World Generation

[vitalis6969]

Ok, running into some problems with world gen that just aren't sitting right in my head. Maybe the answer is obvious and I am just missing something, hopefully you all can help...

First, population vs. tech level vs. crazy gravity. Rolled this up today in filling out a subsector: C2209D9-7, a 3200km world with .15 gravity, very thin atmosphere, Billions of people (Earth Comparative) and a tech level that lets them reach orbit.

What type of people, in the billions, can live on a planet with such extremely low gravity and no gravity control technology?

three worlds in a row I that I rolled up have hundreds of millions to tens of billions in population, no gravity higher than .25G, no breathable atmosphere and barely the capability to explore their own system.

When a population is that high I assume it to be indigenous or at least very very entrenched over centuries. If they are human, how in the world do they survive?

Hopefully I didn't make this too confusing, how do you all take care of this?

-V

 

[rust]

First, if you consider a result of a random design system as nonsensical
or implausible, remember that you are always free to change it to some-
thing that fits your idea of the setting better. :wink:

What type of people, in the billions, can live on a planet with such extremely low gravity and no gravity control technology?

My first thought would be that they are either not humans or members of
a human minor race that has been genetically adapted to a low gravity en-
vironment.

They could also be the descendants of people born in an environment of
this kind, for example belters or lunar colonists, who never developed the
muscular strength to live comfortably on a planet with a higher gravity.

The lack of a breathable atmosphere could be a hint that they live in huge
closed and possibly subterranean habitats, which would fit in well with the
belter or lunar colonist concept.

Besides, they do not really have to live on or under the planet's surface,
they could just as well inhabit habitats in orbit around the planet. If their
technology level is too low to construct such habitats, they were built by
ancestors with a higher technology level or someone else able to do it.
They will have to import some technology and technological services to
maintain and repair their habitats, but this should be no major problem.

This would be some first thoughts how to handle such dice results, but -
frankly - I would just delete them and replace them with something I like
better.

 

[vitalis6969]

Outstanding sir, this is the kind of brain awakening I needed...

Just wanted someone elses input to get the gears turning.

-V

 

[RandyT0001]

1/6 Earth gravity like our moon has. Look for some old footage of the Apollo astronauts walking around on the moon to get a sense of how off worlders will have to move around. IMO the Imperial starport will have artificial gravity embedded into the surface and set to about 80% of normal Earth gravity for the visitors. These people if indegious to this planet are going to be very weak compared to normal humans and their normal everyday materials used are going to be very light. Paper, cardboard/ cardstock, light woods, light plastics are probably the norm. Foam pillows for chairs. Pretty much anything made of metal will require a low speed, electric powered lifting jack or the like to move around. There is no surface water so Travellers might have to refuel at the gas giant or ort cloud.

 

[DFW]

their normal everyday materials used are going to be very light. Paper, cardboard/ cardstock, light woods, light plastics are probably the norm. Foam pillows for chairs. Pretty much anything made of metal will require a low speed, electric powered lifting jack or the like to move around.

All materials would be the same as for humans in 1G. EVERYTHING weighs 1/6. And, their strength = 1/6 = no difference.

 

[rust]

All materials would be the same as for humans in 1G. EVERYTHING weighs 1/6. And, their strength = 1/6 = no difference.

Hmm... with the strength of the inhabitants only 1/6, I could well imagi-
ne a tendency to use less dense materials - not because of their lesser
weight, but because their lower inertial mass would make it easier to
move them around ?

 

[rinku]

Another key to their society here is the Theocracy angle. The planet might itself be considered holy, so they don't emigrate. Very thin atmosphere on such a small world implies reasonable density - they're likely to have reasonable metal resources as well as rock. Water is probably their bottleneck, but TL7 can still get some kind of craft out to send ice in from the outer system. It's not like their escape velocity is a major hurdle. They can likely trade something for off-planet help, anyway.

TL 7 can certainly maintain a sealed habitat existence. Perhaps there is an element of stagnation in technology because technical expertise is mixed up with their religious heirarchy?

Might have been started as a normal small lunar-style colony that became cut off for some reason and survived by adherence to strict authority and regimentation. This then morphed into a religious dictatorship.

 

[DFW]

not because of their lesser
weight, but because their lower inertial mass would make it easier to
move them around ?

When it comes to something like baseball bats, perhaps. Not building materials though, unless said materials satisfied all the needed qualities. On Earth the materials used are used because of the qualities required for the engineering specs (load bearing, corrosion, heat resistance requirements, hardness, etc., etc.)

 

[BP]

Some of my first programs were sub-sector generators for CT. I've made probably dozens of programs to do this. However, over the years I have tended towards Intelligent Design over Random Creation in my Traveller - I don't use random rolls to generate space craft or vehicles, why use it for what is often a more critical part of the game.

Its funny - but compare ship design to world creation - worlds only have 8 options! I can come up with a whole sub-sector of worlds in minutes that actually 'makes' sense IMTU - without a spreadsheet. I suspect MgT was rather restricted in what changes they could make to the worldgen rules.

If I were using their rules, I would definitely have to house rule for DMs and limits for population (and probably several other things).

 

[DFW]

If the worlds are to be "human" worlds I don't use the published rules and haven't since my GMing days with CT. The results are comical if not downright hilarious.

 

[BP]

What - you mean the billions of folks on the low tech, 1/6th surface gravity planet present a believability problem?

Nah - they naturally live many kilometers underground, where the gravity is much higher due to proximity to the cool, dense core. Fortunately, the rocks and fauna give off plenty of oxygen and scrub the atmosphere there, the core is still active enough to provide necessary heat, and huge portions of the surface of the planet are transparent to the useful energy from their sun needed for fauna and life, while filtering out the harmful UV and such.

It is a garden of a planet if you can find the right tunnels to gain entrance to the naturally geodesic formed caverns that hide their underground seas.

This is so common in the universe, not sure why any issues would even come up...

:roll:

 

[DFW]

What - you mean the billions of folks on the low tech, 1/6th surface gravity planet present a believability problem?

Only if it is also a vacuum world. :lol:

 

[BP]

Ah - yes - indeed...

Everyone knows too many vacuum salesmen would ruin the economy of any such world and result in the type of widespread starvation that would make a population of billions truly unbelievable in such a context...

 

[Blix]

Nah - they naturally live many kilometers underground, where the gravity is much higher due to proximity to the cool, dense core.

Aside from everything else that's wrong with your suggestion, they'd have to live a few hundred or thousand kilometres underground (which presents its own technological problems at TL 7) to get much of a difference in gravity.

Also, if the core was half the size (and solid and cold) of the already small planet, which presumably has a Mercury-like density anyway because it has a large core, the density of the core would have to be ridiculously high for there to be high enough gravity at its surface to not cause any low-g problems there.

But then, the core is hot enough to generate heat, so living on the surface of the core is definitely out.

So you've just swapped one bunch of believability problems with another.

 

[rust]

Also, if the core was half the size (and solid and cold) of the already small planet, which presumably has a Mercury-like density anyway because it has a large core, the density of the core would have to be ridiculously high for there to be high enough gravity at its surface to not cause any low-g problems there.

This is Traveller, so the core of the core is of course a black hole, and the
heat is generated by exotic matter fed to the black hole by the Ancient de-
vice that controls all this.

 

[BP]

...
So you've just swapped one bunch of believability problems with another.

Well, at least you got it...

(Yes - that was the point of the post... and the reason for the trailing eye roll.)

 

[captainjack23]

Ok, running into some problems with world gen that just aren't sitting right in my head. Maybe the answer is obvious and I am just missing something, hopefully you all can help...

First, population vs. tech level vs. crazy gravity. Rolled this up today in filling out a subsector: C2209D9-7, a 3200km world with .15 gravity, very thin atmosphere, Billions of people (Earth Comparative) and a tech level that lets them reach orbit.

What type of people, in the billions, can live on a planet with such extremely low gravity and no gravity control technology?

three worlds in a row I that I rolled up have hundreds of millions to tens of billions in population, no gravity higher than .25G, no breathable atmosphere and barely the capability to explore their own system.

When a population is that high I assume it to be indigenous or at least very very entrenched over centuries. If they are human, how in the world do they survive?

Hopefully I didn't make this too confusing, how do you all take care of this?

-V

Hmmmm. First I'd check to see that you were reading the tables or making the rolls correctly. Thats a pretty extreme set of results.

That said, obviously :wink: the "planet" is a lost generation ship built into an unusually large planetoid. Tech has regressed, and they've forgotten they are on a ship. TL 7 could probably keep the systems running, particulalry if the designers assumed that they needed to be as simple as possible for the cesendents of the crew. They arrived, but noone got off. Its been filling up for a while, and digging new areas.

main issue is, why use somthing the size of the earths moon ? -for which I'd suggest looking at an SF yarn I read yonts ago -which supposes that Luna is in fact an alien superdreadnaught marooned in earth orbit. Author David Weber*, perhaps ? Not sure.

And let me reiterate: it's fiction, and I know it is fiction to avoid any repetition of earlier misunderstandings by certain folks.

There's also some bizarre websites on the subject, not sure which came first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Moon_Theory.


* caveat: its an okay read especially if you don't mind or can ignore the not too subtle politial pontification. (not as bad or as intrusive as later Heinlein, but still there).

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Doesn't even have to be all that lost... Maybe it is in the middle of it's journey and is in an otherwise empty hex. It was discovered by accident.

The natives are from a culture that peaked at early TL8 and stayed there for a long time, refining all the technologies that we could do now if we had all the time and money it would take to do it.

Fission powered and it used Nuclear Pulse engines to build up it's speed to a small fraction of the speed of light. In about 200 years, it will begin decelerating into a starsystem with a habitable planet... of course what the locals would think about that is another story.

Yes, you could go with the Metamorphesis Alpha "lost ship who forgot who they are" or it could just be in transit.

 

[silburnl]

which supposes that Luna is in fact an alien superdreadnaught marooned in earth orbit.

Mutineer's Moon.

Author David Weber*, perhaps ? Not sure.

Indeed. It's available on the Baen website for those interested. I concur with captainjack's critical assessment - altho' the cod olde englisshe of some of the characters got old (ha!) right quick.

Regards
Luke

 

[PrinceYyrkoon]

With the deepest respect, if you can't make sense of these results, you should perhaps play something else.

These people obviously live in controlled environments, either under the surface or upon it, in colony modules. These modules arent necessarily the products of the current population. They may be ancient, and found by colonists, etc.. They may even have been vast prison or slave modules. Or the community could be the remnants of a once-great civilization which have since regressed either becuase of war, religion, etc., or just plain cultural inertia.