> From: R. Dired [email removed]
> Subject: (4168) Hmmm....
>
>
> Anyone ever consider what kind of effort it would take to make traveller 3D?
> I know that 2D is so damn much simpler, but space isn't supposed to be simple.
> What's the excitement of it's just a bunch of small islands on a real big
> sea?
Without a good representation the players only get confused and
discouraged by trying to visualize the 3-D map. If you had a computer
or a 3-D model of the universe then this could be quite practical.
Otherwise most players can't tell what planets are close to their current
postion, and almost none could plot a shortest route course though the 3-D
universe.
> On the same topic, one thing that always bothered me was that population was
> random, no matter how bad the conditions on the planet. 99 billion on a
> size A with atmosphere F is kind of hard to believe (much less that many on
> size 1, no water, no air)! Why not have modifiers to the population roll based
> on the other rolls? Say, something like this:
>
[...]
>
> This way, you wouldn't have all those poor planets with billions next to
> the perfect one that the GM can name every person on.
Just think of analogies on earth, why is japan so overcrowded while
Austrailia which is relatively close is almost empty? Usually there
are socio-economic resaons why you see strange population figures, and
what we need is a program/method to come up with novel reasons why
there is a disparagy.
> Also, TL 9-B should reduce the effects of tainted atmosphere to tolerable
> (say, carginogenic, or perhaps a simple lung-wash is needed every month),
> C-D should make it nothing but a faint odor, and E+ should eliminate tainting
> altogether. Remove the requirement for atmospheric type (make it 0-9) for
> industrial worlds.
>
I agree totally with this, as someone else pointed out (Scott? Metlay? Steve?)
the fossel fuel burning is well past at high tech levels. Perhaps the
populace want to have a tainted atmosphere to be classified as industrial :-)
-Dan
Dan Corrin, Network Manager, Mechanical Engineering, UWO, London, Ontario
InterNet: [email removed]. [phone removed]
TML/CZ/FrameUsers/Consim FTP site: sunbane.engrg.uwo.ca (129.100.100.12)