ISF definitely had the wait time built in, with pop's going up in jumps from one level to the next and TL affecting the pop's value. The PU/PTU model has more of a sliding scale with TL only affecting the max population on habitables.  The two don't tend to mix well, as trying to grade values of PU by TL tends to really speed up the runaway economic problem, while making someone wait months to go from 20 PU to 21PU, when he didn't have to wait at all for 1-19 just doesn't feel right to me at least.  Especially when going from 20 to 21 doesn't increase your income any more than 19 to 20 did.

I think crucis is planning on using the PTU model for Cosmic, but that's just based on what I've read of his posts.  If it goes that way, the wait times just don't work so well.  But that is all just my opinion.

Hope that helps.

I will give a more detailed response Sunday or Monday.

For now just keep in mind that we don't have to worry about Terraforming needing to last in the long term, IE millions or even billions of years.  Thousands is a fine time scale.  Again looking back to classic Science Fiction Mars is often shown as a dying world, or having once held a highly advanced civilization but that civilization collapsed or was destroyed for whatever reason it and human explores or adventures discover the tech and make Mars green once more.

Or what I am trying to say is we don't need to worry about terraforming be a permanent change to a world.  

Michael

That's a fair point, Michael.  

Sort of reminds me of the terraforming of the "Spacer" worlds in Isaac Asimov's Foundation/Robots universe.  In the time of the Robot novels, the Spacer worlds had been terraformed into great places.  But by the time of the Foundation series (about 20,000 yrs later), some of the Spacer worlds had degenerated considerably (Aurora, in particular).  The only Spacer world that had retained its environment intact (that was seen in the stories) was Solaria, which was still inhabited by millions of robots, as well as its roughly 10,000 Solarian "humans".  Of course, I'm not sure that these terraformed worlds were actually desolates that had been terrformed into habitables.  They may have been more like TF'd harsh or hostiles to benigns.... (which I suppose could be another terraforming option...)


Crucis

Spectral class could be fun, especially if you get into realistic star sizes (one that reaches the orbit of Mars - like Antares).

Problem - most folks wouldn't have a clue what they were looking at unless you put together a fairly long explanation of the classes.  

The rules for starfire seem to be long enough without adding more.  Fun thought, but if you hope to be able to draw in more players, I doubt adding a seven page table and description section just for stars, let alone the zones and habitibility of the bodies, is going to help much.

Keeping some things simple isn't always a bad thing.
(Although a supplement with that table for we old physicists would be AWESOME!)

Yes, I agree that there will be a segment of the player population that may have no clue what spectral classes are.  But I've always had a perception (perhaps an incorrect one) that Starfire players are sci-fi fans at heart, and sci-fi fans will have a bit of science geek in them (some more than others, of course)... so I don't think that most Starfire fans would be so ignorant of astronomy to not know what spectral classes are at a very basic level, or at least lack the ability to understand what they are.  It's
really not THAT difficult to explain.  

Stars come in different sizes and temperatures, and while for a basic table, star "types" are grouped into rather large "buckets", in reality, those buckets are a bit smaller, and are referred to as Spectral classes and subclasses. Starting at the smallest and coolest subclass used (M9) and going up thru the largest and hotest (F5), stars grow increasingly large and hot as the spectral classes and subclasses increase from 9 to 0, and from M to F.  And as those spectral subclasses grow hotter, their planetary formations zones are pushed increasingly farther from the star... with the zones being very, very close to very cool M9 stars and much more distant for hot F5 stars.

 

That would seem to cover most of the high points without delving into serious detail.

As for the length of the planetary formation zone table, actually a 35 row table should really only be about the same size as the Titius-Bode table, which is also about the same number of rows.

Please note that I wouldn't inflict this on anyone as the standard rule.  But it could make a very interesting optional rule for some people, and it would inject a good deal of variety in star systems since, for example, a G0 and a G9 would no longer have the same PFZ's, since the outer edge of the G0's LWZ might place planet at a similar distance from a G9 in that star's gas zone.

Anyways, it's just a vague thought... and not of any real importance at this point in time...

Terraforming is a neat, but probably complicated idea.  If simplified, it probably doesn't required much more of a suspension of 'reality' than everyone having reactionless drives capable of relativistic speeds and conversion of matter to energy.  
Is it worth the effort to put together for the game, I don't know.  I like to write the stories, not the rules.

As you point out below, procyon, Terraforming is probably only a useful concept if Type T/ST planets are sufficiently rare and if Terraforming was capable of being carried out in a sufficiently short time (even within the game's compressed time scale) at something approaching an affordable cost.

As for body location and habitability, that actually is a lot more mutable than what some might think.  If you popped into Sol system through a warp point a sufficient amount of time ago, Mars would have had a magnetosphere, slightly denser atmosphere, and liquid water on it.  I don't think there are many people left who will argue whether Mars used to hold liquid water, its just a question of how much and when.  Depending on the time frame, Venus might be much closer to habitable than what we currently see.  Earth has managed a much longer habitable period, but as you say, location, location, location.

As for Mars and its magnetosphere, you'd have to have showed up about 4 billion years ago, since that's the current estimate for how long ago Mars lost its magsphere.  And remember that the solar system is about 4.5 or so billion years old.  AND IIRC, Earth's atmosphere is younger than that.  As I mentioned earlier, from what I've read on the topic, smaller planets appear to have difficulty retaining magnetospheres due to their small size.  Also, smaller planets have weaker gravities and thus a weaker ability to prevent lighter molecules from escaping its gravitic influence.

Regarding Venus, yes, it's possible that that is true for a couple of reasons.  First of all, it's believed that liquid water zones migrate outward as stars age and emit more energy.  So, it's likely that Venus was closer to the inner edge of the LWZ at some point in the distant past.  Secondly, Venus may have had a decent magsphere at some point in its past, though I don't recall reading anything on when it's believed that Venus lost its magsphere.  I've also read that it's been hypothosized that Venus may have been hit by one or two moons over the eons and that those collisions are responsible for its very slow rotation.

I agree that there may be some "slop" in the "habitability zone".  But a part of the "problem" in Starfire is the relatively simplistic model being used.

A. Orbits are only measured in single LM increments.  This prevents planets from existing every so slightly closer to LWZ borders and having slightly better and friendlier black body temperatures that could mean the difference between being uninhabitable and being barely habitable.  The use of single LM increments causes each planetary orbit to have some very specific black body temperatures, which are used to produce the various planetary zone borders, and tends to make those borders appear be very "bright lines".  However, trying to do the Titius-Bode tables in non-whole numbers is probably nothing but a total horror show, and only realistically do-able on a purely computer model.


B. The Star Types used only represent a single semi-average sub-type within the actual range of spectral classes represented by that star type.  That is, the Yellow star type represents Spectral Class G0-G9 stars.  However, the purposes of limiting the number of planet-producing star types to a reasonable number, the Yellow star type is represented by the G5 spectral sub-class's planetary zone range values.  If I were to used all of the spectral sub-types represented by the White, Yellow, Orange, Red, and Red Dwarf star types, you'd have a 35 different star type rows in the planetary formation zone tables.  But on the flip side, you'd have star systems that had a considerably more granularity in differentiation from subtype to subtype.  That is, a Class G2 star (Sol is a G2) wouldn't have the same planetary formation zones as a Class G8 star.  A G8 would have PFZ ranges closer to the current Orange type than the current White type.  


I've actually considered doing this, but it may be a bit too much for some people, though it would create a very realistic feel when you could say that your binary system was a G3/K7 binary, rather than just a Yellow/Orange binary.  If all of these sub types were used, on the primary star type table, you'd instead first roll for Spectral Class F, G, K, or M (rather than a star "color"), then you'd roll 1d10 (0 to 9) for the sub type, with values of 0-4 being ignored for Class F stars.  The fact of the matter is that I actually constructed the tables for all 35 spectral sub-types from F5 thru M9, so putting them into the rules wouldn't be difficult at all, aside from the fact that the table itself would be rather more sizeable.  The rules for using such a table would be no different than the way the PFZ tables currently work... there'd just be about 7 times as many rows ... but a lot more variety.

Tempature could be moderated with liberation of CO2 from most rocks on a planet/moon, is opaque to IR light so it absorbs heat well (as is methane and several other gases), and would in sufficient quantity would allow for plant/bacterial life if temperatures were adequate.  I'm sure 'super science' could come up with equally useful compounds that weren't as toxic as high concentration CO2 would be.  

Protection from ionizing radiation would be the problem, as would be the soil of most planets without an atmosphere.  Radiation isn't going to care about CO2, and sterile plants would be poor at repopulating themselves.  Soil exposed to this same radiation will form compounds that are peroxides and would be a great anticeptic in and of themselves.  Not impossible to overcome, just tedious and most likely expensive.

Is terraforming worth it in a game where you can just survey and jump to the next system?  I don't know... that is a hard one.  If T's got rare (devious SM thoughts at work for a future game if this became an option)  and terraforming was competitive with multi month colonization transport, maybe.  With the current availability of T's, and the ease of looking for more, I just don't see it getting used unless it was cheaper than looking for one, which would only increase the number of habitables and speed of the economic spiral.

Unless T's got rare, I just don't see terraforming (increasing the number of T's) helping the game.

As I said above, I tend to agree regarding terraforming, for the same reasons as you detail.

It has been my experience that the games work better when the GM makes heavy use of pre-generation.  

Not that I've seen it personally, but I tend to agree with you on this, Michael.  pre-generation allows the GM to make some tweaks to even things out.  I also tend to think that this is more of an issue earlier in the game when finding a single T/ST can have a proportionally larger impact than later in the game after everyone's found a number of T/ST's.

Looking at exploration luck as a side issue from the economic explosion.

One thought is to borrow an idea from Steve's Aurora and allow terraforming of worlds.  What you do is increase the range of worlds between O2 and T.  What we have currently is T (HI 1 to 10) and O2. Currently O2 covers things like the empty rocks in hard vacuum such as the Moon and Mars.  Possibly also the V type worlds for Venus.  Allow players to be able to terraform worlds just make it stupidly expensive.  So what we do when worlds are found is do a generation based upon the following factors.

#1) Distance from primary in terms of the liquid water zone for the star
#2) Mass of body
#3) You consult a table with the above data, perhaps another roll and you get your world type.  

Maybe you have a world of perfect mass but its on the outer edge of the liquid water zone so is harsh frozen world most of the time.  Maybe the worlds mass is questionable and so its atmosphere is to thin. So you erect massive atmospheric transformers to alter the planets environment.

From a realistic point of view for many worlds just doing Genetic Engineering of the colonists might make more sense.  The time scale would be huge but we have it currently very possible to go from zero to multi-billion population worlds.  The positive is its classic science fiction so it doesn't take much of a suspension of disbelief.      

In the long term people who have really bad luck could hope to be able to do something about their situation short of war.

Michael

This is actually a VERY interesting idea.  

I know that some would probably think that true terraforming might be beyond the capabilities or timeframe of the game.  However, in a game where there's already a time compression, and other items requiring suspension of disbelief ... it may not be the worst possible idea to allow for terraforming.  It seems that the key should be that TF-ing probably ought to be sufficiently expensive that it's a bad investment when other options exist, but not so expensive that it's simply not a reasonable option.


There are also some related points here that you didn't bring up ... exactly...

I think that there's some room for questioning what happens if a Type V planet that's close to the inner edge of the Liquid Water Zone (LWZ) (On a side note ... this gets confusing at times, as there are at least 4 different terms used here ... "biosphere, ecosphere, liquid water zone, and habitable zone" are 4 that I've seen used.  I prefer the latter two.).  Let me explain...

There seems to be some reasonable justification to believe that a big reason that Venus is the way it is because it lacks a magnetosphere.  Without a magsphere, lighter molecules (including oxygen molecules) get stripped away by the solar winds, leaving heavier molecules, thus creating the deadly, super-dense CO2 atmosphere that Venus possesses.  And it's very likely that a huge reason that Venus lacks a magsphere is because it's nearly tidelocked to the Sun, since it had a rotational period (i.e. day) that's equal to a little over 240 Earth-days.  That is, Venus turns VERY slowly.  But what if Venus had a mutually tidelocked moon that dragged the planet into rotating much more quickly?  Would that have prevented the core from cooling and allowed the planet's magsphere to remain active.... and thus prevented the stripping away of the planet's lighter atmospheric gasses.... and possibly allowed the planet to be far, far less deadly and possibly something on the order of a "warm desolate" (if it was close to the inner edge of the LWZ).

I have not included this possibility in Cosmic's sysgen rules ... at least yet, mostly because it gets a little complicated... but such a world might be a possible candidate for terra-forming.  I doubt that it could ever really be Benign or Harsh.... but it might be possible for it to be a form of Hostile.  OTOH, even if you dumped a large number of icy comets onto the planet for a water supply, it may also be that not being in the LWZ could simply prevent the planet from retaining any of that water in liquid form, thus preventing it from ever really being able to make the leap from being a "warm desolate" to a habitable "hostile".  I don't know...



On the flip side.... larger Mass 2 or 3 Type B (O2) planets.  One reason why Mars doesn't have a significant atmosphere is that it has no magnetosphere.  Now a major reason for this is that smaller planets, such as Mars, have a much more difficult time retaining a magsphere over the eons than larger planets, such as Earth.  Then there's also some question about whether the presence of a large moon (such as the Moon) helps in this regard by producing increased tidal stresses on the planet that help to keep a planet retain sufficient volcanic activity to assist in retaining its magsphere.  (Such a moon wouldn't need to be mutually tide locked. It'd only need to exist, since the issue is the presence of tidal stresses, not the use of the mutual TL-ing to drag the planet into rotating.)  The key thing here is that if such a planet is able to retain a magnetosphere, it might then retain a reasonably dense atmosphere, since the magsphere would prevent the solar winds from stripping the atmosphere away as it has with Mars.

So, if such a M2/3 Type B planet were to exist (think of it as a "cool desolate", rather than a traditional "cold desolate"), this could be a candidate for TF-ing.... though it would probably need to be close to the outer edge of the LWZ.  Of course, such a world probably wouldn't lack for water.  It's likely that it would have plenty of water locked up as ice, though with some volcanic activity, it may be possible that there were some bodies of liquid water under the ice near warmer volcanically active regions.  The question here relative to TF-ing would seem to be whether terraforming could overcome the fact that the planet still really wasn't in the LWZ.   Also, the atmosphere on such a world may not be particularly life-supporting.  Without any liquid water and without any plants (assuming that they're not possible in such a cold environment) to produce a lot more oxygen thru photosynthesis, the native atmosphere may not be life supporting.  So, what could terraforming do to overcome its location just outside the LWZ?  And even if you could miraculously make a lot of oxygen appear in the atmosphere, what could be done to prevent any open water from simply refreezing, since the planet's average temps are likely to be below freezing, due to its location.


Wow.  I seem to have argued myself against TF-ing.... I guess that I'm left wondering what terraforming could do to overcome the immutable fact of these two orbital locations.  That is, if you're not in the LWZ, you're not going to have any liquid water... at least any liquid water that's out in the open.  On the "warm desolate" non-Venus, the water would want to turn into vapor.  And on the "cool desolate", water would want to freeze.  It seems to me that what needs to happen for a planet to attain any semblance of being "habitable" would be to overcome these tendencies, so that water would want to remain in a liquid state.  But I'm hard pressed to see how one overcomes "location, location, location".  

Side note: even aside from these concerns, I could see such "warm desolate" non-V and "cool desolate" non-B planets could have different planetary types.  But would a "cool desolate" really be all that different from a traditional "cold desolate" to not still be a "Desolate" world?  Of course, in the case of a "warm desolate" non-V, the shift from a Deadly Type V to a "warm desolate" non-V would be an environmental change that would allow some colonization to occur, though probably as a "desolate".

It's also worth noting that these sorts of scenarios wouldn't be terribly common in Starfire, for a specific reason.  The sysgen process in Starfire is simplified to the point that orbits are based on even 1 LM increments.  This tends to mitigate against these sort of narrow special scenarios, since the black body temperatures that would be necessary for such scenarios to be viable do not always occur for every orbit that's "the first orbit inward from the inner edge of the LWZ" (or next orbit outward from the outer edge of the LWZ).  Many times, that orbit just happens to be well outside of the temp range that could arguable support such a special scenario world...  though I do happen to know what orbits are required by star type for such situations....  They're usually orbits that are within 1 LM of the inner/outer edge of the LWZ, though in the case of White Stars, that "zone" is a bit wider, due to the LWZ's much greater distance from the star.

I seem to have argued myself out of thinking that terraforming is possible, if only because I don't see how terraforming can overcome a planet's basic blackbody temperature due to its distance from the star.  Even if many other factors can be mitigated, such as having a magsphere thus allowing for a decent atmosphere to be retained, and using terraforming to add water and oxygen to the planet, I don't know how you overcome the planet's location ... the amount of heat received from the star due to its distance from said star.  

Regardless, it's still an interesting topic ... and a possible way to deal with a lack of T/ST's ... if a half decent justification could be produced to counter these distance issues.

On the subject of more accurate star type distribution (at least for our end of the universe), my group already uses it to a degree with red dwarfs being the most prominent star type.  Slight grumbling when we changed, but not bad.

FYI, here's an approximation of what the percentages would look like if real life star distribution percentages were used:

Blue Giant: 5%
White: 3%
Yellow: 8%
Orange: 13%
Red 36%
Red Dwarf 30%
White Dwarf: 3%
Red Giant: 2%

Note that I left the BG, WD, and RG %'s unchanged, and only adjusted the types between White and RD.  Further note that the Star Types "Red" and "Red Dwarf" comprise the spectral classes that are generally associated with what are commonly called "Red Dwarf" stars... so I roughly split the remaining percentage points between those two, somewhat favoring the larger Red type over the smaller RD type.  

Also note that the term "blue giant" in Starfire is a bit of a misnomer.  True "blue giants" should really be "blue supergiants".  But if "blue giant" here is just referring to main sequence stars of the O, B, A, and F0-F5 spectral classes, then its percentage should be really be more like 1% ... with the F0-F5's making up about half of that...

As for the density of T/ST, that is always going to be tough.  In a game with an SM, it isn't so much of an issue as long as the SM doesn't play favorites.  (I will never be able to let my 6 year old girl play.  She has my number when it comes to getting her way.)  The random issue is a problem because of what it is.  Random.  It will (almost) never come out even or fair.  The only competitive game I played in was many, many years ago and the solution we decided on was that in every six systems you would find one T and one ST.  Not necessarily in the same system.  If you rolled up at T in the first, you only got O2's or an ST  til you rolled out number 7.  If you hadn't found one by 6, it automatically had one.  We would either reroll or create an anomoly to make it work.  The ST was thrown in so that folks playing the ST races didn't end up shorted.  They had the same chances as everyone else essentially.

Change the # of T/ST per number of systems to suit your style, and away you go.  Worked ok for us and solved alot of the griping.  Wasn't perfect, but nothing will be.

I most certainly agree... The problem is that randomness is just that ... random.  So you are left with either using something like sector templates, pre-genning the game galaxy and manually editing it, or using something like you've done above.