MasterGwydion said:
Condottiere said:
Possibly the size of the potential customer base.
I don't keep track on Dungeon and Dragon sales figures, though I understand it's going through a resurgence, but supposedly large enough to support various other publishers and their writing staffs in bringing out supplementary material, if not, I suppose, licensed to produce more material on existing settings.
Chartered space is fairly large, and probably at best, you can generalize about what's going on, or focus narrowly on certain areas and events.
Certain aspects of Traveller, such as hardware, are fair game, for more intensive scrutiny.
What does this have to do with accurate UWP codes?
Disturbingly, I am sometimes able to follow Condottiere's logic (whether from constant exposure or delusion on my part I'm not sure). I think the point is that not enough of us 'lazy writers' exist for the relatively small Traveller ecosystem, so much remains only poorly defined.
I'm of two minds (or lost minds) on the accuracy of UWPs. Since I just finished writing an economics section for the World Builder's Handbook, it's clear that bad figures for population and tech levels make for formulas that just can't work right, so it would be nice if all data was accurate. On that same mind, I was a little annoyed to look at the Briefing book for Umemii a few years back and find a TL12 space navy embedded in a TL7 world. Would have been nice to know ahead of time, as you'd think it would be a dominant fact for the Borderland cluster, and not something mentioned in an obscure briefing file.
On the other hand (mind, whatever) most adventure modules begin with the disclaimer similar to 'Library data may be out of date, misleading or just plain wrong - but here's the real story' . It is the story that you're buying and making the story fit precisely into someone else's universe can be tough (and I think to Condottiere's probable point there is a limited pool of writers and even smaller pool of fact-checkers and editors). I can't see an excuse for UWP data being wrong inside the Third Imperium, but outside, well, just thinking about the US Census. I've had forms sent to me in the mail that I fill out that weren't checked, and back in 2010, I had census people come to my door insisting on checking for the boarders living in the basement (in 1990 maybe?), when I know that in April 2000 when I owned the house all we had in the basement was a couple of cats. So when the scouts came to Cordon in 1060-something and sent down their team, they probably got a nice reception from the powers-that-were, who helpfully filled out the forms for all the 'people of import'. PoD was built up over time, with different authors for the beginning - which probably included the sector data, but even there 'mistakes were made' - and for the follow-up add-ons.
Yes, I know it can be frustrating (hey, I just sent in a rant about the map of Regina in SotA not being canon) but it is part of the job description of the not-lazy referee to figure out how to interpret and present the material.