William D. Ricker · 8 July 1987 · reply to #6
>From wdr Wed Jul 8 10:26:25 1987
Received: by nes.MENET (1.1/4.7)
id AA01299; Wed, 8 Jul 87 10:26:21 PDT
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 87 10:26:21 PDT
>From: William D. Ricker <wdr>
Posted-Date: Wed, 8 Jul 87 10:26:21 PDT
Message-Id: [email removed]
To: [email removed]
Subject: Re: Traveller software
Cc: [email removed]
Status: R
James,
Years ago I had a subsector generator which did routes too. It was in
some dialect of Fortran for the Prime 750, either FLECS or Fortran77.
I certainly don't have a machine-readable source listing anymore, but I
might find a listing if I look around. If I find it, I'll let you
know.
I don't recall now if it was for book-traveller 2D (flat universe)
sectors or 3D sectors. It did distribute an average+- number of planets
within a volume randomly, generate UPPs, and deduce trade routes
between planets based on distances and starport classes. It was based
on old 3-book traveller, since Scout hadn't been Published yet. ( I've
never bought it -- though I might, were I to need such a program again.
I'm a Traveller player these days; the campaign I developed the program
for never "got off the ground". My next campaign as GM is going to
be Fantasy, of which there is a shortage locally.)
I don't recall whether I iterated through all possible coordinates
checking (random_number <= probabilty_of_planetary_sytem) or whether I
used a less naive algorithm with finer granularity of coordinate. I
may have implemented the sensible optimization of calculating the
expected mean and standard deviation of the number of planetary
systems within the volume in question and then generating a single
normal deviate number for the number of systems to generate. In any
case, the result was a list (array of 2 or 3 by N) of coordinates of
planets { (x,y) or (x,y,z) } and a list (array of 6 or 7 by N) of UPPs
and a matrix (array of N by N) of euclidean distances between pairs of
planets. Trade routes were determined by a trade threshold, which was
I think a function of {starport-class x starport-class} to parsecs or
jump numbers. A second function on {system_number x system_number}
compared the treshold to the distance matrix elements resulted in a
matrix of distances which was 0 if the jump distance was greater than
threshold and the jump distance if less than. This was then the
adjacency matrix on the trade routes.
I don't recall if I used the CalComp Plotter routines to plot the stars
and traderoutes or if I just used printer-graphics and hand-charted the
routes from the matrix. I do recall using color pencils to trace
maximal spanning trees of traderoutes to deduce spheres of hegemony,
which were often quite gerrymandered. [sic: The man's name was Gov.
Eldridge Gerry, which he pronounced, I believe, as 'Gary' not 'Jerry'.
Trivia brought to you by...]
A friend, whose address I gave you, Paul Gazis, has a star charting
program for MS DOS hi resolution systems (in C ?) which does not
generate sectors, but will read a list of 3D coordinates and view
arbitary wedges from arbitrary points of view, with labels. His
Varient traveller rules use 3D space for plotting planetary systems and
as many actual known stars as possible. The regular packet trade
routes are less important in his game because (a) the PCs operate
outside of regular trade lanes, so don't care where they are; and (b)
most of space isn't covered by any government, let alone a large
empire. (Technology levels of the largest goverment only approach
those of Book Traveller's empire: gravitics are not in use and FTL Comm
(hyper wave) is rare and for the largest governments only. Within the
sector we're currently exploring with a sub-universe games master,
Glenn Blacow, things are even lower, around Tech Level 9-11.
BILL RICKER
William Ricker [email removed] [email removed]
PS: According to our ARPANET name server, tektronix and dadla are not
registered .COM nodes, yet the return address arrives here as dadla.TEK.COM.
I can't tell if (a) our tables are out of date, (b) some router is changing
the return address beyond recongition [likely], or either dadla! or tektronix!
is calling itself by funny names.
This was sent as (local uucp gateway)!tektronix!dadla!jamesp .
We'll see if this works.