On Jan 19, 2018, at 12:01 AM, Caleuche <xxxxxx@sudnadja.com> wrote:

While looking through some of the map data, it became apparent that there is a pretty sharp cut off at TL 5 - world below TL 5 are fairly uncommon:

https://i.imgur.com/aZoBIJC.png

And a huge number of Traveller worlds have population codes between 4 and 7 with tech levels between 7 and 13. Random worlds that Travellers visit will be less populated than midsize cities - the median imperial world population is ~700,000. 

I believe it was Dave Nilson in an old JTAS or Challenge, speaking about mapping, world gen and Traveller canon, described most of the OTU (other than the Spinward Marches) as ‘created by a computer with it’s random number generator stuck in a groove’. 

As I recall I read somewhere that the first draft of Atlas of the Imperium was generated on an Apple II computer, which had some, err, *quirks* in the rand() function in Applesoft Basic. Certain values will be over-represented when simulating 2D6 or 3D6, fairly reliably. I've seen that myself, as I wrote a program to test this.

(if I had a clue where my Apple ][+ was stashed, AND it runs, AND my 5¼" floppy drive works AND my floppies haven't decayed into a pile of rust and polymer dust I might be able to get my results from those tests. :-)