MasterGwydion
Cosmic Mongoose
I think the real fix here is to have UWPs be considered an out of game mechanic. That way, individual Referees can change them to reflect inaccurate in-game data such as part of the Scout Service Database.
The Premises of Traveller: 2. Space Travel is Unpleasant and Most Do Not Do It
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I suspect that you won't have a lot of consensus on what is a "questionable" world and even when there is, not much agreement on what needs to be done to fix it. You'd have to have some agreement on what sensible even means. A good number of people think the huge variation in TLs on worlds within the Imperium is questionable. Why is a 10 billion pop TL 15 world like Mora completely surrounded by extremely low pop, TL 7-8 worlds? Did Craw /need/ its TL raised from 3 to 5 to account for the tainted atmosphere or was that a transcription error (MgT2e says TL 3 is fine for Atmo 7, so I'm guessing error)? In the Islands subsectors, the most Earth like and human friendly world in the entire region is a pop 5 farm colony owned by a small dry world with billions crammed on it...
As you probably know, most of the Imperium was written up because 3rd party publishers wanted their own region of space to set adventures so they didn't have to worry about conflicting with GDW publications. I think the Grand Survey was an attempt to clean up and 'officialize' all that material. It is certainly way more information than I'll ever need. I rarely use more than a couple subsectors in a campaign. However sector books seem to be pretty popular. The variety is useful, creating a financial incentive. The same incentive that created an official setting in the first place. But the UWP concept is intrinsically flawed.
The UWP and 'hard' numbers are inherently incompatible. You need a lot more info to get all the reasonable possibilities. What is the TL of a world like the one in Zelazny's Lord of Light where a small clique of very high tech aristos rule over a huge population of low tech folks?
I think you'd have to replace the UWP with something more like a CIA Fact Sheet of data for each world to resolve the problems.
MasterGwydion
Cosmic Mongoose
TL is what is generally available. Certain subsets of the population can have wildly varying TLs. That is in the rules. So in your example above with the Lord of Light, It would be a low TL world as that is what is generally available.
Therefore, UWP is a hard number, you just do not understand it.
I'm not sure Traveller could really claim the world consensus in the same paragraph as a discussion of the game. Perhaps that's a bit cynical, or perhaps it's one of the free aspects of the game that comes in every boxed set and every supplement? (shrug)
I haven't gone through all the sectors, but the ones I'm looking at a lot where done by GDW and not the 3rd parties. For example - Pixie has a Class A starport and a planetary population (on a vacuum world) of less than 10k. It has a scout base, a naval base and is on the X-boat route (though the tail end of it). It's a stopping-off point for the X-boat route to Kinorb (see below). As a pass-through and at the tail-end of nowhere, why would the Imperium invest the money to build a Class A starport? Economically and logistically it makes no sense.
Kinorb (also in the Regina subsector of the Spinward Marches) is evidently a nice Earth-like world - that has it's TL forcibly kept to TL-5 to maintain it's bucolic ecology. It's population is in the millions, and it has a starport of A. The planet is also at the tail-end of the X-boat system and beyond it has no worlds of major importance. With a forced TL-5 it has no ability to build or support it's starport through local manufacturing. None of the worlds around it would be able to do so either for various reasons.
Logically speaking both of these worlds would should only be covered by normal communication means off the main X-boat route since there are no worlds of importance in the area. As part of the Imperium they'd deserve and need support (especially near the Vargr border and not far from Zhodani space). However if you compare the X-boat network elsewhere there aren't any compelling reasons to do it there and not elsewhere.
Can there be exceptional reasons for these? Absolutely! The problem is your exception count is climbing rapidly and this is just two worlds in a single subsector.
There is absolutely no reason that worlds need to be 100% logically built and created - as we have seen from our own reality and history there are plenty of head-scratchers that without a lot of historical context they seem inexplicable.
But it wasn't world building - it was random happenstance that occurred to make it that way. And if you take the events that made the circumstances that way then often you get an "ahhhhh" out of it and your head scratching is far less.
That's reality and not world building. I would bet that when these worlds were first created random die rolls were done and NO world building. The defense of this post-publishing is, as I see it at least, making excuses or justifications after the fact. If that's the case, then fine, but lets not expend tons of energy trying to obfuscate the facts. As a referee I've already made tweaks to satisfy how I think it should be - however if I'm having to do that for this many worlds in one sub-sector, realistically what is the point for me to buy published material? It would be no more real effort than to do it myself. Hence the comments from others that when you pay for something you are expecting more than what you can do on your own.
At least that's how I think most people are. Why buy schlock when you can do that yourself?
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That last bit seems a bit, well, unfair to me. Could be I'm misreading the tone here. As your correctly pointed out, the tech available on a world can vary wildly, and the TL of the planet is what is generally available. Arnold the Terminator may have not been told that the phased plasma rifle in the 40watt range WAS available had this been Traveller.
As for a low TL planet being controlled by higher TL people - I suppose that depends on a few things. If the population is oppressed and forcibly kept at low TL (like Kinorb in my previous statement), then radicals would be able to get smuggled weapons on to the planet for use. We see that all the time today and throughout history. Or else they would simply build the weapons out of what's available - TL8 rifles and machineguns are quite possible to be built by gunsmiths as we have seen in the backstreets of Afghanistan. It's generally the knowledge of how as much as the ability to make it.
If you have read Pournelle's King David's Spaceship book, his 2nd Empire kept a hard lid on transporting knowledge and tech from world to world. In this instance it was because the Empire absorbed worlds and installed their own government and control mechanisms and the TL of the planet affected just how much freedom (as well as potential profit from installed nobility and merchants) could get. The idea permeates a lot of sci-fi literature out there.
But that's true for *all* the numbers. Except maybe size. And even that doesn't tell the whole story because you *can* have gravities outside the typical for a given size. Do you think interpreting 'tainted' as low oxygen so respirators instead of filter masks are necessary is legit? That's not what RAW says. Do chirpers count as population? The government types are hopelessly vague.
You seem to think that TL 10 aristos ruling over TL 4 population is obviously TL 4 and constitutes a "hard" number. But then there's tons of examples of people complaining that you shouldn't have a class A starport at a TL 7 world or humans couldn't live on Mars at TL 6 because the world can't support it. So there seems to be plenty of people who think that isn't obvious.
Anyway, this seems to be turning into a discussion of what hard vs fuzzy numbers are, which isn't a good use of time.
MasterGwydion
Cosmic Mongoose
Sorry. No hostile tone intended. If offense was given, please accept My apology.
MasterGwydion
Cosmic Mongoose
You are quite right, that is not what RAW says, but the impact is minor so it is mostly fluff. Unless I am worldbuilding around that specific world, it can be ignored. Either the people making the statement that Class-A Starports shouldn't exist on low tech worlds has not read the Mongoose-published Starport Materials, nor the OTU-stuff about the SPA and how starports in low-TL areas within the Imperium are subsidized by the SPA up to TL-12.
I think the TL representing what is "generally available" is directly what the book says. It is not "what I seem to think" anymore than My saying 2+2=4 is merely something you seem to think is true. It is the clearly stated rule. Personally, I hate the TL system as being overly vague. Look at Earth. Earth is basically a TL-8 planet, and yet TL-0 and TL-1 cultures still exist on Earth. I homebrew this to make the TL in the UWP to be an amalgamation of several different categories of TL, such as Medical Technology or Transportation Technology or Weapons Technology, etc. Then I backwards engineer the amalgamated number so that it matches what the Travellermap says the TL is for that system. Serious pain in the ass, but incredibly handy when you run sandbox campaigns and your players can literally go anywhere.
NOLATrav
Cosmic Mongoose
It’s interesting that you pick these two worlds, I’ve been working up an adventure in the area. Kinorb is TL8 btw, according to Travellermap.com but your point still stands… I guess? They are on an x-boat route and canon I have read indicates a lot of rich retirees from Boughene and elsewhere run the place so the old “they import the tech they need” trope comes into play.
IMTU I have changed the x-boat route to go directly to Kinorb from Boughene as it makes no sense to route through a prison/naval facility, which Pixie is. Does that reduce story/adventure opportunities or support an effective Imperial Naval procedure in a dangerous border area? Personally I haven’t figured that out yet, and that’s fine. And here is where my stance on the UWP also comes into play: it’s my campaign, I’ll make the changes I like because it’s MTU. But I’m not throwing the baby out with the bath water because a few things don’t make sense, or rub me the wrong way. I’m always discovering what all these worlds could be. I’ve been playing Trav since the mid-80’s so I guess I’m in the school of “UWP is a springboard for the imagination.”
I take the UWP literally (because it’s freely available in-universe information) and strive to be creative in my interpretation of the “reality on the ground.” But I also feel free to change what I like to suit my game. My “exception count” remains low because I only change what really bugs me and I don’t want to “gotcha” my players.
Look, I think all the UWP numbers are vague and I am well aware that that is how the rules describe them. But in this thread and every other thread like it, there are lots of people who get bent about tech levels. The largest share of complaints about "bad worlds" come from TL or starport rating issues. The number of worlds like Cordan where they flat out abuse the fuzzy pop values is extremely small. Physical stats, pop, government, law level hardly ever "break" a world.
IMHO, the only way to "fix" the UWP is make the extended UWPs the World Builder's Handbook or T5 be the norm. Or just replace them with CIA Factsheet type summaries of each world instead of half of the sector books being neat info on things that happened 400 years ago. And I don't know that I would want that. Because I'd rather write that extended stuff myself.
Anyway, it is my opinion that the number of "this is clearly wrong in a way that matters" like your Cordan example or a few known typos is small. I think that if there was some kind of "update the Spinward Marches project" it would explode into massive arguments about Tech Levels with a side order of Starport classifications. And be almost nothing about anything else.
On a side note, that reminds me of another reason I immediately liked the Islands Subsectors when I first saw them in Trillion Credit Squadron back in the 80s is that it looks sensible. All the "major powers" have a class A starport. Nowhere else does. Tech levels are pretty tightly bunched in the 7-13 range. There's a couple backwater colonies with restricted tech levels (5 or 6), but pretty much everyone else is some level of space flight tech so you don't have these kinds of arguments. Combine that with the fact that is it naturally bounded by the Rift and I was like "this is great!".
Never actually had any use for the actual naval rules in that book, but those 3 or 4 pages at the end paid for that book a thousand times over.
Never actually had any use for the actual naval rules in that book, but those 3 or 4 pages at the end paid for that book a thousand times over.
MasterGwydion
Cosmic Mongoose
A world like TechWorld makes sense to Me. It's a few people, but most of their labor is millions of robots, yet their population number is 1. That means that economically, their population number should be around 6 or 7. Things like these affect every attempt to actually plot trade routes. This is what I mean when I say incorrect data. This is only the case because the population number is used to calculate trade routes and such. The more I delve into this, the more I realize that the population number doesn't matter if it is the number of people on the planet or merely the economic strength of the planet's (system's) population. Although given the number of economic factors that are derived from population, perhaps all that needs changing is the definition of the population number. Maybe to something like this, "The population digit in the UWP is a measurement of the system's economic strength. In an "average system" this is usually the number of zeros in the actual population of the system. This could vary greatly in systems that utilize robotic or other artificial labor or in systems wherein large portions of the populace do not contribute to the system's economy."
Does that make any sense? That is an open question to everyone.
I think that if Mongoose makes that the definition of the UWP's Population Digit, almost all of these problems would be resolved and it makes things like Cordan and TechWorld no longer outside of the rules. A simple change of definition, not a huge rework of the entire 50 years of Charted Space.
Does that make any sense? That is an open question to everyone.
I think that if Mongoose makes that the definition of the UWP's Population Digit, almost all of these problems would be resolved and it makes things like Cordan and TechWorld no longer outside of the rules. A simple change of definition, not a huge rework of the entire 50 years of Charted Space.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
You could count the robots as a fraction when calculating population, compared to biological sophonts.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
Too many people look at the UPP in isolation without considering the polity it belongs to.
Every world in the Imperium has knowledge of and access to TL15.
I can go to the shop and buy the latest iphone. Can the UK make them? Could the UK build the infrastructure over time to build them?
Every world in the Imperium has knowledge of and access to TL15.
I can go to the shop and buy the latest iphone. Can the UK make them? Could the UK build the infrastructure over time to build them?
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It is an elegant solution to the problem of how Pop interacts with the Trade Rules. It generally makes Pop less useful as a descriptive tool in world design, though. It trades solving a few weird cases for making every planet uncertain, since that Econ 6 planet could be Harcourt Fenton Mudd and his robots or a billion super impoverished people or anything in between.Does that make any sense? That is an open question to everyone.
I think that if Mongoose makes that the definition of the UWP's Population Digit, almost all of these problems would be resolved and it makes things like Cordan and TechWorld no longer outside of the rules. A simple change of definition, not a huge rework of the entire 50 years of Charted Space.
I had looked it up on Traveller Map myself and I see the discrepancy now. If you look at the bar on the right-side (on the Wiki) it lists the planet at TL-8. But if you read the description it states it's forcibly kept at TL-5.
This is a good representation of what would happen to most economies newly integrated into galactic civilization.
Make them count for 3/5ths of a person, officially in the world's constitution. This would eave a little Easter Egg for the players, to figure out where the local politics are headed.
MasterGwydion
Cosmic Mongoose
I would hope that in most cases it changes nothing, since in most systems 1 pop = 1 econ, same as it is now. It would simply make the "exceptions fall within the rules. The same way that most Earth-sized planets are 1G, but there are exceptions that have higher of lower gravity due to the composition of the planet.
I think if you are still going to assume the default is Pop = Econ, you might as well not bother with the semantics change? The exceptions are still exceptions. All those exceptions are cases where the population is greater than the UWP suggests. And the problem with that is the greater population should affect the Trade Codes. Ergo, the pop/econ figure needs to be changed.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but the objection to Cordan's not including the "servants" (the number of which is not specified in the more recent Trojan reach stuff in Drinax. Is there a more detailed write up in the 1e Aslan book?) was it should change the Trade Code, because they wouldn't be "Low Pop" with the significant trade modifiers that come with that.
Is your position that Cordan's economic power would remain 3 and be "Low Econ" (instead of Low Pop) despite all these extra people? Tech World has the same problem. Pop 1, but the write up says 4000 humans and a million+ robots. That's clearly Pop 3 (or 6 if you count the robots). I can't see anything about Tech-World that would make its Econ value less than a basic pop score. If anything, it should be punching above its weight.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but the objection to Cordan's not including the "servants" (the number of which is not specified in the more recent Trojan reach stuff in Drinax. Is there a more detailed write up in the 1e Aslan book?) was it should change the Trade Code, because they wouldn't be "Low Pop" with the significant trade modifiers that come with that.
Is your position that Cordan's economic power would remain 3 and be "Low Econ" (instead of Low Pop) despite all these extra people? Tech World has the same problem. Pop 1, but the write up says 4000 humans and a million+ robots. That's clearly Pop 3 (or 6 if you count the robots). I can't see anything about Tech-World that would make its Econ value less than a basic pop score. If anything, it should be punching above its weight.
