Tyrel Lohr wrote:I am finally crawling back out of the pit that has been my uncomfortable abode for the last month...
Good to see you back,
Tyrel Lohr wrote:Asteroid Belt Stuff...
Just to throw fuel onto the fire here...
While you have a very good point from a purely scientific point of view, which of these situations seems more likely:
1. My scout returns from a newly discovered system and reports that there are a couple of gas giants, a large rocky planet and a couple of tiny rocky planetoids.
Later on when we do the system survey the survey team reports back "oh, by the way, those two planetoids are in a large asteroid belt".
- or -
2. My scout returns from a newly discovered system and reports that there are a couple of gas giants, a large rocky planet and a large asteroid belt.
Later on when we do the system survey the survey team reports back "good news, we discovered a couple of planetoids in the belt that are large enough to house a station".
To my mind in the sequence of likely events, 2 seems more plausible as a belt of asteroids is probably more noticeable than a couple of asteroids a bit bigger than the asteroids around them (or to put it another way - you could miss the cerean planetoids, but missing the belt seems off),
I figure there are a couple of options here:
1. Make Cerean Dwarfs a trait of an asteroid belt instead (or as well as) a planet-type (i.e.: if a system has a belt, then the belt gets rolls on a chart to discover if or how many cerean dwarfs, etc are present when the survey team goes in).
2. Make asteroid belts a system terrain item (this could work pretty well, but might require some thought to integrate it into the likelihood of cerean dwarfs showing up). This would allow you to have asteroid combats, etc which would be quite apt for some genres (so the belts definitely have some effect on the game),
or as you say, granting cerean dwarfs their own belt automatically (or perhaps on a simple die roll), if you go down this route then you
may want the cerean dwarf planet item count for several dwarfs (you could have several cerean dwarfs in a belt)
Tyrel Lohr wrote:The decision was mainly fueled by the fact that asteroid belts on their own don't add much to play
Well, to be fair, neither do a whole bunch of other things in the Admiral system generation rules... I mean, the star type has no function once the system has been designed,
Tyrel Lohr wrote:All of the rocky planets in our solar system are in the inner zone. The middle zone is from Ceres on out to Saturn, and then the outer zone is everything beyond that. You are really only ever going to find Hospitable planets in the inner zone, as that is the only zone that is close enough to the star to allow for a Goldilocks zone to exist. The further you get away from the star, the worse the planets become.
Fair 'nuff,
Guess I'm used to RPGs defining inner as "too hot for life", middle as "just right" and outer as "too cold" - but by the sounds of it your choice makes better sense,
Tyrel Lohr wrote:Most of the info is here, but it is a patchwork of new rules and unpublished material from Star Charts. The steps for all of the system generation options still have to be completed (I don't think Commodore and Admiral even have steps yet in this draft), but they will provide an overview of what steps are required to complete system generation for that option. As mentioned in another thread, IIRC, there will be crib sheet versions that can be printed that will have all of the necessary charts in one place for ease of use during play.
Well, I mention it because I had a good look with an eye to producing a revised system-generation tool - so I had a fairly in-depth look at the differences between the four systems so that I could make decisions about the classes I will need to construct,
I think 90% of the needed materiel is there - it's mostly a case of tidying things up and finishing off odds and ends,
Tyrel Lohr wrote:As for the more basic question of "what is a jump lane?", they are whatever you want them to be. They can be B5-style hyperspace beacon paths, or they might just be mapped paths through space that ships with warp engines or hyperdrives use to move from one location to another.
The way the rules are written imply some definite stuff,
e.g.:
Jump lanes are almost certainly natural - why else would they cluster around black holes (+8 jumplane modifier?) and other inhospitable systems (I guess they could be an older civilisations leftovers, but they must have been really odd if so - Black Hole aliens -Yay!-), this more or less offs the "mapped paths" explanation, and suggests a naturally occurring fixed route (wormhole-like perhaps)
Jumplanes previously do not seem to have small fixed entrances/exits, as there is no way to effectively blockade them - so either the entrances are so vast that a blockade is ineffective, or it is simply a case that proximity to a star system prevents access to them,
etc, etc, etc...
I guess what I am saying is that the game already has evidence of what wormholes are - it just doesn't explicitly state anything, and given that most other options have a description this one feels absent,