Multiplied population?

     Okay, friends and neighbors, it's dumb question time...

     I recently decided to play around with random numbers in C (on my
Amiga), so I decided to write a planet generator for Traveller (just
like everyone else--come on, admit it).  I got a simple program working
without too much trouble (right now, I'm having some trouble with
generating planet names randomly, but that's no big deal), and a
question occurred to me in the course of writing it.  Namely, just
what's the population multiplier good for?  There are rules in the
Referee's Manual on how to generate it, but I couldn't find anything
in the text on what made it useful.

     Could someone enlighten me on this one?


- --
     Brent

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