A nuclear astrophysicist's view of Dan Corrin's query:
>From a Traveller standpoint, all of the unusual stellar phenomena about which
he's wondered are utterly unimportant. Why? Two reasons: scales of stellar
population, and the distribution and density of unusual star types.
The population distribution of stars with respect to size, age, and light/heat
output (i.e. luminosity) is a well-understood function, essentially an
exponential "pyramid" with the brightest stars at the top and the dimmest at
the bottom. For every fairly bright star such as Sirius, there are hundreds
and hundreds of dim red or brown dwarfs like Barnard's Star; for every very
bright star like Acrux, there are hundreds of Siriuses. The problem with the
current star system generation tables is that if they reflected the true
population distribution of stars in the primary galactic medium, they'd bore
the average gamer to tears, because on a 3D6 table you'd need to roll a 3 or
an 18 to get anything other than a red dwarf, and then you'd have to roll a 3
or an 18 to get anything in spectral class any higher than F, and so on. From
the point of view of a "pointillistic" star system setup like Traveller or
2300 (i.e., we can only go so far before our engines poop out, so every star
system becomes an important stepping stone), the universe becomes an
intricately detailed and dishwater-dull place. |-> [In all fairness, a
"wide-dispersion" game like Space Opera (i.e., our drives have infinite speed
and range so we can pick and choose which worlds we settle) tends to lean
heavily on bizarre systems and unlikely planetary groups; hence the
Space-Opera nature of the game, where if there's no air to breathe normally
outside your Laser-Blazer stellar interceptor craft when you crashland on
Xymox IV, it MUST be a plot device.] In other words, it's unreasonable to ask
Traveller for a "more realistic" star system population distribution; if it
got any more realistic we'd die of boredom, and as it is its departures from
reality are vital if we're to have more than a fistful of inhabitable worlds
in the 11000 star systems of the Imperium.
The fallacy in Dan's argument is as follows: Why shouldn't it be possible to
see everything we need to chart, he asks, considering the fact that we can see
so much just from Earth with today's telescopes? The fact is, we really can't
see very much at all! Our vision relies on apparent luminosity, a quantity
which is heavily dependent on temperature and proximity in a synergistic
fashion. What this means is that while we see a mixture of red, orange,
yellow, white, and blue-white stars in our sky, they by no means reflect true
stellar populations: nearly half of the red dwarfs that we know of can be fit
on the Traveller:2300 Near Star Map with its 50-light-year radius, and the
bright star Deneb in Cygnus, 1600 miles distant, is used as an example of a
one-of-a-kind bright star in a stellar population not only by us, but by the
Vilani as they ply the routes of the First Imperium not far from where we sit,
by the Aslan as they make their first tentative steps toward the Tlaukhu, by
the Vargr as they howl their unanswered questions to the moons of Lair, and to
the Droyne as they look up from their mud huts and beg Yaskoydray to come
back. As a bright star, Deneb stands alone; the star charts of the Imperium
reflect this. The Solomani Rim chart features many stars of lesser but still
bright magnitude; that's because we know they exist. In the neighborhood of
Terra there are three dozen tiny red stars that we can see; if we extrapolate
this to the rest of the galaxy, we assume that each yellow star is surrounded
by red ones, and each yellow-star community is part of a cluster that
surrounds a white star, and so on.
The Near Star Map, by the way, is lifted from an excellent reference on this
sort of thing, the Gliese Catalogue of Near Stars, including the Van
Biesbroeck catalogue, the Ross and Wolf star lists, the American Catalogue,
and the little-known but very worthwhile Vyssotsky listing of red stars, which
cites a lot of bizarre little details about some of our nearest neighbors; the
true interest in the piddling dwarfs in our back yard comes not from their
size and heat but from their odd behavior. Many are actually multiple star
systems, with companions too small to see; others are variables that flare up
from time to time in bursts of killing heat. There's a lot of interest here,
but one has to dig for it.
And what about nebulae, neutron stars, and black holes? Forget them. They're
so rare and distantly spaced, and so noisy by their presence, that in the era
of Traveller we'd probably know about many times as many of them as we do
now, but the new ones we'd have found would all be even further away from us
than the ones we know now. There are fewer than a hundred pulsars in our sky,
and none of them is closer than the Crab, which is (I think; let me look it
up) beyond the range of the Imperium's survey maps. The three X-ray sources
believed to be black holes, Cygnus X-1 and X-3 and Scorpius X-1, are even
further distant, their companions blue supergiants that dwarf even Deneb. It's
just not feasible to try to generate them randomly; they'd never come up in a
local area like ours. (There is the possibility of localized dark matter, like
brown dwarfs and black holes without companions, but the former would barely
perturb a jump route unless they happened to move through EXACTLY the path of
a jumping ship, which is ridiculously unlikely, and the latter don't make much
sense from a cosmological standpoint.)
It's my opinion that the star system generators should stick to areas where
any number of guesses might be perfectly okay, as in planetary groupings; we
only have one system on which to base our guesses as of now, and it'll be a
couple of centuries before we get out to Agidda and learn differently from the
Vilani. In terms of creating stellar groupings, it's unreasonable to have more
than a miniscule chance of anything more unusual than a single or multiple
main-sequence star group. Giants, maybe once in a great while; Supergiants,
almost never; Black holes, no way.
I hope this clears up the question; if not, then I've bored an AWFUL lot of
people. I'll be glad to argue this point with anyone who thinks I'm wrong from
a standpoint of realism, but have your references ready: I have mine. As for a
game-fun standpoint, I believe in doing what needs to be done, of course, but
there are a lot of ways to spice up a new sector than to sprinkle Wolf-Rayet
and RR Lyrae stars everywhere just to freak out navigators....
metlay | HOW TO DIE YOUNG, #586:
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