EDG said:
GypsyComet said:
The raw UWPs are the EASY part.
I imagine the gibberish, unpronouncable names don't help

.
That was part of the fun, yes. Using a home-built program to churn out thousands of Zdetl words, which I then harvested pronounceable words from, was a lengthy process. Making sure there were no duplicated names across the sector, or between that sector and Zhdant (which I helped do a lot of names for), was also fun.
Making sense of the sector UWPs based on the rather bare cultural clues available at the time, realizing (or confirming) that the character generation was NOT a model for the populace as a whole (the rules make for a Noble factory that eventually runs out of proles), and just generally "reading" Zhodani space; THOSE took time.
The biggest problem many Traveller grognards, including the original authors, have is that Zhodani space appears to be so heavily overseen that it is inherently boring. Low potential for adventure, very high penalties for habitual lawbreaking, and a lot of people in power that you simply *cannot* lie to, cheat, or steal from.
And yet, Zhodani space, as modeled by the UWP rules in the CT Alien Module for them, contains a number of conundrums.
Just as Imperial populations are statistically concentrated on less that 10% of the worlds, so are populations in Consular space. The kicker with the Zhodani is that many of those worlds are the Consular equivalent of Amber Zones, which the Zhodani refer to as "Unabsorbed". The term can mean several things, but one of the implications is that Zhodani social science has trouble dealing with high population densities.
So the picture of Zhodani space changes somewhat once you actually have a large swath of it to examine. Large tracts of relatively sleepy little worlds full of happy proles, the main travel routes amongst them heavily travelled by the Consular Navy and government couriers (read "Highway Patrol" and bureaucratic communiques), all punctuated by two groups of industrial powers, standing like great cities on the plains. The handful of culturally Zhodani industrial worlds are much of the technological base that the Consulate stands upon, while the surprisingly large collection of high population Unabsorbed worlds stand as a disordered and dissimilar league of potential bad boys, shining into the moral night of the Consulate like Las Vegas into the desert. "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" as the saying goes.