Subj: Traveller-digest V1999 #1434
Date: 12/3/99 1:19:34 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: owner-traveller-digest@lists.imagiconline.com (Traveller-digest)
Sender: owner-traveller-digest@lists.imagiconline.com
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Traveller-digest Friday, December 3 1999 Volume 1999 : Number 1434
(R)1996. Traveller is a registered trademark of FarFuture Enterprises.
All rights reserved.
The following topics are covered in this digest:
SEC : UNCLASSIFIED - We Work the Black Seam
Re: 50ton Heavy Fighter
RE: 102 Vehicles
RE: 50ton Heavy Fighter
Re: Pacer Failure (was : Police Career (actually the Bomb Squad))
Re : Professional Stereotyping (was : The perils of television)
Re: Naval rank question
Re : G:T Solomani Rim
Anti-matter
Re: Brilliant Lances (was Re: Hello and TNE question)
Re: One of our worlds is missing!
Re: Stopping the world...
Re: "Aslan" name debate again
Re: One of our worlds is missing!
Re: Medicine in the 3I (longish)
Re: "Aslan" name debate again
Re: Roger Sanger . . BAD, BAD, BAD???
Re: Roger Sanger . . BAD, BAD, BAD???
Re: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Machinery
Re: Hello and TNE question
3D Star Maps
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 1999 14:10:47 +1100
From: "David Healey"
Subject: SEC : UNCLASSIFIED - We Work the Black Seam
From: SD Mooney
> >Originally, the plan was to use coal from local sources, but
> >it was realised that the natural radiation levels of the coal would
> >set off all the site external alarms if any dust blew around.
>
>Not dust, but combustion gases.
ISTR that coal itself is naturally mildly radioactive, and typically
piled in big heaps at power stations, in which case dust would be an
issue. But it's a while since I did it so my memory may be fading.
Radon gas. Gets into the lungs real easy and decays from there. Also found, from memory, in granites (which contain lots of other stuff) and given of by some basalts (can't remember which ones).
Dave
!
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 22:15:30 -0600
From: "shadowcat"
Subject: Re: 50ton Heavy Fighter
Fighting Ships of the Shattered Imperium
Shadowcat AKA Kevin Walsh
Captain of the Free Trader Beowulf
ADD/ADHD Advocate
http://www.advancenet.net/~meow
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 19:59:33 -0800
From: Jesse DeGraff
Subject: RE: 102 Vehicles
Take it from me, use artistic license =) Shift numbers so that you end up
with the same displacement, but arrive at something that's a little more
esthetically pleasing that shoebox.
BTW, it'd love to see what you're doing with it. I've always wanted to
start illustrating 101 Starships, but so far I just haven't had the time.
Best,
Jesse
jdegraff@pacbell.net
http://www.vision-forge-graphics.com/jesse/traveller/trav_welcome.htm
"Striving to Produce a Better (Illustrated) Traveller Universe" (tm)
- -----Original Message-----
From: owner-traveller@lists.imagiconline.com
[mailto:owner-traveller@lists.imagiconline.com]On Behalf Of Joseph R.
Dietrich
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 7:45 PM
To: traveller@lists.imagiconline.com
Subject: 102 Vehicles
I have finally been able to get some time to do some drawings for 102
Vehicles, and I've noticed something: They're all stubby.
Forex: Many of the buses are 6 m x 3 m x 3 m, or thereabouts. Try drawing
these out on a piece of graph paper -- heck, just block it out roughly, as a
rectangle. These are incredibly short for their height and width (Or is the
Imperium just full of "short buses."
I assume this is a an artifact of the T4 vehicle construction system.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 20:25:05 -0800
From: Jesse DeGraff
Subject: RE: 50ton Heavy Fighter
Nope, try again =) That's a 20DT Strike Fighter.
COACC maybe? Thought I had a copy of it, but I'll be damned if I can find
it. Anyone?
Jesse
- -----Original Message-----
From: owner-traveller@lists.imagiconline.com
[mailto:owner-traveller@lists.imagiconline.com]On Behalf Of shadowcat
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 8:16 PM
To: traveller@lists.imagiconline.com
Subject: Re: 50ton Heavy Fighter
Fighting Ships of the Shattered Imperium
Shadowcat AKA Kevin Walsh
Captain of the Free Trader Beowulf
ADD/ADHD Advocate
http://www.advancenet.net/~meow
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 1999 15:39:09 +1100
From: "Robert O'Connor"
Subject: Re: Pacer Failure (was : Police Career (actually the Bomb Squad))
I was not going to comment on this (but heck, worse wastes of bandwidth
have been posted to the list).
Leonard Erickson wrote :-
> > Any significant installation would be damper screened to prevent 'fun
> > with nukes/nuke dampers' in any case - because nukes are so common.
>
> Which leads to fun when a VIP from a TL-9 world enters the building and
> suddenly keels over. Why? You neutralized the Pu in the powerpack for
> his heart pacemaker! (real technology, folks!)
Some real world data, folks.
RTG driven pacemakers were proposed in the late 1960s. An occasional
few examples were built in the following decade.
Improvements in the energy density of chemical batteries, plus better
understanding of the electrical requirements for a pacemaker (only
microampere currents are required), have led to the situation today,
where said batteries get electively changed every 2-4 years.
Clinical expertise has also developed over years of long use to the
point where pacing is a last resort treatment. Cardiac disease severe
enough to mandate pacemaker placement is nasty. It is equivalent to
heart failure, which has a long term outlook comparable to many
malignancies (e.g. 5 year survival rates of about 20%).
Some improvement on this grim statistic is being made as our
understanding of ischaemic heart disease and the best ways to prevent
and treat it grows.
So on risk-benefit grounds, having a chunk of plutonium in your chest
is unlikely to shorten your life expectancy from radiation-induced
malignancy. In any case, such a power source hasn't been necessary for
at least a decade for this application.
Pacemakers can be interfered with by other things, which will probably
be even more common than nuke dampers in tomorrow's built environment.
Any sufficiently powerful source of EM interference will
cause pacer failure, either via induced currents or heating(!). MR
scanners, diathermy machines and multi-watt radio transmitters are
example troublemakers.
Our VIP should have medical backup (either imported or provided by the
host) in order to provide prompt, competent resuscitation in the event
of pacemaker failure (ranging from resetting the pacer with a magnet to
external pacing to circulatory assist
devices and low berthing, etc.). Anything less would be criminally
stupid, especially for such a simple and common emergency.
Robert O'Connor
Medico, Gamer
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 1999 15:39:24 +1100
From: "Robert O'Connor"
Subject: Re : Professional Stereotyping (was : The perils of television)
In reply to :-
> >Same thing happens in the legal and medical
> >professions. Lots of people go to law school and
> >medical school thinking they'll soon have lots of
> >money, nice cars, fascinating professional problems
> >that get solved in an hour or two, and lots of
> >attractive sex partners. ...now that I write the list
> >down, my experience of one out of four still ain't
> >bad.
So far in my medical career, I've managed four of four, though 'lots'
ought to be replaced by 'sufficient' for two of them. Not bad for a kid
from a disadvantaged background.
;-)
My apologies to the lawyers on the list, but :-
Generally the problems laywers are asked to solve are not immediately
life-threatening, but are sufficiently complex to require many hours in
their solution (human nature being what it is).
Medicine, especially in my current area of employment, has lots of
problems that need fixing within an hour or two. In fact, most of them
need solution within five to ten minutes.
"Air goes in and out, blood goes round and round. What more could one
ask from this life?"
- - one of the more interesting consultants with whom I have worked.
Robert O'Connor
Medico, Gamer
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 23:45:11 -0500
From: "Swordy (Colin MIchael)"
Subject: Re: Naval rank question
Bloody Coast Guard, that's what they are. They deserve no Naval rank at
all. A JG could handle a silly PT boat like an SDB and a light commander
would be wasted running the whole canoe club! If you really must give the
sorry sot a title then Bathtub Commodore should cover it. Harrumph.
- -Sea Crusty the ex-Swabby
- ----- Original Message -----
From:
> What would expect the rank of a SDB Fleet Commander to be? I'm talking
about the dude
> (or dude-ete) who's in chage of all the SDBs in a system. Not a squadron
commander.
> Would this rate an Admiral? Commodore? Commander? Captain? Bueler? Bueler?
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 00:03:15 EST
From: JFZeigler@aol.com
Subject: Re : G:T Solomani Rim
In a message dated 12/2/99 6:03:38 PM Eastern Standard Time,
robocon@idx.com.au writes:
> Jon, have you a copy of two documents from the Missouri Archives which
> may partly offset this effect? Namely, Harold Hale's discussion post
> from 1995 which attempts to assign Real Universe(TM) nearby stars to the
> sector map, and the algorithm for correcting dodgy canonical stellar
> data?
Interesting. I was already familiar with Harold's "real stars list," and for
local color I intend to point out some of the more famous stars in the
capsule writeups I'm doing.
I wasn't familiar with his algorithm for correcting the stellar types, but in
fact I have done something similar "on the fly." I've converted all Type IV
and Type VI stars to V, for example, and I've turned some of the white
dwarf stars into main sequence members (mostly M-class). I also turned
M9 V stars into M8 Vs. None of this was done particularly systematically,
but as a first approximation the results don't look too bad. If any of the
playtesters howl in protest I can always go back and hand-tweak a
couple dozen stars to fit a more reasonable distribution.
On the other hand, I don't have as much trouble with having Earthlike
worlds around the tinier M-class dwarfs. What I've been doing is deciding
on a planetary climate and then computing the orbital radius from that.
I'm not limiting myself to the old Book 6 method of having the orbits fall
into the fixed Bode sequence. Those Earthlike worlds near M8 V stars
just orbit *very close in*.
(Of course, I'm glossing over the fact that tide-locking causes its own set
of problems, but this is Traveller, after all. . .)
There's one world in the sector circling a D-class primary, but that world
isn't particularly Earthlike anyway -- I plan on writing it up as a "cryo-
world" with an ambient temperature not far above absolute zero. And
a population in the tens of millions, of course :-).
- ----------
Jon F. Zeigler: Mathematician, computer geek, amateur historian, freelance
writer, occasional scribbler of bad poetry
"For any statement, no matter how innocuous, there exists a nonempty
set of people who will take offense at it."
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 21:17:42 -0800 (PST)
From: Kyle Schuant
Subject: Anti-matter
Steven Hudson writes:
>>explain why SF games almost always assume that
anti-matter is a
> power supply system that doesn't need an ultimate
source of fuel?>>
Well, they do need fuel, but the real bulk is the
containment, not the fuel. One gram of anti-matter
contacting one gram of matter will give 1.8 x 10^17
joules of energy, a lot! Antimatter is produced all
the time by natural decay, as in uranium ore deposits
(or thorium, radium, etc), just very very little, and
it doesn't last long, soon bumps into matter and zaps
it and the matter into a burst of gamma rays. Small
amounts (a few atoms) of antimatter have been stored
in our time, but they require huge magnetic fields.
Anyhow, the point is that a very small amount of
antimatter will keep you going a long time; the
aforementioned one gram of antimatter would keep a 100
MW reactor going for 57 years! (assuming 100%
efficiency, even at 5% efficiency you still get a
whole year)
Who wants to worry about refuelling with a gram?
However, I do wonder about those containment fields,
what if they fail? This suggests either unimagined
technology or another reactor giving power for those
fields. Suposing that fails... I guess this is why
anti/matter reactors aren't yet on ships until very
high TLs?:)
=====
KA Schuant
member: Chef's Guild International, Sporting Shooter's Assoc, Amnesty Int, Carlton Soccer Club
Melbourne
Australia
"Duct tape is like the Force: it has a light side, a dark side, and it binds the universe together"
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. All in one place.
Yahoo! Shopping: http://shopping.yahoo.com
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 22:12:19 -0800
From: Kristian Miller
Subject: Re: Brilliant Lances (was Re: Hello and TNE question)
Luther Martin wrote:
>
> Has anyone out there played Brilliant Lances or Battle Rider? If so, what
> did you think of them? Good? Bad?
>
Hi Luther,
Brilliant Lances is pretty good. My only little complaint is that the
movement record keeping is a little hard to pick up quickly. We can set
up a game when you and Glenn are done pulverizing the planet Mongo in
the 5FW.
Kristian
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 22:15:36 -0800
From: "Benyamene' ZeAbe' Akella"
Subject: Re: One of our worlds is missing!
Via electronic medium on 12/2/99 10:05 AM, bonnevil@ima.umn.edu wrote:
> Question for the list, particularly someone with access to _Atlas of the
> Imperium_:
I've not heard of this product, who published it, when, and where could I
get a copy? Or is it one of those hard to acquire Traveller treasures?
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 17:37:24 +1000
From: david.d.jaques-watson@centrelink.gov.au
Subject: Re: Stopping the world...
Dear Folks -
Terry replied to Jason thus:
>> an incredible rate. (My best friend quoted something around 900
>> miles per second, but I don't have the figures to back it up.
>> That's one hell of a skinned knee.)
>
>My rough calculations indicate a more "sedate" rate. On the equator,
>the circumference of the Earth is 24854.848 miles, give or take. The
>Earth rotates once in about 23.933333333 hours. So I figure the
>speed at close to 1038.503398 miles an hour.
Sounds closer...
"Just remember that you're standing
On a planet that's evolving,
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.
It's orbiting at ninety miles a second,
So it's reckoned,
About a Sun that is the source of all our power.
The Sun, and you and me,
And all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In an outer spiral arm (at fourty thousand miles an hour),
Of the galaxy they call the Milky Way!"
_The Galaxy Song_, Monty Python.
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
David "Hyphen" Jaques-Watson Beowulf Down (Tavonni/Vilis/SM 1520)
http://www.tip.net.au/~davidjw davidjw@pcug.org.au
"I file things in historical order, with a hashing algorithm of gravity"
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
REQ'D DISCLAIMER - material & opinions contained within are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily represent, in whole or in part, the
position of Centrelink or any other Commonwealth Government agency.
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 01:45:46 -0500 (EST)
From: Kenji Schwarz
Subject: Re: "Aslan" name debate again
On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, Josh W. Spencer wrote:
> So what DO the Aslan call **themselves**?? I looked throughout my MT
> material and the one issue of the Travellers' Digest I have on the
> Aslan. I didn't see anything in there.
Fteirle. I think it's only in DGP Solomani & Aslan, though, so it's not
"canon" for any current or forseeable-future official publications.
Kenji
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 01:52:29 -0500
From: "Swordy (Colin Michael)"
Subject: Re: One of our worlds is missing!
Hard to find, over priced and not a very good value for the money. And no,
I will not part with mine :-)
- -Crusty
- ----- Original Message -----
From: Benyamene' ZeAbe' Akella
> > Question for the list, particularly someone with access to _Atlas of the
> > Imperium_:
>
> I've not heard of this product, who published it, when, and where could I
> get a copy? Or is it one of those hard to acquire Traveller treasures?
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 22:55:00 -0800
From: "Benyamene' ZeAbe' Akella"
Subject: Re: Medicine in the 3I (longish)
Via electronic medium on 12/2/99 2:08 PM, robocon@idx.com.au wrote:
> Sorry for wasting bandwidth ; just thinking 'out loud'.
Waste? What waste? Flagged for future use, this coming winter should afford
me some down time to work on my webpage, and this is some great material. A
very good framework with room left for regional detailing. Loved it.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 15:08:20 +0800
From: "Colin aka Arkham aka the God King"
Subject: Re: "Aslan" name debate again
The Gurps Traveller perspective on Aslan naming:
"The Aslan (who call themselves Fteirle)..."
G:T Alien Races 2 p5 (and multiple mentions thereafter)
"When the Solomani first made contact with the Fteirle they encountered a
minor vessle of the Yerlyaruiwo clan. The human crew, part of the wave of
Turkic speaking settlers then spreading spinward from Terra, immediately
tagged the new species 'Aslan' after the Turkic word for lion"
G:T Alien Races 2 p16 sidebar
********************************************************
Colin Clark
For RPG stuff including:
Hong Kong 2028 Campaign and
HERO bits & pieces
see http://www.iinet.net.au/~astroboy
********************************************************
- ----- Original Message -----
From: Kenji Schwarz
To:
Sent: Friday, 3 December 1999 2:45
Subject: Re: "Aslan" name debate again
>
>
> On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, Josh W. Spencer wrote:
>
> > So what DO the Aslan call **themselves**?? I looked throughout my MT
> > material and the one issue of the Travellers' Digest I have on the
> > Aslan. I didn't see anything in there.
>
> Fteirle. I think it's only in DGP Solomani & Aslan, though, so it's not
> "canon" for any current or forseeable-future official publications.
>
> Kenji
>
>
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 23:12:17 -0800
From: "Benyamene' ZeAbe' Akella"
Subject: Re: Roger Sanger . . BAD, BAD, BAD???
Via electronic medium on 12/2/99 2:18 PM, gridlore@pop.mindspring.com wrote:
> Let me put it this way: for what
> Sanger (spit) wants for the DGP rights, you could probably buy the D&D
> franchise from WoTC.
Is this hyperbole? Are you serious, or guessing, or jesting? I mean, I love
Traveller, but there's no way that the DGP Trav product line, no matter how
good the material, is anywhere near the "commercial value" of D&D. He Who Is
Spoken Of While Spitting sounds, not only greedy, but stupid. And as I've
heard other's say, the value of the material *depreciates* the longer it
remains unavailable.
Besides, Information wants to be free.
ObTrav: Same corporate history, in the Holo-sim program field. Eneri Zinger
holds copyright on a well developed line of .... awwww, you get it.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 02:37:06 -0500
From: "Chris Seamans"
Subject: Re: Roger Sanger . . BAD, BAD, BAD???
From: Benyamene' ZeAbe' Akella
> Is this hyperbole? Are you serious, or guessing, or jesting? I mean, I
>love Traveller, but there's no way that the DGP Trav product line, no
>matter how good the material, is anywhere near the "commercial
>value" of D&D. He Who Is Spoken Of While Spitting sounds, not only
>greedy, but stupid. And as I've heard other's say, the value of the
>material *depreciates* the longer it remains unavailable.
I would hope that Doug was exaggerating just a little. After all, the D&D
franchise likely has a value in the tens of millions. As far as greed or
sheer stubborn pigheadedness goes, personally I'm not going to really pass
judgement because I don't know enough of what's going on. He did burn Robert
Prior, who seems to be a rather good egg, and that, in itself, is a heinous
crime.
The value of the material has depreciated already because it's available to
so few people.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 21:44:55 +1300
From: "Frank Pitt"
Subject: Re: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Machinery
> > From: shadow@krypton.rain.com (Leonard Erickson)
>
> > Never. But I owned one of the *infamous* Seagate ST-251 40 meg drives
> > with "stiction" for many years. Since I rarely turned the system off,
> > it wasn't much of a problem. But if I *did* turn it off, I had to
> > unbolt the drive and give it a quick, *hard* tist to break the heads
> > free. then quickly rebolt the drive and apply power.
>
> That sounds more like an old car than a disk drive.
Nah,that's a disk drive alright, we had one just like it.
Heck, we left the cover unscrewed so we could just lift and give it a kick
during reboot.
Worked for years like that.
Frankie
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 1999 11:17:54 +0200
From: Antti Lahtinen
Subject: Re: Hello and TNE question
> I give, what was the big deal about TNE that nobody liked it?
As usual, the number of opinios about TNE equals or exceeds the
number of people talking about it. IMHO, :
Bad things:
The rules used 1d6 as damage dice, which allowed characters to
absorb huge amount of damage before dying.
Skill system... well... I just did not like it. We began to use
CORPS system after first few TNE sessions.
Good things:
Damage rules include penetration value, which makes it possible
to design various low-penetration and high-penetration
ammunition. (shaped charges, "bean bags", etc.)
Armor and damage was based on one set of rules, so that the same
amount of damage could be applied against a starship, vehicle or
a living creature. It is possible to calculate the amount of
damage inflicted by a falling rock, ramming ship, etc.
The reactionless thruster was replaced with fuel-consuming
rocket engine. This change made it more difficult to accelerate
ships into ridiculous speeds.
FF&S technology rules allows the design of a wide variety of
equipment with some detail. (some portions of FF&S are still
oversimplified)
Brilliant Lances has enough detail to make starship combat
interesting. Since normal character skills are used in combat
tasks, a high-skill PC can make difference in some situations.
Starship combat is done on long ranges. Since it is possible to
hit a starship-sized target within 4 light seconds (40 hex),
space combat resembles more submarine warfare than aircraft
dogfights.
Luther Martin wrote:
> Has anyone out there played Brilliant Lances or Battle Rider?
> If so, what did you think of them? Good? Bad?
BL is very good, but requires much preparation. It is better
suited for a small number of "small" or "medium" sized ships,
and the game bogs down quickly is large number of ships are
used.
BR is simplified version of BL, intended for large-scale
battles. With some rule fixing, it was quite fun to play.
- --
Antti Lahtinen lahtinen@ee.tut.fi
Researcher, MSc (Eng) http://www.ee.tut.fi/~lahtinen
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 03:18:06 -0600
From: "Kurtis Rodgers"
Subject: 3D Star Maps
I've been poking around with one of the "bad penny" Traveller issues, the
star mapping system. Certainly not one of the hot button issues, but one
that pops up on the list occasionally in various forms (a 3D mapping thread
appeared recently). Every Ref who questions the artifice of the rectangular
A4 subsector hex maps may wonder if there isn't a "better" way. Of course,
"better" depends entirely on what you value in a system. In my opinion,
anyone wanting to run a Spinward Marches campaign, for example, would be
more than amply rewarded for accepting the old hex maps due to the wealth of
available source material in that setting. It certainly never bothered me
in high school when I first played the game. In those days, the paperwork
required to use a three dimensional system, or even a simple non-hex
determinate grid, was simply not worth the trouble.
In some ways, mapping is only an issue if you contemplate the Way of the
Heretic, and are starting with a relatively clean slate. After looking at
the existing map data, I decided that for my own campaign, I would need to
redo most of a sector or two. This opens the door to speculation about
other changes to the mapping scheme. Also, the casual power of the software
at my fingertips today is quite a bit different than it was in 1980.
I am familiar with the practical problems with attempting 3D star mapping
for Traveller. (Anyone who isn't should refer to the sidebar on page 47 of
GT:First In for a good summary.) Still, the idea holds some fascination,
and has a certain 'cool factor'. Another way of thinking about this
problem, aside from geometric issues, is the degree to which real-world
astrography can be used. When I create an Earth-like planetary setting
(i.e., a fantasy world), the first 'world builder's handbook' I reach for is
a World Atlas. There's nothing like using the real thing, at least in bits
and pieces. I am sure I'm not alone in this practice. I wondered what the
results of applying Traveller jump travel to a 'real' star map would be.
["Go for it!" says the little red guy with the fork on my shoulder. "It'll
never work," says the bored cherub, opposite. "A hopeless quagmire!"]
So I decided to at least explore the possibilities of a 3D TU, roughly based
on real astronomy data. : P
What would be the real practical problems, rather than merely the speculated
ones that get discussed? How 'dense' would star travel be in this
environment? Do stars naturally occur in J1-2 mains, and are there really
rifts or other distribution phenomena that might 'stretch' out travel and
political boundaries?
Since I happen to have both tools and skills that can be applied toward
these questions, I am spending a little time on it. Unless I get a Big Yawn
from the list, I'll share my results with the TML. Anyone let me know if
I'm reinventing the wheel here.
_____
Source Data
I'm currently using the Hipparcos star catalog for my source data. I have
only imported the data from hip_main.dat file, which contains 118,218
records. A *very* few of these records lacked parallax data, and were
discarded. The rest were plotted into a Cartesian coordinates table, with
Sol at 0,0,0. A record was added for Sol at 0,0,0. : )
A destinations child table was compiled from the main Cartesian reference
table. Due to the projected processing time required for finding J1-6
destinations for every star in the catalog (well over 30 hours on my P300
server), I decided to limit myself (for now) to a sample set of data: all
the catalog stars within 60 parsecs of Sol. This comes to 9946 records, a
very reasonable sample data set (just under 10% of the total catalog).
_____
Destination Counts
In order to get a feel for Traveller-style interstellar travel in this
setting, I am running queries against this database that count the available
destinations from each star in the sample. These destination counts can
then be compared to those in the OTU (for amusement only - please, no
wagering!) : P
For the purposes of this model, all stars are assumed to be useful refueling
points, and thus potential destinations for star travel. (This is *not* an
assumtion I would make in an actual campaign.)
_____
Total Destinations at J6 or Less
Let's cut to the chase and see just how bad the destination-inflation is in
3D Traveller. This result set is rather long, so I have snipped portions of
it for brevity. There's enough here to get a feel for the data. The first
result column is the count of destinations available to a star at Jump-6 or
less. The second column is the number of stars to which the destination
count applies. The third column is the percent of the total sample that the
star count makes up.
Destinations Star Count Percent
- ------------ ----------- -------
1 17 0.17
2 86 0.86
3 195 1.96
4 363 3.65
5 550 5.53
6 611 6.14
7 714 7.18
8 685 6.89
9 643 6.46
10 587 5.90
11 488 4.91
12 429 4.31
13 354 3.56
14 296 2.98
15 299 3.01
16 226 2.27
17 188 1.89
18 194 1.95
19 161 1.62
20 149 1.50
...
40 26 0.26
...
60 22 0.22
...
80 21 0.21
...
100 13 0.13
...
110 4 0.04
111 6 0.06
112 1 0.01
These numbers are pretty bad, as expected. Can you image fueling up your
J-6 Yacht and having 112 possible jump destinations to choose from? Yikes!
I've already used a lot of bandwidth for a single post, so I'll stop here.
Remember - these numbers are for Jump-6. If we limit the jump capability,
the results get much more interesting (and encouraging, ...and shorter,
too). So, anyone interested in seeing this same table at max Jump-3?
Kurtis
------------------------------
End of Traveller-digest V1999 #1434
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