In my case I wouldn't look at as a failure on your part or anyone else's per-se. I maintained an interest in Traveler in whatever form - classical, TNE, 5FW, didn't matter. But RL interfered and I joined the army back in 80 so for many years there was a lot of moving around, dealing with strange looks, lack of opportunity back then to stay current on what was happening, lack of players/referees etc. So, speaking on my part, and mine only I drifted away. Only picked up an interest again in recent years.
Tim
On Monday, April 7, 2014 12:06 AM, "" <> wrote:
>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
>shouldn39;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.
>
>Wouldn39;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
>shouldn39;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)
>
>
>
>
>
Tim
On Monday, April 7, 2014 12:06 AM, "" <> wrote:
>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
>shouldn39;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.
>
>Wouldn39;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
>shouldn39;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)
>
>
>
>
>