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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