ParanoidGamer said:
He is well enough published in scientific posters and journals, and a published as one of the authors of "Transhuman Space: Under Pressure."
And have had a couple of JTAS articles published that introduce Brown Dwarfs and Interstellar Planets into Traveller. And did a lot of the world design for GT: Sword Worlds (trying to make the nonsense UWPs in the SW subsector realistic - square peg, meet round hole). And of course the realistic star design system.
I will also take a quote from his info in the listing of the transhuman book that is on his site: "Under Pressure describes the oceans of the setting, including an 'Extraterrestrial Oceans' chapter written by myself covering Europa, terraformed Mars, and the ethane lakes of Titan (which now don't appear to exist in reality - the book was published before the Cassini Titan fly-bys)." (emphasis mine)
I really should update that actually... because it later turned out that liquid hydrocarbon lakes
do exist in reality on Titan (at the north and south poles). Though there's nowhere near the amount of surface coverage that is shown in the book.
Which I note that shows all this science is not iron clad and subject to "correction".
We knew going into the book that the Titan stuff was likely to be disputed by the Cassini flybys. In fact, I wrote that material with a very strong suspicion that it would be mistaken. The europa ocean stuff is nowhere near certain either - we know the ocean's there but we don't know how thick the ice on top of it is or if there's anything interesting in it. Hell, we were pretty much doing original research for the book into the behaviour of sonar etc under those conditions.
It always amuses me when people like you point and shriek at statements like the one you highlighted. Nobody's ever claimed that the science you so disdain is "ironclad", and nobody's ever claimed that it's not subject to correction either. I've said that I'm pretty confident that there aren't going to be any more huge shifts in our understanding of overall planetary system layout and stellar evolution, but that's not even close to saying that it'll never change.
Delivery style aside, at least he knows something about the topic of "realistic star system design".
Well gee, I feel so validated now. :roll:
I actually know a hell of a lot about realistic star system design - I've been working on it ever since I first got Traveller in the mid-80s. You might even say I'm an expert in the field. So you'll forgive me if I sound like I know what I'm actually talking about and like I'm an authority on the subject (which I guess can easily be mistaken for "arrogance" by people who feel threatened by that sort of thing) and if I come across as thinking this sort of thing is important - especially when I know that a lot of the realism problems in Traveller can be fixed relatively easily.
Whether his level of realism is appropriate, applicable, or able to be built into a game system with out making it too cumbersome to use is the focus of this thread and what he tried to get into in the original T5 v MGT thread. That thread was started asking "what is the difference between the two rule sets" and not asking about "reality levels in star system design for games".
Okaaay... which is why I started this new thread about that subject, ostensibly so that people interested in it can talk about it unmolested here instead (though by that time you and captainjack had long since derailed the other thread, and now it seems you're intent on hijacking this one too). I didn't even start the digression into realism on the other thread - dmmcoy did.
So why are you now pointing out what's been obvious to most people here from the start? Perhaps you suddenly realised what was going on here, and that it didn't actually interest you? I'm glad you've had this little revelation - perhaps now you can go find something more interesting to you on another thread and leave this thread to the people who actually want to discuss it.
Though before you go I would still be interested in seeing this reference you keep going on about for the lack of realism in SJG's use of "acceleration".
EDIT: And given that you've gone to all the trouble of broadcasting all this information about me, it's only fair that you let me know who you are on CotI, because I'm certain we've probably had run-ins there before... your real name doesn't ring any bells with me and I can't seem to find anyone on the GT boards there or any of "the old crowd" who would correspond to you.
