[TML] ABPR: Designing Campaign Starmaps

[Knapp]

On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 4:51 AM, Derek Wildstar <wildstar at io.com> wrote:

> Advice for Beginning Players and Referees: Designing Campaign Starmaps
>
> So, for whatever reason, you want to run a Traveller campaign using
> your own starmap.  Here is some advice from a Traveller referee, and
> something that I assume will cause much discussion on the list.  The
> caveat that applies to all of this is - this is what works for me and
> the folks I've played with.
>
>
> 2D or Not 2D
> The standard Traveller starmap is flat and uses hex-based movement.
> Interstellar space is actually three dimensional, and there aren't any
> rows of hexes inscribed across the galaxy.  I think it's reasonable to
> at least consider Traveller with a 3D starmap, or even a "real"
> starmap.  Before you go that route, there are a few things to consider:
> 1) The number of possible destinations and routes grows as the cube of
> the distance, rather than the square, significantly increasing the
> number of worlds within a few jumps and making navigation harder.  For
> example, there are no stars within J-1 of Terra.  There are 4 within
> J-2, 11 within J-3, 32 within J-4, 67 within J-5, and 103 within J-6.
> A 2D J-6 map has 126 hexes and typically contains around 40 stars.
> ---Derek
>

> Notes:
> [1] "Weak" random number generators exhibit short periodicity (the
> results repeat after only tens of thousands of iterations), poor
> distribution (some numbers or patterns of numbers occur more often
> than they should), or correlation (the next number generated is
> related to the last number).  The random number generator functions
> supplied with many older programming languages are particularly poor;
> "cryptographic" random-number generators in modern languages like Java
> are better.
>

When you talk of the stars with so many jumps of Earth are you talking
habitable of just stars?

When you speak of old languages what do you mean? For example C has new libs
with new random functions that are very strong and I would bet that many
other "old" languages have been updated also. I know all the languages that
I have looked at have a random routine based on Twistler. Here is a bit
about it from the python docs.

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-random.html
Python uses the Mersenne Twister as the core generator. It produces 53-bit
precision floats and has a period of 2**19937-1. The underlying
implementation in C is both fast and threadsafe. The Mersenne Twister is one
of the most extensively tested random number generators in existence.
However, being completely deterministic, it is not suitable for all
purposes, and is completely unsuitable for cryptographic purposes.

-- 
Douglas E Knapp

http://sf-journey-creations.wikispot.org/Front_Page