Yep you are completely correct Mike on your points special is special
because its out of the normal or 'expected'.
I would only caution that astrophysicists themselves admit that their
understanding of the cosmos is very limited (only about 4%). And that while
its all good to have a base line to create a setting like Traveller its
tables are based on knowledge which everyone has to honestly admit is
'limited' so making assertions that something 'can't' be a certain way like
small planets holding an atmospheres is an assertion based entirely on a
sample size of our solar system. Since we have not actually visited other
star systems nor currently have a way to determine if any planet around any
other star actually 'has' an atmosphere for anything smaller than a Gas
Giant.
However if your going to make a game you have to start somewhere and
current understanding is as good a place as any.
On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Mike West <> wrote:
> **
>
> 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
>
>
>
> If the world was fair then every bad thing that has ever happened to you
would have been deserved.