John Potter wrote:
> It should be noted that yes a white dwarf in the coarse of its life
> cycle, as astrophysics understands it, would wipe clean the planets
> when the nova goes off. However remember that Traveller is a SciFi
> game and there are at least 1 previous race to the current galactic
> species (Ancients/Droynes or Primorials) that reached a technology
> level that while it may take a bit Terraforming entire worlds was
> completely within their stated technology capabilities for the setting.
You are missing the point. The issue is scale. Regina is an impossible
system on multiple levels. Don't care. If the ancients had to jack
with it, so be it. I have no problem with that. The issue is not Regina.
The issue is that, as listed in the RSB, something like 90+% of *all*
multi-star systems have a type "D" star somewhere in there. There
is no way, even if you drop down to science fantasy, that the
Ancients (and other terraformers) went that far out of their way to
terraform *that* many planets. They just wouldn't do it. Plus, if they
would do it, they wouldn't have done such a crappy job of it, making
all of those useless planets.
As for world-size, again, I have no problem with Darrian having been
terraformed to have an atmosphere that it can't hold on to. So be it.
But there are too many size 1-4 worlds with thick atmospheres for
the Ancients to have manipulated *all* of them. Stuff like that takes
a long time to do, and the Ancients just didn't have that long.
The point is never to take away the special and unique and "impossible"
occurrence that will happen. The point is to make the background and
non-special 90+% out there make at least some sense. Don't take it
*all* out. But if everything is "special", then, really, none of it
is. And
the Ancients were just insane geniuses screwing with worlds to no
apparent end.
Mike West