I fundamentally disagree. I have never had a player in any game, Traveller or otherwise, look something up in a sourcebook and rely on that information in character without confirming with the GM. Nor is it the author of a supplement's job to decide to add disinformation to the campaign without explicitly calling out the reason for doing so. What happens at the table is up to the individual referee. The game's author does not know anything about the campaign or what level of information the players would have about the world in question. So the "it's in character info and can be wrong" is BS. That's something only the referee can decide.
The UWP is primarily game mechanic for describing worlds in a short hand for the GM's use. It is a flexible set of values that allow for divergence from literal readings. This is important because there are lots of things that don't easily fit into the simplistic set of numbers. Some people would prefer that they were less flexible. That's what the last dozen or so pages of this thread (all the recent ones) have been about.
Authors should not be free to just ignore the UWP entirely and just do whatever they want without acknowledging the UWP at all, because that is not what the rules allow. And that actually does result in the "then there are no rules" situation that some folks have complained about. It is not too much to ask that an author take care to explain why he is diverging from the existing material. This is true for a sourcebook and it is especially true when dealing with an adventure campaign.
If an author of a sourcebook has a cool idea that they really can't quite fit into the UWP as written, they have some flexibility as per the rules. They can change the UWP and note that fact. They can present an explanation for why the actual situation diverges from the stated UWP without actually resulting in a change to the UWP. Because their job as a writer is to convey their story intent to the reader, who is almost certainly the referee.
The author clearly thought his story needed 4000 technicians and a million robots instead of the 30 scientists and 4000 robots of all previous published versions. That's fine. But acknowledge that you are changing it on purpose and tell us what the reason for the change was. Don't just have conflicting information with no explanation for why the information conflicts. That's not within the spirit of the rules.
UWPs are not rule free, RP fluff. They also aren't carved in stone rigid values. A ref at a table can disregard the rules if they wish. An author should thread that rather wide needle in a published book.
