More on UWPs

[email removed] (Derek Wildstar) writes:
>On Jim's Modified Generation System:
>One possibility to consider for worlds with Tainted atmospheres is that there
>is a native "minor" race; this species is very likeley to not notice the taint
>(in fact, it might be beneficial to them).  If this is the case, there should
>be no negative DM for thin tainted, standard tainted, and dense tainted
>atmospheres, and no TL minimum.

Hmm... this is an interesting idea. I guess the GM would have to decide
whether or not such races exist before making a final call on this one.
Since there are a variety of "taints", however, the race would be
virtually "locked" to their one "homeworld". Unless they were genetically
altered to survive there, I don't see how they might have come into
being. And you still have the obvious question, why would anybody
engineer a mutant race for a specific tainted atmosphere when there are
non-tainted atmospheres out there? I guess we could come up with all
sorts of rationalizations for this. But on average, it seems a bit
extreme to assume this.

Of course, there might be worlds that acquired some strange and lethal
virus (to about 99.9% of all standard humans). Then natural selection
could take care of this problem, and the race wouldn't be locked to
their homeworld.

I like the idea, but I also think that it's unrealistic to implement
it as a matter of course. Situations like this should be very rare.

>The other thing I noticed was the negative starport DM on worlds with
>very small populations.  This should be generally true, but exceptions
>do exist --- the resort world with nearly no permanent residents but a
>Class A or B port; the mining outpost with a few thousands of
>inhabitants and a very high traffic level.

When I was thinking of the starport modifiers, I was actually thinking
less in terms of traffic and more in terms of sheer humanpower
requirements. Take a class-A starport. You have starship construction
going on (by definition). How many people would that require? Could
you do it with 10? 100? Or would you need thousands of people? My
guess is toward the latter (but since I don't really know, comments
on this point are extremely welcome).

For a look at what I would call unrealistic, look at either of these
two worlds:

Pixie/Regina  A100103-D        Paya/Aramis  A655241-9

Even with high-technology, it should take quite a few people to
build a starship. Then you also have to consider all the other
tasks a class-A starport is generally capable of performing. Anybody
have any ideas on what the minimum number of people should be for
each starport type (just in terms of running the port)? We might
even need to cross-index this with tech level.


           _   /|       Jim Vassilakos
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