Utter hogwash about Pilot 7s and so on.

A thread of 2 messages, 21 February 1990 to 21 February 1990, in the order they were sent.

#1069 Utter hogwash about Pilot 7s and so on.

[unnamed sender] · 21 February 1990

I won't argue with your math, or your marvelous grasp of the rules.
I will merely say that your initial premise is total bilge. Has it
ever occurred to anyone that if one preson in ten were a member
of the Imperial Services, the economy would collapse? Let's get
realistic here for a minute, folks! It should be equally easy for
one of you rules lawyers/mathematicians out there to estimate the
size of an Imperial Sector Fleet, based on the data in the Reb Sourcebook.
>From that, we can make a decent estimate of the total military strength
of a sector; if there are 1e13 people in a sector, I find it hard to
believe that unless there is a state of open war/draft callup, there
would be more than a hundred million people per sector in the service.
(I have no book s in front of me now; this is an estimate.) I really
think that all of your numbers should be scaled down by, oh, four orders
of magnitude. And not including aging effects is cheating, not to mention
the fact that in a one-year service (Same Scouts, different rules) it's
much easier to get your tail shot off. Harrmph!

Oh, and if these posts were meant in fun, well, hahaha, very jocular.

(Can you tell I haven't seen my fiancee in two months? Knew you could.)

metlay

#1078 Re: (1069) Utter hogwash about Pilot 7s and so on.

Bart Massey · 21 February 1990 · reply to #1069

In TML Biweekly Volume 6 Issue 16 [email removed] writes:
> I will merely say that your initial premise is total bilge. Has it
> ever occurred to anyone that if one preson in ten were a member
> of the Imperial Services, the economy would collapse? Let's get
> realistic here for a minute, folks!

Hmm.  Perhaps the estimate is high, but "total bilge"?  Please correct me if
I'm wrong, but I believe the good ol' U.S.ofA. has a total armed forces
payroll of around 2 million bodies, or about 2/300 of the total U.S.
population.  This would only change the estimates in question by 1 order of
magnitude, and certainly wouldn't invalidate the premise that the existing
rules make it abnormally easy for player characters to get high skill levels.

The problem is that the probability of getting skill level n + 1, given skill
level n, should be O(1/n) rather than the O(1) function it is now.  This
would make the probability of getting skill level n from scratch roughly
O(log(n)), which would make the suggestion of an earlier poster make sense,
by making the skill level be roughly the *log* of the actual "amount of
skill".  If the constants were chosen correctly, there might still be some
Pilot-9s in the universe, but there would be many orders of magnitude more
Pilot-7s.

On the other hand, I had always assumed that the rules were the way they were
to make player characters more interesting, and that they didn't apply to the
population as a whole.  To put it another way, if I used the character
generation system described above, I would probably throw away most of my
characters as "too boring", and the existing generation system just
"pre-throws-away" most, but not all "boring" characters.

I'm sure I will be liberally corrected on all of the above.

					Bart Massey
					..[email removed]
					..[email removed]