Homestead/Sindal - how much water?

Jump Dave

Banded Mongoose
Does Homestead (Sindal 1015, Trojan Reach 1715) have a Hydrographics rating of:

0 (per the v2 Core Rulebook, as well as the v1 Aslan and v1 Trojan Reach books),

or 1 (per Pirates of Drinax, and travellermap.com)?

... or did it used to have 0, and water has been added to the world somehow?


Also: how is "Dry" defined on the Core Rulebook map of Sindal subsector (page 232)? Thebus and Theev show hydro of 3, and Noricum has a hydro of 6. Does this mean not only is there water there, but it's safe to drink? (and if that's the case, would present-day Earth be considered "dry" since most of our water is too salty to drink...?)
 
Mongoose has proclaimed that travellermap.com is the source of truth and they are seeking to align their content with travellermap's. So I guess Homestead has 10% water.
 
Mongoose changed a lot of Trojan Reach UWPs in MgT1 and then just before the MgT2 iteration of Drinax came out, they swore fealty to travellermap which I believe uses the original Grand Survey statistics since they're canonical. There are still conflicts that come up. One that comes to mind is the odd UWP of Vior that MgT1 developed, giving a vacuum world a TL of 1 which even appeared in "Last Flight of the Amuar," a MgT2 adventure. The planet is now up to its much more realistic travellermap TL rating of 7.

I've noticed that Martin is doing backflips to make the conversion work. In the recently published "Borderland Run" adventure, he has found ways to explain some of the discrepancies. For example, the Falcon system was previously described as a size 1 rockball when travellermap had it as a mid-sized world with a thin atmosphere. "Borderland Run" explains that the rockball is a moon of the mainworld, but it often gets top billing for visitors to the system because the denizens of the mainworld are affected by a disease and Travellers are advised not to go there. There are similar explanations made for other discrepancies.

When I started my current Trojan Reach-based campaign in mid-2017, I painstakingly went through the TXT file for Trojan Reach that was available from travellermap and inserted the MgT1 stats from the Aslan alien module into a new text file. Right about the time I finished, Mongoose announced the conversion to the travellermap stats. D'oh! :evil:
 
Take this with a grain of salt...

CT: SCOUTS mandated that if you had a world with an atmosphere type 4-9 OR Population 8 for main world, the 2d6 roll for the primary star type was supposed to be at +4. If you look at Megatraveller's rules for generation primary stars of any pregenerated world (which all of the Spinward Marches were by dint of being published as supplement 3 by the way), you would find that the rule is the same: roll 2d6 and add a +3 modifier.

Of those systems in Spinward Marches, there are 439 star systems. Of those, only 264 meet the requirement that the planet has an atmosphere 4 to 9. In addition, there were also another 25 that met the criteria of population 8+ but not the atmosphere type. That's a total of 289 star systems that should have had a +4 modifier on the 2d6 roll for star type. That means, that the minimum roll would have been a 6 and the maximum would have been a 16 on 2d6.

When you look at the statistical results - you'll find that only 8% of the star systems that meet the criteria of atmosphere 4 to 9, or population 8+ should have an M spectral class star. The spectral class A should not even be possible, as you need to roll a 2 on 2d6 unmodified. The modified roll of 2d6+4 should make a roll of a 2 impossible. Yet, the new survey has 29% of all those stars as being M class spectral types. Per the rules given in either Scout or MegaTraveller's Referee book, the bulk of the stars should have been K class. Instead, the breakdown is as follows:

M: 85
K: 65
G: 69
A: 1
F: 69

Clearly, when someone wrote the program to spit out the results for the Spinward Marches data, they sort of didn't follow the rules as given.

In addition, there are a lot of worlds that have a diameter that is too small to even retain water vapor - let alone water, which is why some of the worlds need some serious tweaking in order to have them make more sense. When I used to hang around Citizens of the Imperium - there was a discussion on why some of the worlds data were different than the canon values, for much along those lines.

Me? I'm awfully tempted to go back to the original data, use GURPS SPACE to generate the actual stellar data for the star system, and leave it at that - my own "In my traveller universe" instead of using the stellar data from the other stuff.

That's just me however, and generating 439 star systems by hand is a royal pain in the arse - writing the code would require that I actively sit down and code, which these days, I lack the determination to see to the end. :(

Then again, T5 had good advice: MOAN - Map only as Necessary. That also means "Generate full data only as necessary." ;)
 
The map of TravellerMap.com is mostly canonical. The source for most sectors is a grand survey provided by Marc Miller -- and in some cases the planetary data are different from older canon sources. The changes aren't just era differences (colonization, population booms or collapses, changes in government or law, or even terraforming). They're changes that recognized mistakes in earlier canon publications.

A particularly common change type is meant to make atmospheres plausible for world sizes: no more Size 1 worlds with Dense atmospheres. I'm not sure whether such worlds were made larger or given thinner atmospheres, but my guess is some of each, to minimize conflict with other published material. (For example, if there's a published adventure that has a plot point that requires a Dense atmosphere, that world might be larger, but if there's a map showing a small world and no plot points that depend on atmosphere, it might have a Thin or Trace atmosphere.)

The Traveller wiki has documented the changes in some cases, showing both the current canon statistics (and in some cases, canon statistics for more than one era) and statistics marked as superseded canon.

Some sectors are not well documented. Some have no canon source. I get the impression that Gvurrdon is a mess, for example. And Foreven is, according to canon, left minimally documented, and reserved for referees to detail themselves. Of course, Double Adventure #5 The Chamax Plague/Horde kind of violated the Foreven reserve by detailing Raschev and Alenzar, but that's another story.
 
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