, I probably never
will. I very much appreciate the sentiment, "at least you tried," but I
also note there is no frustration like the exquisite asphyxiation of
knowing that you had intended to do a thing, believed that you had, and
finding out, "no, not really." It's kind of like if there were a
Twilight Zone episode where for the first 15 minutes a guy goes through
painstakingly painting a yellow house so that it is now purple, then goes
back to the office and people say, "Why didn't you repaint the house?" "I
did, it's purple." Then they take him out to the house which is clearly
still yellow, and he spends the rest of the show thinking, "Did I paint a
different house? Did I dream this? Did someone come after me and paint it
back to yellow? Am I insane?" I am just trying to put this, "you didn't go
far enough" to some kind of bed. I may be working toward a hypothesis of
the multivariate description of the failure, which will hopefully clarify
as we go, with your help if I may ask for it.
If I had any sense, or more ambition, I might scrap this conversation and
start over from a clean sheet. But this is already here, so in keeping
with the old GDW-era (false) wisdom that, "it's easier/quicker to modify a
flawed MS in-hand than to start over," I will retain the period-piece
flavor by working with the existing MS. That makes this perhaps closer to
"performance art" than clear analysis, so I will go ahead and now nominate
this message for the "Dave Nilsen Memorial Palme d'Annoying" for the most
long-winded, self-indulgent, digressive post for this month. I think my
last one caused you understandable confusion or frustration, and I will
try to avoid doing that again. Mea culpa.
> dcnilsen13 wrote:
>
> >> You tried, which is more than can be said of others.
>
> > Thanks, but what did I do wrong, or fail to do?
>
> You didn't go far enough.
I'm still trying to get a sense of if "didn39;t go far enough" means, as
that can cover a LOT of ground, from "when you punched up the stars you
should have punched them up even higher," to "there were other categories
of things you should have fixed while you had the hood up," or, probably,
"both." :-)
To aid in clarity, I will create a list of specific possible cases of
"didn39;t go far enough." And I will try not to muddy the waters by
anticipating the response and saying, "if this one, here is why," but go
into that later after you make your assessment. My guess is that your
answer will be, "G, All of the above," but we'll save that for later.
1. When you "punched up" the stars (i.e., made them bigger/hotter) you
shouldn't have settled for changing M7 to M3, for example, you should have
gone more often to K, G, or F.
2. When you "punched up" the stars, although the general effect was
satisfactory, you still missed some (basically a QA flaw).
3. When you "punched up" the stars, there was a flaw in the overall
process. (Although I don't have access to all of the previous tables from
WTH, MT, Scouts, etc., with the old tables we modified, I have noticed in
the last 24 hours that TNE still retains M5+ V stars with no habitable
zone which might have snuck back in via the "redone" stars, which is an
issue.)
4. When you "punched up" the stars, there was some other flaw in the
overall process: ______________.
5. When you removed the degenerates (white dwarfs) from the primaries, you
failed to remove them from the companion stars.
6. When you removed the degenerates you failed to properly reclassify all
degenerates as simply "D" because a white dwarf remnant is a white dwarf
remnant is a white dwarf remnant, no such thing as a G2 D vs. a M3 D vs a
M8 D. (Actually there is an M8D, the car Bruce McLaren was killed in while
testing it in 1970 at Goodwood. Bruce ruled.)
7. You failed to address other issues of stellar evolution, such as stars
that had already departed the main sequence.
8. You failed to address other issues of stellar Class/Luminosity Class:
______________________.
9. You failed to address issues of Stellar Population (I/II/III). (see
"Appendix," bottom)
10. Other: ________________________.
By laying out the above, I am not trying to cast myself as some kind of
martyr being picked on, just trying to clarify the various possible
meanings of "didn39;t go far enough," because I really do want to figure out
where the problem(s) happened so I can satisfy myself if it was a
decision, an error in creating a solution, or an error in execution.
And by the way, please don't WORRY too MUCH if I go INTO all CAPS, I DON'T
mean ALL that MUCH by IT. I know somewhere in e-mail etiquette I am
supposed to agree that CAPS means that I am "yelling," but I guess I don't
agree with that. I use it to call out things I want to call attention to
(sometimes just for myself), and in this medium where I don't have access
to the full formatting palette of italics, bold, underlines, etc., I have
to fall back on CAPS and "quotes" to help things stand out.
> Maybe the old grognards would've screamed bloody murder for giving an
Earth-like world a proper star instead of a M7 V (i.e. Allel) or
removing the "M7" from "M7 D" (because D's are just D's). But for those of
us who were hoping for a bit more, it would've
> gone a long way.
Again, I'm groping for clarity. Not sure where Allel is (so can't find
it), but I assume you are showing me a TNE value. That's an example of
something that SHOULD have been fixed, as M7 V has no habitable zone, and
I'm sure at some point I was assured it was fixed, or at some point I
failed to proof it well enough to ensure that it had been.
So back at groping, is Allel an example of something that slipped through
the cracks of the TNE attempted fix, where most other worlds in that
category DID get fixed (process/proofreading error, item 2 above), or is
it
representative of vast numbers of worlds like Allel that came through the
TNE attempted "fix" without, in fact being fixed (e.g., item 3 above)?
> ==============
> >> When generating the stars for the four sectors that appeared in the
> second 1248 sourcebook, "Bearers of the Flame", EDG was on board and all
of us were determined to make the stars right to
> >> the best of our
> >> ability. In the 8 years that have passed, I'm sure we've learned a
bit
> more about astrophysics that EDG would want to
> >> tweak those stars a bit more.
>
> >Right, and that's part of why I was determined to be conservative and
> only
> >change what was necessary (stars with no habitable zones, stellar
> remnants
> >that would have killed their worlds already).
>
> But we knew even back then that there were some stars that were too
cold. And someone at GDW knew it too because we wouldn't have received
"World Tamers Handbook" if you didn't. If you plug those numbers in
(Chapter 8: Stars and Planets) for worlds orbiting M5 or worse, there's no
way you're going to get an Ag
> world around an M7 V.
Correct. And I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that we had fixed
that, but obviously didn't. I'm trying to clarify if it's a Type 2 QA
error (where it was fixed generally but there are still some errors) or
Type 3 process error (where it happened more regularly).
> ==============
> >In a game like Traveller, which intends to remain in print forever and
> also uses terms like "canon," you can't afford to get into chasing the
latest scientific theories all the time, because UWPs are "Holy
> Sacraments."
>
> Not even going on theory here. I think it's safe to say that these are
facts. Most M stars are too small and cold to put out much heat so you're
going to have marginal worlds while a class "II" > star is going to be
really freaking hot.
Concur. I'm not trying yet to assign this to a category above, but just
say that the solution was to work with existing Traveller tools that I
believed were adequate, primarily the tables that showed habitable zones.
The goal was to re-assign new stars WITH a habitable zone for the main
world where existing stars did not (and where that didn't happen that is a
failure), so the rule was to get them at least into an M4 V. If there was
something wrong with the habitable zones tables that would be a real
problem, but I was not aware of that. Or if there is a sense that
"habitable zone" is too weak a requirement and doesn't go far enough, the
light from an M star doesn't have the light spectrum needed for a true
Rich or Agro world, you really need a K, G, or F for that, we did not
address that; the existing Traveller rules that we were leveraging didn't
touch on that, so perhaps needed a deeper rewrite. I know there was the
principle that rare Ag and Ri worlds should get the "Varsity Team" star
they deserved, and would have sworn that they did, but if they did not
they fell through the cracks.
On the other end, hot stars were already addressed by the fact that all
such stars already had habitable zones for the main worlds, doubling down
on the Traveller convention that "habitable zone" meant just that, and was
acceptable under the existing rules. Larger issues of the nature of
radiation and light spectrum put out by those stars, if those were not
appropriate to certain world types, was not addressed, but rolled into the
possibly over-simplified existing convention of the habitable zone.
Addressing that would have also required a deeper re-writing, but was not
on our list of things to fix, mostly because the small-cold star issue was
so much more of an issue.
So there's room for a few failures in there, depending on the issues
you're aware of. Also, the discussion above about what Traveller already
described as "habitable zones" is an example of what I also describe as
"conservatism" where we try to stick as much as possible with what the
game has already said.
> ==============
> > People get honked over HEPLaR and laser focal arrays but changing
> UWPs all the time would be
> pouring permanent itching powder down their shorts.
>
> In for a penny, in for a pound. Everyone in charge of Traveller has
changed the rules with every published version. No one bothered to explain
why. A cynic would say that it was to sell more product. The idealist
would say that they found a way to make better rules. So why not explain
to people we're fixing the
> UWP's to make them better. And if people can't accept that, whatever.
I think that "in for a penny in for a pound" may be near the heart of what
I described above as the "multivariate analysis" of the failure. And as
someone who agrees with that, I have to direct a few more related
aphorisms my/our way, because they are all valid:
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," "Moderation in the
defense of liberty is no virtue," "A half-way solution is no solution at
all," "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew
you out of my mouth," (Rev 3:16), "You can please some of the people all
of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you
can't please all of the people all of the time."
Re: the conservative approach I mentioned, I've remarked before that
Traveller has a lot of opposing constituencies that it gets stretched
between, and provided examples of how TNE specifically got
stretched(/drawn-and-quartered) between them, e.g., storyline vs. rules in
the space missiles discussion and others. Some people like the 3I and care
less about the rules, some prefer the rules and run their own universes,
etc. And then there was the larger issue driving TNE, the premise that we
had to "break up"/"drive down" the game to be more open to new players who
were deterred by the "too much existing stuff" idea. That also generated a
new tension, the premise that "you don't get new players from people who
have never heard of Traveller picking up the new game and thinking, 'I'll
try this because it doesn't frighten me,' you get them from new players
being added to existing Traveller campaigns by existing Traveller refs who
already aren't afraid of it."
For a variety of reasons, we tried to make TNE as inclusive as possible,
which may well have been the original sin, but that's what we did. The
idea that, "all of the worlds and races and history of Charted Space are
still there--and elements of that can be retained in its previous
state--but in a different form that opens up the game and lowers the
barriers to new players" is a key example of that. That extends rapidly
into the idea that, although we are going to introduce some changes and
retcons into the new game, we are going to try to spread the dislocations
evenly over all of the constituencies and not just promote one at the
expense of the other. (However this was predicated on where the 3I already
was by Hard Times in 1991, a "shattered" and rapidly decaying Imperium, we
could not do a "Dallas shower" scenario.) A corollary of "Charted Space is
still there" is that the UWPs are all still there, EXCEPT where we changed
some of the stars. I've said I tried to be conservative with the changes,
and that was out of a sense of loyalty, honor, and commitment to the
people that trusted those numbers. They'd been around for a long time, and
I felt that being too free with changing them would be playing too loose
with their trust. It may seem odd that the guy who made other changes to
the game claims he felt bound by honor or loyalty to keep the changes down
to some minimum, but it is the way I felt, and those were my intentions.
(More on large-scale changes below.)
All of which leads to the final aphorism here: "The road to hell is paved
with good intentions," and I would have to say that I am guilty of that,
even if--and I don't like to think about this--one could argue that those
good intentions are morally equivalent to cowardice in being unwilling to
try to inflict too much pain on any one audience constituency.
But specifically about how conservatism related to stars, that should not
have prevented them from all being replaced by ones with habitable zones.
I know that in my discussions with Geo Gelinas he talked about wanting to
retain the overall established distribution of stellar types, and I
thought that was fine. That would probably have steered him toward
replacing M5+ stars with M0-4 stars in most cases. As a HIWG guy he was
probably more inclined to be conservative in changing published UWPs than
most, but in keeping with the habitable zone discussion above, that should
still have addressed the issue. I also know that he put in brighter stars
for Ag and Ri worlds, and tried to observe one of those "only so many per
subsector or sector" rules of thumb. (Did we ever publish Geo's star
replacement procedures in Challenge? Or was that just his collapsing
rules. I think he did distribute the star replacement rules to other HIWG
members.) Certainly if the issue is item 1 above, that could be explained
by this conservatism, as well as the lack of a habitable zone "hook" we
could connect it to. (The "already defined habitable zone approach" is
also related to conservatism, and will be further discussed below.)
Otherwise failures might be more of the Item 2 or 3 type.
Re: explaining the change. I know that I explained to a number of
audiences what I/we tried to do with the stars, but never to the entire
audience. There was a clear principle that the TNE rulebook would not
include a bunch of, "why we changed this from the last version of
Traveller," because that would work in opposition to the "welcome new
players" idea. I had always wanted to write a big Challenge article with a
full-page H-R diagram so that players could see that much of what we see
as "different types of stars" were actually the same types of stars at
different points in their lifespan, which would explain some of the
changes we made. But I never had the chance.
This next thing makes sense to me to put here, because it gets at the
assumptions within which this was done. The "fixing the stars" idea was
not one of the core principles of TNE, but was something I added on
because I thought it was important. It didn't interest Frank as a design
goal, his objections to unlivable worlds was mostly on the Hi-Pop airless
rock basis, rather than stellar warmth, which means that I was adding this
project on top of the other things, without any additional time in the
production schedule to devote to it. My recollection is that my objection
was on a personal basis, from experience as a ref having to rationalize
all these worlds around cold cinder stars (geothermal heat is fine, though
illogical, the first time, after that it gets old) and as an amateur
astronomer. I don't think I was aware of any significant player complaints
about the stars, except a few ratifications after I had already decided to
do something. In fact I do remember, when I began trying to get people to
help me do it, having to "convert" people to my perspective by explaining
why the existing stars were bad and why they should care. Given that I was
doing it in addition to the TNE priorities, and how detailed and fiddly it
was, I ended up relying on outside help. It would have been nice to have
the assistance of a professional astronomer like EDG (especially one who
had already considered how Traveller could be adjusted), but I didn't.
That's not an excuse, just a recollection that adds some context to the
amount of work that was able to be put into it. As I think is clear, to
the extent possible we pulled forward a lot of existing Traveller premises
and systems that were deemed successful. The world generation system for
example, was reproduced almost as-is, save some adjustments I made
(apparently incompletely) to redress the star problems. (I also note that
there were changes to the DMs in the world generation system made in the
various un-documented printings of the LBBs that you can only find if you
looked for them. In trying to ensure that TNE carried forward the most
recent versions I spent a significant amount of time comparing these. I
did not have the time or ability to look into whether published UPPs/UWPs
were based on, or inconsistent with, various versions and whether this
might "require" changes to UPPs generated under non-current systems.)
While I say here that I don't recall there being anyone coming to me
saying, "Traveller has to fix the stars," I'm not asserting that no one
did. But I do know that moving it forward was pretty much a one-man shop
(me, plus helpers) which informs the sense I present of how my approach
was conservative, as it was not a hot-button issue, but was me pushing
something that was not being demanded. So naturally I did not feel a
mandate to do large-scale overhaul with large-scale repercussions which
had not been asked for, but rather a limited correction which would try to
solve existing contradictions with the rules or reasonable assumptions.
Again, not an excuse, just context.
Finally for this section, we all know that the problem with Traveller
stellar generation (back in 1991, I don't about after 1995) is that it
puts the cart before the horse, by generating the star at the end after 1)
inhabited world present? 2) UPP? 3) UWP beyond UPP? 4) Extended system =
star. We have probably all realized that a system which starts with
deciding if a hex contains an inhabited star system skips over whether or
not it has a star system at all. In my early Traveller campaigns I also
included uninhabited star systems in between inhabited ones, and the
result was an undifferentiated map where there were very few empty hexes.
When Traveller started publishing subsectors and sectors based on the
"inhabited system present?" model it locked that reverse logic into place.
It locked it further into place by establishing things like "mains" which
showed areas that Jump 1 ships were locked into and could not get out of.
Were there additionally uninhabited systems in the "empty hexes," that
would undermine the "main" concept, and change the logic of game play, so
the extended logic of the generation system became codified in the
published star map, and ever more so in the 3I background.
The real question when generating objects in space is first, is there a
star here, then, given the nature of that star what kind of worlds and
habitation does it have, and so on? But to go to that system would detach
the game system from the established campaign background generated by the
existing system, so had ramifications beyond what the players, and by
extension GDW, were prepared to mess with. Again, given the essential
nature of the 3I background to many players, this led to players and GDW
being less inclined to try to mess around there, which leads back to the
conservatism I've described. (More below in 2300 discussion)
> ==============
> > because for WHATEVER reason, a vast number of Traveller players are
> collectors/completists, and they want to collect all those UWPs, which
are very important to them, and if we're stupid enough to give them to
them, there is some kind of assumption that they are going to be
reasonably stable. So I get why people don't want them changed. They're
hard enough to read and make sense of to begin with, but if little digits
start randomly changing here and there, how can you tell what is what?
What is a fix, what is a typo? Which of these eye-watering rows of
numerals can you trust? We'd all be running around like Oedipus gouging
our eyes out.
>
> While I can't read a High Guard digit stream, my specialty was UWP's. I
never had a problem with that--my engineering background perhaps. But
we're not even going into the mass retention of
> atmosphere39;s bit, I was just talking about the stars.
Sorry, I read the whole post first, then went back and started
free-associating, and must have allowed that thought to get sucked into
the wrong location.
> ==============
> >in many cases the UWPs were generated automatically by a buggy DGP
> program and it
> is not clear if the Star DMs were applied correctly. But the bottom line
is that IF THE "OFFICIAL" UWPs DON'T REFLECT THE GENERATION SYSTEM THEY
ARE ERRATA and must be brought into line with it.
>
> Now it sounds like you're arguing my point.
Absolutely! As it was originally my point, else I wouldn't have attempted
to make the changes I tried to make.
> A lot of people know that
the data was buggy (Genie) but only the most stubborn of people want to
keep it.
>
> At this point in your post, you keep arguing my point, so I'm not sure
> why you did it except to rant at the people who gave you grief for years.
I say "free associate," you say "rant." :-) But to the extent that you
pointed out the corrections are still prevented, the "free association"
goes on.
Speaking of GEnie, at one point I had the opportunity to say that the
GEnie UWPs which had not yet been published were not official, and I
really, really wanted to do that, as it would have saved us the trouble of
"changing" a bunch of bad stars and buggy data, because it was never
"real" to begin with. So I checked around a little bit to try to get a
sense of how many people were using it, and the answer was, "everyone who
has access to it, everyone in HIWG, etc.," because DGP was widely regarded
as being closer to God than GDW. And here's the kicker, which really
illustrates the nature of "official" back in 1991-92: we at GDW didn't
even have access to the pseudo-official DGP-generated UWPs, which for me
could have been the basis of, "If GDW doesn't know about it, it ain't
official." We had what had been put into print, but that was just a small
minority of Sectors of Charted Space, all of which had been generated by
DGP and in the hands of everyone on the mailing lists EXCEPT GDW. So we
asked and begged around, and eventually someone on one of the lists sent
us the DGP auto-generation run, and like I said, I declined to invalidate
any of it, with the exception of the principle that "subsectors that
consist exclusively of 100xxx UPPs or other obvious errors are wrong." The
problem is that bad stars resulting from misapplied DMs would have been
more work to identify than we could generate. It's maybe hard to remember
the period before the advent of the Internet and WWW and readily available
desktop computing, but that's where we were.
> =============
> >But we should not be chasing current scientific theory all day. The
game
> >was designed in 1977, and its 1977 design is locked into its UWPs and
that's okay. The game is never going to realistic. We've got a flat map
> >that is not based on actual star locations but claims to include
Earth,
> >we've got jump drive, psionics, etc., etc., so we can afford to draw a
lone somewhere.
>
> Again, I'm not talking about theories. And yes, we've got a 2D map for a
3D galaxy. That's not something we can control until we get into a higher
tech future where we can model that sort of thing with ease at home.
Realism is going to be an unachievable goal; does that mean we should
abandon the steps that we "can" take to advance things? Psionics, jump
drives, etc. yeah, there's going to be elements of the game that are
fictional
> assumptions to this game's universe. But there are some things like
stars and gravity and breathable atmospheres that are
> factual, so why not try to get them right?
We should, as I tried to do in 1993 and apparently failed to go far enough.
I think it is useful at this point to talk about 2300 and deep overhauls
and where I think that left our thinking in 1992. NOT because it directly
applies to possible stellar fix failures, but when I think about "not
going far enough" it makes me think that there is some definition of "far
enough" that Traveller might not be able to follow or follow in 1992.
Traveller: 2300 and 2300 AD was GDW's attempt to create a new SFRPG based
on cutting-edge "hard science" (which by its very wording consigned
Traveller to another category, "space opera," "Golden-Age SF," "squooshy
science," whatever). This featured several new departures, including the
explicit statement that aliens are NPCs, not PCs, promoting their
"alien-ness," but for these purposes were based on "realistic"
astrographic/stellar data. (It has been pointed out that the 2300 near
space environment is wrong as it was based on the already out-of-date 1969
Gliese catalog, plus various
misinterpretations and new scientific findings since then, but that's not
relevant here.) Since that "realistic" stellar data already included the
locations and characteristics of all stars, the stellar generation portion
was minimized, and moved onto "since this star is already here, here is
the nature of worlds that might be around it." 2300 was clearly and
explicitly an attempt to make a game "more realistic" than Traveller, and
to my understanding was intended as the replacement to Traveller, hence
the name. When DGP came up with MT that was added as another GDW SFRPG
which essentially competed with 2300, and in 1990 GDW released the last
2300 product and shut down support. So by the time I arrived at GDW in
1991 GDW had already had two parallel competing SFRPGs, and MT was the
winner. MT was clearly associated with its existing background and the
worlds in it, so the winning SFRPG was more closely related to the
established in-game background facts, whether or not realistic, as opposed
to a commitment to a purely realistic representation of space.
So while this is a theoretical decision that was not placed before us in
1992, since I'm thinking about deeper redesigns that would expand the
habitable zone concept to add light spectra I have to wonder if that would
have been considered a practical thing to add to Traveller. My thought is
that level of redesign would be more like a 2300 fresh-start and introduce
consistency problems with the established 3I World stats, and since 2300
lost and MT won, the tendency would be to stay closer to the "truth" of
the existing (inaccurate) campaign background rather than doing a deep
world generation redesign.
ALL OF THAT ASIDE, I absolutely agree that an SFRPG worth its name should
be scientifically accurate within its subject matter, and that includes
stars and the reality of their asserted details and those of their
planets. Another way of saying this is that an SFRPG that asserts
habitable worlds or Agricultural or Rich worlds around stars whose defined
classifications don't provide sufficient heat or light by definition
doesn't mean anything by those stellar classifications other than
pseudo-astronomical "color."
FULL DISCLOSURE: I tried that once and didn't get the job done. And it's
no longer up to me.
> =============
> >> IMTU, I've been changing the UWP's where my campaigns are active
> (Vland
> >>and Windhorn). I've been altering stars to fit the mainworlds and
> bumping
> >>up world sizes to ensure they have sufficient mass to retain their
atmospheres (as EDG educated us/me).
>
> >That would be beyond my line based on the "errata" test, as it's not
errata unless you're also re-doing the world generation system to
> disallow
> >current results.
>
> In fact, that was done for Mongoose under their Open Gaming License. I
believe EDG was involved with it (not really sure) and it's way in the
back of the "Traveller System Reference Document" under "Space Opera
Rules". But I do know that he's been hard at work re-creating system
generation procedures. You can find > it all at sfrpg-discussion.net
That's definitely what ought to be done, and helps with fixing UWPs
because it gives you a place to stand and pull the values back into what
can be generated.
> =============
> >Also, now that we are finding exoplanets for the past couple years, we
> are
> >going to start getting the doors blown off our assumptions on solar
> system
> >formation, so I wouldn't be in a hurry to change things we'll just
want
> to
> >change again in a couple more years.
>
> It'll be a long time before they make sense of all the data coming in,
and they're not even getting the complete picture--it39;s skewered in favor
of the massive gas giants and earth-sized worlds are at the low end limits
of their resolution. Yeah, there will be people that are willing to dive
right in, but I'll wait. > I've got plenty to do now.
Yeah, I think we're saying the same thing. Try to make it accurate, but
keep the change frequency down to some manageable level, whatever that is.
And since that's not up to me, it's really foolish of me to talk about it
at all, other than revisiting what we were trying to do way back when.
Incidentally, I don't know if anyone told you this, but we failed. :-)
> ============
> >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?
>
> Ok, take a deep breath and relax. I'm not picking on you.
Yeah, I know that. I'm not taking it personally, just trying to get a
handle on what the failure is.
> It isn't that
you did things wrong, Dave. You had the tools (World Tamer's Handbook) but
didn't take full advantage of them. Some of us have. Nick Bradbeer
programmed a spreadsheet with chapter 8's stellar data to make it easy to
compute average temperatures > on worlds.
I think one insight is that the readily distributed, readily usable tools
like Nick's spreadsheet were not "available" to us then, and when I say
"available," sure an IT early-adopter type could have something, but not
the way Excel comes with almost any computer and how all of us have picked
up how to use spreadsheets over the past 20 years. I worked with the guy
who was doing the Traveller computer program and that was the first time I
had ever heard the word "hyper text." We really were doing all that stuff
manually back then. The design staff all had Mac OS 6 that we used as word
processors, and the number crunching programs were provided to the
business staff who had IBMs. I don't even know who made spreadsheets back
then, Corel maybe. The technological advantage that you are talking about
is nothing to sneeze at. We didn't even have spreadsheets for FF&S
designs.
> I modified it for my own use by plugging in interpolated data for the
stars in between the data points you gave us (0's and 5's). And just
using that I go around
> tweaking stars to get something that makes sense (to me, anyway) based
on the UPP and those pesky trade classifications.
Here's one thing that makes me wonder. You're talking about WTH, which
should have some of the same tables as the TNE world generation system,
and I have to go back to something I suggested above. If you're having to
tweak stars to fix surface temperature it sounds like there is something
wrong with the habitable zone tables, which as I said is beyond where we
went or felt we could go.
Wouldn't it also be practical to just nudge the orbit in or out the
percentage fudge factor you're allowed? If that doesn't work, I'm back to
thinking there's something wrong with the habitable zone table or
something else.
> If you guys had done the same back them, you might've done it
yourselves. But I get it, you couldn't spend all your time worrying
about the UWP's. There were other supplements and adventures to publish.
You didn't have the luxury of time. Maybe if MTG never happened...
>
> For the record, I'm doing this for MTU. I don't care if the game's
current publishers do anything about it or not, and I don't blame you. You
did more to fix Traveller's problems than anyone > else before or since.
Again, you're welcome, but I'm not sure I'm any closer to understanding
where we dropped the ball. If the primary issue is the star tweaking
you're talking about above, I don't think we ever had the chance of doing
that for all of the worlds, given the lack of rapid, bulk data processing
ability back then.
I think given the example of Allel you're also thinking of stuff that
either fell through the QA cracks or systematically, and maybe some other
things you didn't mention.
Also, you mentioned somewhere doing the work on your campaigns in Vland
and Windhorn, but I'm pretty sure we never published any TNE data there,
so those are not examples of bad TNE mods, right?
> \_/
> DED
> TNE @ Yahoo ml Admin
>
APPENDIX
1. When you "punched up" the stars (i.e., made them bigger/hotter) you
shouldn't have settled for changing M7 to M3, for example, you should have
gone more often to K, G, or F.
(Had a manual rule for this, may not have been adequate, especially if
we're talking about a new understanding of habitable zone based on
spectrum of radiation.)
2. When you "punched up" the stars, although the general effect was
satisfactory, you still missed some (basically a QA flaw).
(Absolutely likely, hopefully not that many.)
3. When you "punched up" the stars, there was a flaw in the overall
process. (Although I don't have access to all of the previous tables from
WTH, MT, Scouts, etc., with the old tables we modified, I have noticed in
the last 24 hours that TNE still retains M5+ V stars with no habitable
zone which might have snuck back in via the "redone" stars, which is an
issue.)
(This, honestly, is what I fear you're saying. given the M5 V issue AND
your citation of Allel, something got in there that didn't pass the test.
I can't tell you how that got screwed up.)
4. When you "punched up" the stars, there was some other flaw in the
overall process: ______________.
(Unknown discussion)
5. When you removed the degenerates (white dwarfs) from the primaries, you
failed to remove them from the companion stars.
(Yes, I am reminded now that we failed to do this. I can't remember why,
but it's probably because multi-star systems are so complex. If they're
distant companions maybe you can get away with it, and short of playing
with each and every system it's hard to know how big the problem is. It
should have been easy to turn the companion into an M6-9 V while we were
in there, don't know why we didn't. I wonder if in some subsectors we did
address the companion stars, but in others forgot to. Certainly the
primary goal was to ensure the system had a habitable zone which we
[maybe] fixed, and that addressed the most urgent issue (giving the world
a habitable zone) while not addressing the evolution issue. I would have
ideally liked to just ditch all binary, trinary stars, but everyone knows
that multiple stars are supposedly more common than singles, so that
didn't seem right.)
6. When you removed the degenerates you failed to properly reclassify all
degenerates as simply "D" because a white dwarf remnant is a white dwarf
remnant is a white dwarf remnant, no such thing as a G2 D vs. a M3 D vs a
M8 D. (Actually there is an M8D, the car Bruce McLaren was killed in while
testing it in 1970 at Goodwood. Bruce ruled.)
(Yes, I was aware of this at one point. Cannot remember why we didn't do
this, but we should have.)
7. You failed to address other issues of stellar evolution, such as stars
that had already departed the main sequence.
(Unknown discussion, some of this discussed previously, "however many
planets described as being there are the ones left uneaten.")
8. You failed to address other issues of stellar Class/Luminosity Class:
______________________.
(Unknown discussion)
9. You failed to address issues of Stellar Population (I/II/III). (see
"Appendix," bottom)
(Somewhere in the game I removed the possibility of Pop II stars, as back
then they were not supposed to be in the spiral arms, but only in the
galactic halo, so did not belong in the random generation table. I think
that's maybe why I got rid of Luminosity Class VI, as at the time they
were maybe only supposed to be Pop II. They didn't have population III
back then.)
10. Other: ________________________.
(Unknown discussion)
Thanks for the reply, and please forgive me for a couple things:
1. I'm still trying to grasp the details of the failure,
2. The confusing nature of the running commentary in my previous message.
My running commentary was me free associating a number of
cross-cutting/contradictory pressures from back at the time on the way to
recapitulating the question, "what was the failure?" Re: "failure," please
be assured that I know you're not picking on me. But I have heard several
times from EDG, you, and others, that TNE tried but failed to fix the
problems, and I just want to understand where we fell short, because it's
a big, complex issue. I don't take it as negative criticism, but as the
guy that tried to fix it 21 years ago I just want to know where we dropped
the ball. "I'm the navigator, I have a right to know where we are." (Donn
Eisele, Apollo 7, attrib.)
Also you probably noticed me switching back and forth between first ("we
do/we did") and third person ("they should"), showing my head being
variously back in 1991-95 when I WAS the guy who "had to make the call"
and the criteria I tried to balance, and now as as a formerly-interested
observer. When this has come up previously my head was not as fully
connected to the 1991-95 period as it is now, and I couldn't grasp the
failure and gave up trying. Now, while my head is more fully connected,
I'm trying to get a handle on it, because if not now, I probably never
will. I very much appreciate the sentiment, "at least you tried," but I
also note there is no frustration like the exquisite asphyxiation of
knowing that you had intended to do a thing, believed that you had, and
finding out, "no, not really." It's kind of like if there were a
Twilight Zone episode where for the first 15 minutes a guy goes through
painstakingly painting a yellow house so that it is now purple, then goes
back to the office and people say, "Why didn't you repaint the house?" "I
did, it's purple." Then they take him out to the house which is clearly
still yellow, and he spends the rest of the show thinking, "Did I paint a
different house? Did I dream this? Did someone come after me and paint it
back to yellow? Am I insane?" I am just trying to put this, "you didn't go
far enough" to some kind of bed. I may be working toward a hypothesis of
the multivariate description of the failure, which will hopefully clarify
as we go, with your help if I may ask for it.
If I had any sense, or more ambition, I might scrap this conversation and
start over from a clean sheet. But this is already here, so in keeping
with the old GDW-era (false) wisdom that, "it's easier/quicker to modify a
flawed MS in-hand than to start over," I will retain the period-piece
flavor by working with the existing MS. That makes this perhaps closer to
"performance art" than clear analysis, so I will go ahead and now nominate
this message for the "Dave Nilsen Memorial Palme d'Annoying" for the most
long-winded, self-indulgent, digressive post for this month. I think my
last one caused you understandable confusion or frustration, and I will
try to avoid doing that again. Mea culpa.
> dcnilsen13 wrote:
>
> >> You tried, which is more than can be said of others.
>
> > Thanks, but what did I do wrong, or fail to do?
>
> You didn't go far enough.
I'm still trying to get a sense of if "didn39;t go far enough" means, as
that can cover a LOT of ground, from "when you punched up the stars you
should have punched them up even higher," to "there were other categories
of things you should have fixed while you had the hood up," or, probably,
"both." :-)
To aid in clarity, I will create a list of specific possible cases of
"didn39;t go far enough." And I will try not to muddy the waters by
anticipating the response and saying, "if this one, here is why," but go
into that later after you make your assessment. My guess is that your
answer will be, "G, All of the above," but we'll save that for later.
1. When you "punched up" the stars (i.e., made them bigger/hotter) you
shouldn't have settled for changing M7 to M3, for example, you should have
gone more often to K, G, or F.
2. When you "punched up" the stars, although the general effect was
satisfactory, you still missed some (basically a QA flaw).
3. When you "punched up" the stars, there was a flaw in the overall
process. (Although I don't have access to all of the previous tables from
WTH, MT, Scouts, etc., with the old tables we modified, I have noticed in
the last 24 hours that TNE still retains M5+ V stars with no habitable
zone which might have snuck back in via the "redone" stars, which is an
issue.)
4. When you "punched up" the stars, there was some other flaw in the
overall process: ______________.
5. When you removed the degenerates (white dwarfs) from the primaries, you
failed to remove them from the companion stars.
6. When you removed the degenerates you failed to properly reclassify all
degenerates as simply "D" because a white dwarf remnant is a white dwarf
remnant is a white dwarf remnant, no such thing as a G2 D vs. a M3 D vs a
M8 D. (Actually there is an M8D, the car Bruce McLaren was killed in while
testing it in 1970 at Goodwood. Bruce ruled.)
7. You failed to address other issues of stellar evolution, such as stars
that had already departed the main sequence.
8. You failed to address other issues of stellar Class/Luminosity Class:
______________________.
9. You failed to address issues of Stellar Population (I/II/III). (see
"Appendix," bottom)
10. Other: ________________________.
By laying out the above, I am not trying to cast myself as some kind of
martyr being picked on, just trying to clarify the various possible
meanings of "didn39;t go far enough," because I really do want to figure out
where the problem(s) happened so I can satisfy myself if it was a
decision, an error in creating a solution, or an error in execution.
And by the way, please don't WORRY too MUCH if I go INTO all CAPS, I DON'T
mean ALL that MUCH by IT. I know somewhere in e-mail etiquette I am
supposed to agree that CAPS means that I am "yelling," but I guess I don't
agree with that. I use it to call out things I want to call attention to
(sometimes just for myself), and in this medium where I don't have access
to the full formatting palette of italics, bold, underlines, etc., I have
to fall back on CAPS and "quotes" to help things stand out.
> Maybe the old grognards would've screamed bloody murder for giving an
Earth-like world a proper star instead of a M7 V (i.e. Allel) or
removing the "M7" from "M7 D" (because D's are just D's). But for those of
us who were hoping for a bit more, it would've
> gone a long way.
Again, I'm groping for clarity. Not sure where Allel is (so can't find
it), but I assume you are showing me a TNE value. That's an example of
something that SHOULD have been fixed, as M7 V has no habitable zone, and
I'm sure at some point I was assured it was fixed, or at some point I
failed to proof it well enough to ensure that it had been.
So back at groping, is Allel an example of something that slipped through
the cracks of the TNE attempted fix, where most other worlds in that
category DID get fixed (process/proofreading error, item 2 above), or is
it
representative of vast numbers of worlds like Allel that came through the
TNE attempted "fix" without, in fact being fixed (e.g., item 3 above)?
> ==============
> >> When generating the stars for the four sectors that appeared in the
> second 1248 sourcebook, "Bearers of the Flame", EDG was on board and all
of us were determined to make the stars right to
> >> the best of our
> >> ability. In the 8 years that have passed, I'm sure we've learned a
bit
> more about astrophysics that EDG would want to
> >> tweak those stars a bit more.
>
> >Right, and that's part of why I was determined to be conservative and
> only
> >change what was necessary (stars with no habitable zones, stellar
> remnants
> >that would have killed their worlds already).
>
> But we knew even back then that there were some stars that were too
cold. And someone at GDW knew it too because we wouldn't have received
"World Tamers Handbook" if you didn't. If you plug those numbers in
(Chapter 8: Stars and Planets) for worlds orbiting M5 or worse, there's no
way you're going to get an Ag
> world around an M7 V.
Correct. And I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that we had fixed
that, but obviously didn't. I'm trying to clarify if it's a Type 2 QA
error (where it was fixed generally but there are still some errors) or
Type 3 process error (where it happened more regularly).
> ==============
> >In a game like Traveller, which intends to remain in print forever and
> also uses terms like "canon," you can't afford to get into chasing the
latest scientific theories all the time, because UWPs are "Holy
> Sacraments."
>
> Not even going on theory here. I think it's safe to say that these are
facts. Most M stars are too small and cold to put out much heat so you're
going to have marginal worlds while a class "II" > star is going to be
really freaking hot.
Concur. I'm not trying yet to assign this to a category above, but just
say that the solution was to work with existing Traveller tools that I
believed were adequate, primarily the tables that showed habitable zones.
The goal was to re-assign new stars WITH a habitable zone for the main
world where existing stars did not (and where that didn't happen that is a
failure), so the rule was to get them at least into an M4 V. If there was
something wrong with the habitable zones tables that would be a real
problem, but I was not aware of that. Or if there is a sense that
"habitable zone" is too weak a requirement and doesn't go far enough, the
light from an M star doesn't have the light spectrum needed for a true
Rich or Agro world, you really need a K, G, or F for that, we did not
address that; the existing Traveller rules that we were leveraging didn't
touch on that, so perhaps needed a deeper rewrite. I know there was the
principle that rare Ag and Ri worlds should get the "Varsity Team" star
they deserved, and would have sworn that they did, but if they did not
they fell through the cracks.
On the other end, hot stars were already addressed by the fact that all
such stars already had habitable zones for the main worlds, doubling down
on the Traveller convention that "habitable zone" meant just that, and was
acceptable under the existing rules. Larger issues of the nature of
radiation and light spectrum put out by those stars, if those were not
appropriate to certain world types, was not addressed, but rolled into the
possibly over-simplified existing convention of the habitable zone.
Addressing that would have also required a deeper re-writing, but was not
on our list of things to fix, mostly because the small-cold star issue was
so much more of an issue.
So there's room for a few failures in there, depending on the issues
you're aware of. Also, the discussion above about what Traveller already
described as "habitable zones" is an example of what I also describe as
"conservatism" where we try to stick as much as possible with what the
game has already said.
> ==============
> > People get honked over HEPLaR and laser focal arrays but changing
> UWPs all the time would be
> pouring permanent itching powder down their shorts.
>
> In for a penny, in for a pound. Everyone in charge of Traveller has
changed the rules with every published version. No one bothered to explain
why. A cynic would say that it was to sell more product. The idealist
would say that they found a way to make better rules. So why not explain
to people we're fixing the
> UWP's to make them better. And if people can't accept that, whatever.
I think that "in for a penny in for a pound" may be near the heart of what
I described above as the "multivariate analysis" of the failure. And as
someone who agrees with that, I have to direct a few more related
aphorisms my/our way, because they are all valid:
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," "Moderation in the
defense of liberty is no virtue," "A half-way solution is no solution at
all," "So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew
you out of my mouth," (Rev 3:16), "You can please some of the people all
of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you
can't please all of the people all of the time."
Re: the conservative approach I mentioned, I've remarked before that
Traveller has a lot of opposing constituencies that it gets stretched
between, and provided examples of how TNE specifically got
stretched(/drawn-and-quartered) between them, e.g., storyline vs. rules in
the space missiles discussion and others. Some people like the 3I and care
less about the rules, some prefer the rules and run their own universes,
etc. And then there was the larger issue driving TNE, the premise that we
had to "break up"/"drive down" the game to be more open to new players who
were deterred by the "too much existing stuff" idea. That also generated a
new tension, the premise that "you don't get new players from people who
have never heard of Traveller picking up the new game and thinking, 'I'll
try this because it doesn't frighten me,' you get them from new players
being added to existing Traveller campaigns by existing Traveller refs who
already aren't afraid of it."
For a variety of reasons, we tried to make TNE as inclusive as possible,
which may well have been the original sin, but that's what we did. The
idea that, "all of the worlds and races and history of Charted Space are
still there--and elements of that can be retained in its previous
state--but in a different form that opens up the game and lowers the
barriers to new players" is a key example of that. That extends rapidly
into the idea that, although we are going to introduce some changes and
retcons into the new game, we are going to try to spread the dislocations
evenly over all of the constituencies and not just promote one at the
expense of the other. (However this was predicated on where the 3I already
was by Hard Times in 1991, a "shattered" and rapidly decaying Imperium, we
could not do a "Dallas shower" scenario.) A corollary of "Charted Space is
still there" is that the UWPs are all still there, EXCEPT where we changed
some of the stars. I've said I tried to be conservative with the changes,
and that was out of a sense of loyalty, honor, and commitment to the
people that trusted those numbers. They'd been around for a long time, and
I felt that being too free with changing them would be playing too loose
with their trust. It may seem odd that the guy who made other changes to
the game claims he felt bound by honor or loyalty to keep the changes down
to some minimum, but it is the way I felt, and those were my intentions.
(More on large-scale changes below.)
All of which leads to the final aphorism here: "The road to hell is paved
with good intentions," and I would have to say that I am guilty of that,
even if--and I don't like to think about this--one could argue that those
good intentions are morally equivalent to cowardice in being unwilling to
try to inflict too much pain on any one audience constituency.
But specifically about how conservatism related to stars, that should not
have prevented them from all being replaced by ones with habitable zones.
I know that in my discussions with Geo Gelinas he talked about wanting to
retain the overall established distribution of stellar types, and I
thought that was fine. That would probably have steered him toward
replacing M5+ stars with M0-4 stars in most cases. As a HIWG guy he was
probably more inclined to be conservative in changing published UWPs than
most, but in keeping with the habitable zone discussion above, that should
still have addressed the issue. I also know that he put in brighter stars
for Ag and Ri worlds, and tried to observe one of those "only so many per
subsector or sector" rules of thumb. (Did we ever publish Geo's star
replacement procedures in Challenge? Or was that just his collapsing
rules. I think he did distribute the star replacement rules to other HIWG
members.) Certainly if the issue is item 1 above, that could be explained
by this conservatism, as well as the lack of a habitable zone "hook" we
could connect it to. (The "already defined habitable zone approach" is
also related to conservatism, and will be further discussed below.)
Otherwise failures might be more of the Item 2 or 3 type.
Re: explaining the change. I know that I explained to a number of
audiences what I/we tried to do with the stars, but never to the entire
audience. There was a clear principle that the TNE rulebook would not
include a bunch of, "why we changed this from the last version of
Traveller," because that would work in opposition to the "welcome new
players" idea. I had always wanted to write a big Challenge article with a
full-page H-R diagram so that players could see that much of what we see
as "different types of stars" were actually the same types of stars at
different points in their lifespan, which would explain some of the
changes we made. But I never had the chance.
This next thing makes sense to me to put here, because it gets at the
assumptions within which this was done. The "fixing the stars" idea was
not one of the core principles of TNE, but was something I added on
because I thought it was important. It didn't interest Frank as a design
goal, his objections to unlivable worlds was mostly on the Hi-Pop airless
rock basis, rather than stellar warmth, which means that I was adding this
project on top of the other things, without any additional time in the
production schedule to devote to it. My recollection is that my objection
was on a personal basis, from experience as a ref having to rationalize
all these worlds around cold cinder stars (geothermal heat is fine, though
illogical, the first time, after that it gets old) and as an amateur
astronomer. I don't think I was aware of any significant player complaints
about the stars, except a few ratifications after I had already decided to
do something. In fact I do remember, when I began trying to get people to
help me do it, having to "convert" people to my perspective by explaining
why the existing stars were bad and why they should care. Given that I was
doing it in addition to the TNE priorities, and how detailed and fiddly it
was, I ended up relying on outside help. It would have been nice to have
the assistance of a professional astronomer like EDG (especially one who
had already considered how Traveller could be adjusted), but I didn't.
That's not an excuse, just a recollection that adds some context to the
amount of work that was able to be put into it. As I think is clear, to
the extent possible we pulled forward a lot of existing Traveller premises
and systems that were deemed successful. The world generation system for
example, was reproduced almost as-is, save some adjustments I made
(apparently incompletely) to redress the star problems. (I also note that
there were changes to the DMs in the world generation system made in the
various un-documented printings of the LBBs that you can only find if you
looked for them. In trying to ensure that TNE carried forward the most
recent versions I spent a significant amount of time comparing these. I
did not have the time or ability to look into whether published UPPs/UWPs
were based on, or inconsistent with, various versions and whether this
might "require" changes to UPPs generated under non-current systems.)
While I say here that I don't recall there being anyone coming to me
saying, "Traveller has to fix the stars," I'm not asserting that no one
did. But I do know that moving it forward was pretty much a one-man shop
(me, plus helpers) which informs the sense I present of how my approach
was conservative, as it was not a hot-button issue, but was me pushing
something that was not being demanded. So naturally I did not feel a
mandate to do large-scale overhaul with large-scale repercussions which
had not been asked for, but rather a limited correction which would try to
solve existing contradictions with the rules or reasonable assumptions.
Again, not an excuse, just context.
Finally for this section, we all know that the problem with Traveller
stellar generation (back in 1991, I don't about after 1995) is that it
puts the cart before the horse, by generating the star at the end after 1)
inhabited world present? 2) UPP? 3) UWP beyond UPP? 4) Extended system =
star. We have probably all realized that a system which starts with
deciding if a hex contains an inhabited star system skips over whether or
not it has a star system at all. In my early Traveller campaigns I also
included uninhabited star systems in between inhabited ones, and the
result was an undifferentiated map where there were very few empty hexes.
When Traveller started publishing subsectors and sectors based on the
"inhabited system present?" model it locked that reverse logic into place.
It locked it further into place by establishing things like "mains" which
showed areas that Jump 1 ships were locked into and could not get out of.
Were there additionally uninhabited systems in the "empty hexes," that
would undermine the "main" concept, and change the logic of game play, so
the extended logic of the generation system became codified in the
published star map, and ever more so in the 3I background.
The real question when generating objects in space is first, is there a
star here, then, given the nature of that star what kind of worlds and
habitation does it have, and so on? But to go to that system would detach
the game system from the established campaign background generated by the
existing system, so had ramifications beyond what the players, and by
extension GDW, were prepared to mess with. Again, given the essential
nature of the 3I background to many players, this led to players and GDW
being less inclined to try to mess around there, which leads back to the
conservatism I've described. (More below in 2300 discussion)
> ==============
> > because for WHATEVER reason, a vast number of Traveller players are
> collectors/completists, and they want to collect all those UWPs, which
are very important to them, and if we're stupid enough to give them to
them, there is some kind of assumption that they are going to be
reasonably stable. So I get why people don't want them changed. They're
hard enough to read and make sense of to begin with, but if little digits
start randomly changing here and there, how can you tell what is what?
What is a fix, what is a typo? Which of these eye-watering rows of
numerals can you trust? We'd all be running around like Oedipus gouging
our eyes out.
>
> While I can't read a High Guard digit stream, my specialty was UWP's. I
never had a problem with that--my engineering background perhaps. But
we're not even going into the mass retention of
> atmosphere39;s bit, I was just talking about the stars.
Sorry, I read the whole post first, then went back and started
free-associating, and must have allowed that thought to get sucked into
the wrong location.
> ==============
> >in many cases the UWPs were generated automatically by a buggy DGP
> program and it
> is not clear if the Star DMs were applied correctly. But the bottom line
is that IF THE "OFFICIAL" UWPs DON'T REFLECT THE GENERATION SYSTEM THEY
ARE ERRATA and must be brought into line with it.
>
> Now it sounds like you're arguing my point.
Absolutely! As it was originally my point, else I wouldn't have attempted
to make the changes I tried to make.
> A lot of people know that
the data was buggy (Genie) but only the most stubborn of people want to
keep it.
>
> At this point in your post, you keep arguing my point, so I'm not sure
> why you did it except to rant at the people who gave you grief for years.
I say "free associate," you say "rant." :-) But to the extent that you
pointed out the corrections are still prevented, the "free association"
goes on.
Speaking of GEnie, at one point I had the opportunity to say that the
GEnie UWPs which had not yet been published were not official, and I
really, really wanted to do that, as it would have saved us the trouble of
"changing" a bunch of bad stars and buggy data, because it was never
"real" to begin with. So I checked around a little bit to try to get a
sense of how many people were using it, and the answer was, "everyone who
has access to it, everyone in HIWG, etc.," because DGP was widely regarded
as being closer to God than GDW. And here's the kicker, which really
illustrates the nature of "official" back in 1991-92: we at GDW didn't
even have access to the pseudo-official DGP-generated UWPs, which for me
could have been the basis of, "If GDW doesn't know about it, it ain't
official." We had what had been put into print, but that was just a small
minority of Sectors of Charted Space, all of which had been generated by
DGP and in the hands of everyone on the mailing lists EXCEPT GDW. So we
asked and begged around, and eventually someone on one of the lists sent
us the DGP auto-generation run, and like I said, I declined to invalidate
any of it, with the exception of the principle that "subsectors that
consist exclusively of 100xxx UPPs or other obvious errors are wrong." The
problem is that bad stars resulting from misapplied DMs would have been
more work to identify than we could generate. It's maybe hard to remember
the period before the advent of the Internet and WWW and readily available
desktop computing, but that's where we were.
> =============
> >But we should not be chasing current scientific theory all day. The
game
> >was designed in 1977, and its 1977 design is locked into its UWPs and
that's okay. The game is never going to realistic. We've got a flat map
> >that is not based on actual star locations but claims to include
Earth,
> >we've got jump drive, psionics, etc., etc., so we can afford to draw a
lone somewhere.
>
> Again, I'm not talking about theories. And yes, we've got a 2D map for a
3D galaxy. That's not something we can control until we get into a higher
tech future where we can model that sort of thing with ease at home.
Realism is going to be an unachievable goal; does that mean we should
abandon the steps that we "can" take to advance things? Psionics, jump
drives, etc. yeah, there's going to be elements of the game that are
fictional
> assumptions to this game's universe. But there are some things like
stars and gravity and breathable atmospheres that are
> factual, so why not try to get them right?
We should, as I tried to do in 1993 and apparently failed to go far enough.
I think it is useful at this point to talk about 2300 and deep overhauls
and where I think that left our thinking in 1992. NOT because it directly
applies to possible stellar fix failures, but when I think about "not
going far enough" it makes me think that there is some definition of "far
enough" that Traveller might not be able to follow or follow in 1992.
Traveller: 2300 and 2300 AD was GDW's attempt to create a new SFRPG based
on cutting-edge "hard science" (which by its very wording consigned
Traveller to another category, "space opera," "Golden-Age SF," "squooshy
science," whatever). This featured several new departures, including the
explicit statement that aliens are NPCs, not PCs, promoting their
"alien-ness," but for these purposes were based on "realistic"
astrographic/stellar data. (It has been pointed out that the 2300 near
space environment is wrong as it was based on the already out-of-date 1969
Gliese catalog, plus various
misinterpretations and new scientific findings since then, but that's not
relevant here.) Since that "realistic" stellar data already included the
locations and characteristics of all stars, the stellar generation portion
was minimized, and moved onto "since this star is already here, here is
the nature of worlds that might be around it." 2300 was clearly and
explicitly an attempt to make a game "more realistic" than Traveller, and
to my understanding was intended as the replacement to Traveller, hence
the name. When DGP came up with MT that was added as another GDW SFRPG
which essentially competed with 2300, and in 1990 GDW released the last
2300 product and shut down support. So by the time I arrived at GDW in
1991 GDW had already had two parallel competing SFRPGs, and MT was the
winner. MT was clearly associated with its existing background and the
worlds in it, so the winning SFRPG was more closely related to the
established in-game background facts, whether or not realistic, as opposed
to a commitment to a purely realistic representation of space.
So while this is a theoretical decision that was not placed before us in
1992, since I'm thinking about deeper redesigns that would expand the
habitable zone concept to add light spectra I have to wonder if that would
have been considered a practical thing to add to Traveller. My thought is
that level of redesign would be more like a 2300 fresh-start and introduce
consistency problems with the established 3I World stats, and since 2300
lost and MT won, the tendency would be to stay closer to the "truth" of
the existing (inaccurate) campaign background rather than doing a deep
world generation redesign.
ALL OF THAT ASIDE, I absolutely agree that an SFRPG worth its name should
be scientifically accurate within its subject matter, and that includes
stars and the reality of their asserted details and those of their
planets. Another way of saying this is that an SFRPG that asserts
habitable worlds or Agricultural or Rich worlds around stars whose defined
classifications don't provide sufficient heat or light by definition
doesn't mean anything by those stellar classifications other than
pseudo-astronomical "color."
FULL DISCLOSURE: I tried that once and didn't get the job done. And it's
no longer up to me.
> =============
> >> IMTU, I've been changing the UWP's where my campaigns are active
> (Vland
> >>and Windhorn). I've been altering stars to fit the mainworlds and
> bumping
> >>up world sizes to ensure they have sufficient mass to retain their
atmospheres (as EDG educated us/me).
>
> >That would be beyond my line based on the "errata" test, as it's not
errata unless you're also re-doing the world generation system to
> disallow
> >current results.
>
> In fact, that was done for Mongoose under their Open Gaming License. I
believe EDG was involved with it (not really sure) and it's way in the
back of the "Traveller System Reference Document" under "Space Opera
Rules". But I do know that he's been hard at work re-creating system
generation procedures. You can find > it all at sfrpg-discussion.net
That's definitely what ought to be done, and helps with fixing UWPs
because it gives you a place to stand and pull the values back into what
can be generated.
> =============
> >Also, now that we are finding exoplanets for the past couple years, we
> are
> >going to start getting the doors blown off our assumptions on solar
> system
> >formation, so I wouldn't be in a hurry to change things we'll just
want
> to
> >change again in a couple more years.
>
> It'll be a long time before they make sense of all the data coming in,
and they're not even getting the complete picture--it39;s skewered in favor
of the massive gas giants and earth-sized worlds are at the low end limits
of their resolution. Yeah, there will be people that are willing to dive
right in, but I'll wait. > I've got plenty to do now.
Yeah, I think we're saying the same thing. Try to make it accurate, but
keep the change frequency down to some manageable level, whatever that is.
And since that's not up to me, it's really foolish of me to talk about it
at all, other than revisiting what we were trying to do way back when.
Incidentally, I don't know if anyone told you this, but we failed. :-)
> ============
> >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?
>
> Ok, take a deep breath and relax. I'm not picking on you.
Yeah, I know that. I'm not taking it personally, just trying to get a
handle on what the failure is.
> It isn't that
you did things wrong, Dave. You had the tools (World Tamer's Handbook) but
didn't take full advantage of them. Some of us have. Nick Bradbeer
programmed a spreadsheet with chapter 8's stellar data to make it easy to
compute average temperatures > on worlds.
I think one insight is that the readily distributed, readily usable tools
like Nick's spreadsheet were not "available" to us then, and when I say
"available," sure an IT early-adopter type could have something, but not
the way Excel comes with almost any computer and how all of us have picked
up how to use spreadsheets over the past 20 years. I worked with the guy
who was doing the Traveller computer program and that was the first time I
had ever heard the word "hyper text." We really were doing all that stuff
manually back then. The design staff all had Mac OS 6 that we used as word
processors, and the number crunching programs were provided to the
business staff who had IBMs. I don't even know who made spreadsheets back
then, Corel maybe. The technological advantage that you are talking about
is nothing to sneeze at. We didn't even have spreadsheets for FF&S
designs.
> I modified it for my own use by plugging in interpolated data for the
stars in between the data points you gave us (0's and 5's). And just
using that I go around
> tweaking stars to get something that makes sense (to me, anyway) based
on the UPP and those pesky trade classifications.
Here's one thing that makes me wonder. You're talking about WTH, which
should have some of the same tables as the TNE world generation system,
and I have to go back to something I suggested above. If you're having to
tweak stars to fix surface temperature it sounds like there is something
wrong with the habitable zone tables, which as I said is beyond where we
went or felt we could go.
Wouldn't it also be practical to just nudge the orbit in or out the
percentage fudge factor you're allowed? If that doesn't work, I'm back to
thinking there's something wrong with the habitable zone table or
something else.
> If you guys had done the same back them, you might've done it
yourselves. But I get it, you couldn't spend all your time worrying
about the UWP's. There were other supplements and adventures to publish.
You didn't have the luxury of time. Maybe if MTG never happened...
>
> For the record, I'm doing this for MTU. I don't care if the game's
current publishers do anything about it or not, and I don't blame you. You
did more to fix Traveller's problems than anyone > else before or since.
Again, you're welcome, but I'm not sure I'm any closer to understanding
where we dropped the ball. If the primary issue is the star tweaking
you're talking about above, I don't think we ever had the chance of doing
that for all of the worlds, given the lack of rapid, bulk data processing
ability back then.
I think given the example of Allel you're also thinking of stuff that
either fell through the QA cracks or systematically, and maybe some other
things you didn't mention.
Also, you mentioned somewhere doing the work on your campaigns in Vland
and Windhorn, but I'm pretty sure we never published any TNE data there,
so those are not examples of bad TNE mods, right?
> \_/
> DED
> TNE @ Yahoo ml Admin
>
APPENDIX
1. When you "punched up" the stars (i.e., made them bigger/hotter) you
shouldn't have settled for changing M7 to M3, for example, you should have
gone more often to K, G, or F.
(Had a manual rule for this, may not have been adequate, especially if
we're talking about a new understanding of habitable zone based on
spectrum of radiation.)
2. When you "punched up" the stars, although the general effect was
satisfactory, you still missed some (basically a QA flaw).
(Absolutely likely, hopefully not that many.)
3. When you "punched up" the stars, there was a flaw in the overall
process. (Although I don't have access to all of the previous tables from
WTH, MT, Scouts, etc., with the old tables we modified, I have noticed in
the last 24 hours that TNE still retains M5+ V stars with no habitable
zone which might have snuck back in via the "redone" stars, which is an
issue.)
(This, honestly, is what I fear you're saying. given the M5 V issue AND
your citation of Allel, something got in there that didn't pass the test.
I can't tell you how that got screwed up.)
4. When you "punched up" the stars, there was some other flaw in the
overall process: ______________.
(Unknown discussion)
5. When you removed the degenerates (white dwarfs) from the primaries, you
failed to remove them from the companion stars.
(Yes, I am reminded now that we failed to do this. I can't remember why,
but it's probably because multi-star systems are so complex. If they're
distant companions maybe you can get away with it, and short of playing
with each and every system it's hard to know how big the problem is. It
should have been easy to turn the companion into an M6-9 V while we were
in there, don't know why we didn't. I wonder if in some subsectors we did
address the companion stars, but in others forgot to. Certainly the
primary goal was to ensure the system had a habitable zone which we
[maybe] fixed, and that addressed the most urgent issue (giving the world
a habitable zone) while not addressing the evolution issue. I would have
ideally liked to just ditch all binary, trinary stars, but everyone knows
that multiple stars are supposedly more common than singles, so that
didn't seem right.)
6. When you removed the degenerates you failed to properly reclassify all
degenerates as simply "D" because a white dwarf remnant is a white dwarf
remnant is a white dwarf remnant, no such thing as a G2 D vs. a M3 D vs a
M8 D. (Actually there is an M8D, the car Bruce McLaren was killed in while
testing it in 1970 at Goodwood. Bruce ruled.)
(Yes, I was aware of this at one point. Cannot remember why we didn't do
this, but we should have.)
7. You failed to address other issues of stellar evolution, such as stars
that had already departed the main sequence.
(Unknown discussion, some of this discussed previously, "however many
planets described as being there are the ones left uneaten.")
8. You failed to address other issues of stellar Class/Luminosity Class:
______________________.
(Unknown discussion)
9. You failed to address issues of Stellar Population (I/II/III). (see
"Appendix," bottom)
(Somewhere in the game I removed the possibility of Pop II stars, as back
then they were not supposed to be in the spiral arms, but only in the
galactic halo, so did not belong in the random generation table. I think
that's maybe why I got rid of Luminosity Class VI, as at the time they
were maybe only supposed to be Pop II. They didn't have population III
back then.)
10. Other: ________________________.
(Unknown discussion)