hiya,
I wasn't going to comment about the first reply, but since this one came
I thought I'd explain my reasoning and give some more comments.
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!
In Message (1078) Bart Massey writes:
>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.
The 1 in 10 came about by the following reasoning:
Every character tries to enlist in their preferred service, the enlistment
rolls can fail and if the character does fail to enlist they are subject to
a draft in an armed service (which is nice and uniformly distributed).
I took a wild guess about the chance of failing enlistment, I was probably
incorrect. But according to the rules I think that 1 in 36 must fail their
enlistment roll and it is quite likely that more will do so. They will be
subject to the draft.
BTW: What proportion of the population had been/or is in the armed forces when
there was drafting?? I suspect it was quite a bit higher than 1 in 10.
>
>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.
If this is happening then I take back this and my previous posting, since they
are obviously incorrect.
My assumption that dead characters retired in the previous term will also make
a difference to the results, I am unsure as to how much. This assumption made
the calculations a lot simpler.
My other assumption as to ignoring aging effect is valid, since the average
time spent in the serive in very short. The probability of staying in the
scouts until aging takes effect is very low. I also ignored increases in
character stats due to skill rolls. These are more likely to have an effect,
but any effect they have will increase the chance of high skill levels.
I might also comment: in Classic Traveller Supplement #1 1001 Characters there
were two instances of Scientists with Computer-8. Hows that for chance.
Pauli
seeya
SNIF
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