With the suggestion for a new hex style, I need a way to produce images of gas giants. I can do this (for free) with the gas giant plugin for GIMP. 🙂
New hex style
Travelling between different places in a solar system takes time. Sometimes it will even be faster to make a micro (in-system) jump than using the M-drive.
When jumping to a system, it might be important to know where to get free fuel. If you have a cargo or passengers for the main planet, then it might not be economical to go to a gas giant (to get free fuel) in the outer system as well. Even if the main planet has oceans, you might not be allowed to refuel in these. If you don’t have any cargo or passengers or any other business to the main planet, then you might want to jump directly to the gas giant instead. There you can refuel and jump to the next destination.
How can you plot all the relevant information for a system in a hex on the subsector map? My idea is to divide the hex in six triangles, and show the most important planets with the important moons in each triangle. If there aren’t enough important planets, just leave some triangles empty. But as a minimum 2-3 triangles should have planets. I have put the gas giants in the right part of the hex, just like where the gas giant icon is usually placed.
This is my example for the Terra system. What do you think?
New Fanzine – Frontier Report
The first issue of the fanzine Frontier Report can be downloaded from the children of earth website.
It is really good. I am looking forward to the next issue. 🙂
Jerry Mapes
There was some very sad news about JR Mapes, (a contributor to the Zhodani Base). 😥
At his traveller blog You can find his cleaned up Spinward Marches data and some other goodies.
His posts at the Zhodani Base:
- Classic Traveller Game – S.E. Kansas – Starting June 2007
- GRiP Classic Traveller Game Starting May 2007
- Counters Rendering Machines
For his big contribution to the traveller community, the planet at position 1234 in Foreven Sector is now called Mapes. I selected this planet since it is a peaceful place. When we visit it, we will think of him. New version of Harem Subsector below.
Aek Elakfough – Gvurrdon 0439
The biggest problem with this planet is that has TL-G and a population of zero. In the maps here at the Zhodani Base that uses data from Galactic, the population has been modified to reflect the situation a few years later. But in the original source (AM-3 Vargr) the UWP is:
0439 A000002-G Lo nIn As 220Va K8 V M7 D
Okay, so we got 2 Vargrs running a class A starport at TL-G. That seems a bit unlikely… It might be that they have lots of robots running the starport and the TL-G production facilities. Where did all those TL-G robots come from?
Another idea is that the only thing they produce at their asteroid base is coffee, and that they once visited Darrian and bought an old coffee machine. When the Impie Scouts visited Aek Elakfough they noticed that the only thing produced was coffee from a TL-G coffee machine. So these scouts followed their scout protocol and noted that this was indeed a TL-G world… They also noted that the two Vargrs were engineers and could (if they wanted to) overhaul starships on their asteroid base. Voila, it must be a class A starport…
Another problem with TL-G for Vargrs are that on page 29 in AM3, the maximum TL for Vargr is F. But on the other hand, that is the same page that have a table for Aslan Morale.
Roger Malmstein has also tried to answer the questions about Aek Elakfough and has written a document about it.
Space Cadet, by Robert Heinlein
Another book that I recently read was Space Cadet, by Robert Heinlein. I bought this at the Fantasy Centre last time I was in London.
This is one of Heinlein’s so called juveniles stories. It’s about young boys training to become officers in the Interplanetary Patrol. No girls are allowed there. It’s a kind of adventure that boys in the end of the 40’s might have liked. The science is silly as well. Even when this was written, it wouldn’t have seemed likely to find intelligent beings on Mars and Venus and in the asteroid belt. I had hoped that this book was a Starship Troopers light version, but it wasn’t. 🙁
Eventhough I didn’t enjoy reading this, there was some good parts in the book. The meeting with the primitives on Venus was interesting. When it turned out that the primitives actually were the advanced venusians I thought about when I read something similar… Oh yes, is was the 2300AD adventure called “Ranger”. 😕
Image from wikimedia. License: GNU Free Documentation
