[TML] ABPR: Designing Campaign Starmaps

[Derek Wildstar]

On Jul 19, 2008, at 3:11 AM, Knapp wrote:
> When you talk of the stars with so many jumps of Earth are you  
> talking habitable of just stars?

Just stars ... and I'm counting each star in a binary system, because  
it's easier to do it that way.

Using real data, stars that are likely to have habitable worlds are  
few and far between.

Using Tarter and Turnbull's criteria* for stars likely to have  
"habitable" Earthlike worlds, the nearest one to Sol is Gliese 447,  
which at 3.3 parsecs requires a ship capable of J-4.  Two more  
habitable systems, Luyten's Star and Lacaille 8760 are also within  
J-4.  Overall, in that J-6 sphere, in addition to the 3 habitable  
systems within J-4, there are:
4 more (Gliese 628, 674, 832, and 682) reachable via J-5, and
7 more (Gliese 526, 205, 229, 693 and 588; Hipparcos 33226 and 103039)  
reachable via J-6.

> 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 would be highly suspicious of anything done on any of the old 8-bit  
or 16-bit machines, particularly if it was done in Microsoft's BASIC  
interpreter, which is known to have a bad random number generator.   
The DGP sector files were done on early Macintosh computers, and fall  
into this category.  I would also be wary of software that hasn't been  
updated in the last 5 years or so.

Good random number generators are available for most languages that  
are in current use.  The Mersenne Twister algorithm you mention is  
good, and current versions of Windows and MacOS X include strong  
random number generators in the operating system (to support  
cryptography functions).  The Mersenne Twister was invented in 1997,  
and so software or tools created before the turn of the century may  
not use it.  For example, Microsoft Visual Basic 6 was released in 1998.

---Derek


* See http://www.astrobio.net/news/article436.html