Dagnabit! You're just trying to get a new article.... ;)

Yes, there are some things that could be looked at. That might be a good community project for us here or maybe on COTI or somewhere.

I think I recall that in some system somewhere (God knows where) there was a ringworld (ring there, not finished) and somewhere else there was a partial or full Dyson's sphere around a sun.

I hadn't thought about the Rosettes.

And what about a planet or gas giant or sun with a constellation of stations rotating around it, possibly while the body they rotate around is not populated at all.

And of course, full system generation could probably put (in extremis) more people in the system off the main world than on.... and that would affect trading, importance/political clout, military budgets...

Maybe this needs revisited to have a standard proposed that will include outliers (a mechanism to handle them at any rate).

Tom B

On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 10:31 AM Jeff Zeitlin <xxxxxx@freelancetraveller.com> wrote:
On Tue, 28 Apr 2020 14:42:45 +0100, Timothy Collinson wrote:

>I quite like the idea of "X" for artificial though.  Although I immediately
>start to wonder how you represent really *big* artificial constructs that
>might ordinarily be size "8" say.  The Magrathean planet builders come to
>mind.

If you're getting to this point, you should really revamp the whole system.
First, you'll want to account for 'super-earths' - that is, planets that
are significantly larger than Earth, but are _not_ gas giants. Second,
you'll also want to account for 'stupidly large' artificial structures,
like ringworlds or Dyson Spheres. Then, there's dealing with 'structures'
like Kempler Rosettes - six equal-mass worlds spaced at 60-degree intervals
around a central point, which central point may or may not need to be
occupied by a stellar mass (or any mass!). You'll also want to account for
any of these being NFA ('no fixed address', that is, mobile, either not
associated with a star [rogue planets] or under their own power
[worldships]).

The problem with Traveller's U*P systems are that you're trying to reduce
an entity (whatever is represented by the * - Character, World, Ship, Task,
whatever) to a single Hollerith card, and in order to do that, you're going
to _have_ to omit some information. That's when you look at the likelihood
of any particular type of exception occurring, and decide at what point you
simply code it as 'this is an exception - see the notes for explanation'.


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