Universal World Profile

[Tom Kalbfus]

Traveller has one, they are 8 characteristics which deliver a thumbnail sketch of a world providing basic information of immediate concern to players. My question is, should Starfinder have one too? First lets review what Traveller has. Traveller has letter codes which stand in for 2-digit numbers, thus is a form of data compression. The values are
A = 10, B = 11, C = 12, D = 13, E = 14, F = 15, X = reserved, the numeric digits 0 through 9 are their own numeric values. Now we got that matter over with, there are 8 characteristics describing a world in Traveller, they are in order Starport, Size, Atmosphere, Hydrographics, Population, Government, Law Level, and Tech Level. Each has an alphanumeric written in the form like this: A012345-6, in this example 'A' is the Starport, '0' is the Size, '1' is the Atmosphere, '2' is the Hydrographics, '3' is the Population, '4' is the Government, '5' is the Law Level, and the dash separates '6' which is the tech level.

The Starports are classified the following way A = Excellent, B = Good, C = Routine, D = Poor, E = Frontier Installation, and X = No Starport.

Sizes are the following: R = Ring (As in around Saturn), S = small moon, 0 = Asteroid belt, the digits 1 through A are the diameters of a solid world in thousands of miles, 1 = 1000 miles, 2 = 2000 miles, 3 = 3000 miles, 4 = 4000 miles, 5 = 5000 miles, 6 = 6000 miles, 7 = 7000 miles, 8 = 8000 miles, 9 = 9000 miles, A = 10,000 miles. Gas giants are either Small Gas Giants as in Uranus and Neptune or Large Gas Giants as in Saturn and Jupiter, they aren't further described.

Atmospheres are described the following way
Digit Description
0 No Atmosphere
1 Trace
2 Very thin, tainted
3 Very thin
4 Thin, tainted
5 Thin
6 Standard
7 Standard, tainted
8 Dense
9 Dense, tainted
A Exotic
B Corrosive
C Insidious

Only Thin, Standard, and Dense atmospheres can be breathed by humans without special equipment, the tainted atmospheres require filter masks but are otherwise breathable, every other type of atmosphere listed is not!

Hydrographics is the percentage of water coverage of the world's surface in 10% intervals
Digit Description
0 0%
1 10%
2 20%
3 30%
4 40%
5 50%
6 60%
7 70%
8 80%
9 90%
A 100%

Population is the exponent of ten of the population of the world, which translates to
Digit Description
0 0 to 9 inhabitants
1 10 to 99
2 100 to 999
3 1000 to 9999
4 10,000 to 99,999
5 100,000 to 999,999
6 1,000,000 to 9,999,999
7 10,000,000 to 99,999,999
8 100,000,000 to 999,999,999
9 1,000,000,000 to 9,999,999,999
A 10,000,000,000 to 99,999,999,999

Government is
Digit Description
0 No Government
1 Company/Corporation
2 Participating Democracy
3 Self-perpetuating Oligarchy
4 Representative Democracy
5 Feudal Technocracy
6 Captive Government/Colony
7 Balkanization
8 Civil Service Bureaucracy
9 Impersonal Bureaucracy
A Charismatic Dictator
B Non-Charismatic Leader
C Charismatic Oligarchy
D Religious Dictatorship

Law Level is categorized by weapon restriction
Digit Description
0 No prohibitions
1 Body pistols, explosives, and poison gas prohibited
2 Portable energy weapons prohibited
3 military weapons (ie machineguns) prohibited
4 Light assault weapons (submachineguns) prohibited
5 Personal consealable firearms prohibited
6 Most firearms except shotguns prohibited
7 Shotguns prohibited
8 Long bladed weapons (swords) prohibited
9 All weapons prohibited

Tech levels are classified as the following:
Digit Description
0 Stone Age
1 Bronze/Middle Ages
2 Renaissance
3 Age of Reason/Gunpower Age
4 Early Industral era (19th century)
5 Early 20th century (up to World War II)
6 Mid 20th century (1940 to 1970)
7 Late 20th century to early 21st century (1970 to 2020)
8 Interplanetary Era
9 Early Interstellar (FTL Drive)
A Early Interstellar
B Average Interstellar
C Average Interstellar
D High Interstellar
E High Interstellar
F Technical Maximum Interstellar

That is the Basic Universal World Profile for Traveller. So my question is, would such a thing be useful for Starfinder? Starfinder has progress levels
Digit Description
0 Stone Age
1 Bronze Age
2 Middle Ages
3 Age of Reason/Gunpowder Age
4 Early Industrial Era/19th Century
5 Modern Era/20th/Early 21st Century up to 2020 AD
6 Fusion Era
7 Gravity Era/Interstellar Era (FTL Drives)

What else do we need?
I would suggest we don't need a starport for each world, how about we give the primary star type in its place?

For World Sizes, I propose 6 categories
Digit Description
1 Asteroid
2 Dwarf Planet
3 Small World (1000 to 4000 miles in diameter)
4 Medium World (5000 to 10,000 miles in diameter)
5 Large World (11,000 to 18,000 miles in diameter)
6 Gas Giant (10,000 to 100,000 miles in diameter)
Hows that? Anything else?

We might want atmosphere types to determine whether a planet has a breathable atmosphere.

We may want a hydrographic percentage.

Star Wars has a primary terrain type for those garden worlds (Desert Planet, Forest planet, swamp planet, Frozen Planet, Ocean Planet, Volcanic Planet etc.) I'd say we include something like that.

What else? I'm not so sure population is necessary, we could simply describe the planet as crowded urban, or uncrowded rural or uninhabited or something like that.

A government type presumes there is one world government, an over simplification in many cases

Law Level i'd leave out.

We would substitute progress level for tech level.

Any ideas or comments?

[Matthew Shelton]

* Gravity - covers comfort level for unaided walking on the surface and is a base value for escape velocity. Could be subsumed under world size, although rockball worlds ought to have a little more gravity per radius than iceball or gaseous worlds.

* Orbit - represents radiation level and escape velocity from the primary star. Orbit and atmosphere also influences surface temperatures (habitability zone, glaciation, and so on)

* Toxicity and pH level of atmospheres should be separate things from atmospheric pressure. If there's a large amount of pollutants that are poisonous to carbon-life this should be its own category.

Escape Velocity would be one among many derivative ratings. This one would be based on atmospheric pressure and gravity (or world size). Thick atmospheres create more drag, but certain launch systems may take advantage of the ability to use wings to fly to a high altitude, and rocket engines to go the rest of the way. Thin or nonexistent atmospheres would require a vertical launch system like a rocket stack, space shuttle orbiter, or an aircraft with some kind of VTOL thrusters.

Concerning legal-political conditions, Pathfinder should already have a system for that which could translate over. Plus, assigning a rating for technology, law, political, or economic conditions to cover the entire planet seems simplistic at best, and kind of racist at worst. Unless the whole planet is under the unitary rule of a world-state, there will be at least two or three or many different nation-states perhaps with very different legal-political systems and technology levels.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Tech level generally means the highest tech level on the planet, it doesn't mean that a planet has not the equivalent of a Third World that exists at a lower tech level because they can't afford higher. There are places on Earth where people live in the Stone Age, there are places on Earth where people deliberately choose to live at a lower tech level, such as the Amish, but a person visiting a World is not concerned with those, he Is just wondering if he can get his spaceship repaired here or if spare parts are available and so forth, so he is not going to go to the nearest stone age tribe to effect repairs on his ship.

[Michael Monn]

I plan on using GURPS Space to generate star systems.

[David knott 242]

Note that the Traveller UWP system does not cover gas giants -- they really don't need to, as normal humanoid types never go there and the differences among them don't matter for purposes like skimming fuel from them.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Cloud giants could go there as gas giants have a lot of clouds for them to live on. Also 3 of the 4 gas giants in our solar system have a surface gravity similar to Earth, only Jupiter would be uncomfortable. Also there are plenty of gas giants that reside within the temperate zone of a star, Traveller assumed that gas giants would not be found close into a star, gas giants also tend to have lots of Moons. A Moon the size of Earth's Moon is actually very rare for a planet the size of Earth. Mars as to asteroid like Moons. Mercury and Venus have none. Gas giants could host a number of Earth sized moons all within the habitable zone of a star if it is within the habitable zone of a star.

[David knott 242]

The surface gravity of a gas giant is rather irrelevant since you have no actual surface to stand on or even swim in.

The UWP system would work fine for the moons of a gas giant.

[Tom Kalbfus]

This is where magic comes in! You could have floating islands, you coul have magic bubbles to hold in breathable gases around it, and keep out the poisonous and flammable gases such as hydrogen. A certain type of gas giant is the water giant, these are planets that are mostly made out of water with small rocky cores in the center. Most gas giants are by the way not gas all the way to the core. Jupiter, Saturn both have mantles of liquid hydrogen, and further metallic liquid hydrogen. Neptune and Uranus have global oceans of water/ammonia under their crushing atmospheres, so a water world with a normal standard oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere is technically a gas giant. One can float on its surface in a boat. Water worlds tend to be from 10,000 to 30,000 miles in diameter.

[David knott 242]

A UWP counterpart for Starfinder would need to take magical worlds into account. That is something that Traveller was safely able to ignore unless they needed some unusual world type created by "extremely advanced technology" for plot purposes.

[Shisumo]

The gas giants in Golarion's system have a number of permanent inhabitants. Also, "breathable" means very different things to different kinds of races, something else that Traveller doesn't care about.

Distant Worlds already has a kind of planetary profile created, although my guess is that we will see significant changes to that profile when Starfinder actually gets here.

[Odraude]

Generally when I do stuff for my sci fi game, I use an expanded system I made for gas giant classification. It starts with super earths and ocean worlds, and runs the spectrum to gas dwarf, ice giant (neptunian), gas giant (jovian), and finally brown dwarf. I mostly do it for flavor as well as to show the different resources the players can obtain to use, sell, or exploit. Or in case of gravity, to see if the players can escape from the gas giant's gravity if they go in to scoop for fuel.

[duckofspades]

Michael Monn wrote:

I plan on using GURPS Space to generate star systems.

I'm just going to play a game of stellaris till I get to the point I like. Then hit pause & switch to observe mode.

[Tom Kalbfus]

David knott 242 wrote:

A UWP counterpart for Starfinder would need to take magical worlds into account. That is something that Traveller was safely able to ignore unless they needed some unusual world type created by "extremely advanced technology" for plot purposes.

I could easily envision asteroids with atmospheres and 1-g gravity fields, it would just take magic to do that. Asteroids are small enough in many cases to do this, on the other hand a dwarf world, or a small world with a breathable atmosphere is likely the work of a god or a titan. Some other things are possible as well. For instance imagine a giant wall of force forming a ring around a G2 V star, the wall of force is 1 million miles wide, and is 93 million miles away from its primary, and rotating inside that wall of force is a band of metal 1 million miles wide, 1 mile thick with walls on either side that is 1000 miles high to hold in atmosphere, this ringworld rotates around its Sun once every 9 days producing 1-g of centrifugal force. The magic wall of force provides the strength to hold the ringworld together, it is just an ordinary wall of force just like any a wizard can cast except for its enormous astronomical dimensions! Larry Niven's solution was to use scrith, here we just use magic, this particular spell was cast by a greater titan. There is an inner ring of 10 shadow squares at the approximate distance of the orbit of Mercury. The progress level of the societies on the ringworld is PL 2, Pathfinder rules apply for the setting on the ringworld, unless a Starfinder character interacts with it. The wall of force gives off no sideways friction by the way, so the ringworld just keeps on spinning due to its inertia.

A smaller version of this is the magical version of the Banks Orbital, it is almost 3 million miles in diameter and it rotates once every 24 hours producing day and night and 1-g of centrifugal force.

Going the other direction, a Dyson shell is possible, all you need is magical gravity to hold things onto its inner surface, a smaller version of this is a Hollow World, with a magical sun in its center, in this case it is more of planetary dimensions.

These are all works of the gods, in the standard sci fi setting you have super advanced beings or civilizations that do this sort of work, here you jus have gods and titans doing this.

[Bluenose]

Star Trek is an example of that sort of setting, to some extent. Of course most super-beings like the Q rarely pay much attention to ordinary beings. Of course it also lacks 'space wizard' PCs, for practical purposes.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Q is an NPC type character. The thing about technology that is different from magic, is that anyone can have technology who can afford it, whereas with magic, it is all about skill, only wizards of a certain level can cast a fireball spell, but anyone can throw a hand grenade!

[Tom Kalbfus]

Here are the partial world codes I am working on for my homebrew setting, when they official world codes come out if any, I can translate them I suppose, but for now I'll use these for data compression.

[Tom Kalbfus]

Here is my latest update on World codes.
I added atmosphere hydrographics, and gravity. Hydrographics modifies gravity downwards when it exceeds 100% water coverage.