Classification of technologies and hexadecimal system.

[mr beer]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

Seems like the Traveller game designers didn't think so though.

That's nice but I have no interest in learning some kind of code in order to play an RPG, which is why I dislike the system you are proposing.

[PTTG]

TL0 space travel methods: "Our species evolved on an airless, low-g world, so we just run real fast, jump off, and control our direction by throwing rocks."

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Traveller characters are perfect as a database storage format for 1970s computers. Not for humans.

Let me correct that for you:

Originally Posted by Anthony

Traveller characters are perfect as a database storage format for 1970s computers. Not for all humans, because I, for example, find it very difficult and thus I do not like it.

To me, on the contrary, hexadecimal systems are very comfortable and precisely perfect to represent this type of things with alphanumeric characters, instead of using two digits, and I am also a human.

In any case I would like to know in which book all this comes out.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by mr beer

That's nice but I have no interest in learning some kind of code in order to play an RPG, which is why I dislike the system you are proposing.

Thats fine but I would like to know in which book does all that come out, I want to read it and there seems to be a lot of traveller books.

[pestigor]

I read the first post and would like you to describe what a value "1" space travel means and what a "B" value space travel means in terms of setting and how they scale with the other categories on your list.

It's sort of like being asked to evaluate the Kelvin system of temperature without any reference points on what the values actually mean.

Does every value start at zero when a species first becomes sentient or self determining(at what ever level a species can achieve that)?
What about the missing categorizes that are crucial to the given categories that whswhs listed?
What is the focus of the Gurps game you're running and is a scale starting at zero to F necessary for every category?
What is it that you're hoping to accomplish in your Gurps game with this and is this an area you feel Gurps is lacking?

[Celjabba]

Those 2 links have details.


https://travellermap.com/doc/secondsurvey

https://travellermap.com/doc/fileformats

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

Those 2 links have details.


https://travellermap.com/doc/secondsurvey

https://travellermap.com/doc/fileformats

It's pretty rudimentary, but I like it. Thank you!

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

hexadecimal systems are very comfortable and precisely perfect to represent this type of things with alphanumeric characters, instead of using two digits

Hexadecimal needs two digits as soon as you reach a value of 16 (hex "10", coming right after "F"). Real-life hex users (mostly programmers) routinely use 2-, 4-, and and 8- digit hex numbers. The appeal of hexadecimal there is that it neatly represents binary values and common word widths in a more compact form. It's hard to figure out exactly where a '1' is in a 32- or 64-bit number without counting down spaces from one end. Counting by 4s makes it easier.

Traveller used the word, but happily continued the pattern beyond F where they needed to. They didn't care about a particular base, but rather just using one glyph per value. It's base "high enough", not base 16. Nor did they care about it being easy to read individual bits from the hex; the numbers were just numbers.

Or for that matter, they didn't care about it being easy to read at all. Once you get past the really short UPPs for characters and planets, Traveller started breaking up sequences even of less than 10 glyphs with dashes and spaces so on, to visually give the uniform pattern some variation -- just as we do with commas or periods in decimal numbers. For long sequences, you might even break up your glyph string with actual mnemonic labels (like "ST, DX, IQ, HT") so that you don't have to memorize an order. Recall that old 7 +- 2 rule of thumb.

Just proceeding with letters will run into problems once you reach 36, but Traveller also didn't care about that, since most of their indices didn't need to go that high. You can always adopt some other convention for glyphs to follow (throw in the lower-case letters, or punctuation marks, or there's a whole series of ordered glyphs for you in Unicode, though many of those might be hard to tell apart at a glance).

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

hexadecimal systems are very comfortable and precisely perfect to represent this type of things with alphanumeric characters, instead of using two digits

Hexadecimal needs two digits as soon as you reach a value of 16 (hex "10", coming right after "F"). Real-life hex users (mostly programmers) routinely use 2-, 4-, and and 8- digit hex numbers. The appeal of hexadecimal there is that it neatly represents binary values and common word widths in a more compact form. It's hard to figure out exactly where a '1' is in a 32- or 64-bit number without counting down spaces from one end. Counting by 4s makes it easier.

Traveller used the word, but happily continued the pattern beyond F where they needed to. They didn't care about a particular base, but rather just using one glyph per value. It's base "high enough", not base 16. Nor did they care about it being easy to read individual bits from the hex; the numbers were just numbers, not themselves encoding a pattern. (Though I suppose you could try to make a case for even-odd showing atmosphere taint.)

Or for that matter, they didn't care about it being easy to read at all. Once you get past the really short UPPs for characters and planets, Traveller started breaking up sequences even of less than 10 glyphs with dashes and spaces so on, to visually give the uniform pattern some variation -- just as we do with commas or periods in decimal numbers. For long sequences, you might even break up your glyph string with actual mnemonic labels, like "ST, DX, IQ, HT" so that you don't have to memorize the order.

Just proceeding with letters will run into problems once you reach 36, but Traveller also didn't care about that, since most of their indices didn't need to go that high. You can always adopt some other convention for glyphs to follow (throw in the lower-case letters, or punctuation marks, or there's a whole series of ordered glyphs for you in Unicode, though many of those might be hard to tell apart at a glance).

[Celjabba]

Originally Posted by Alonsua

It's pretty rudimentary, but I like it. Thank you!

I haven't opened my traveller books in years, but iirc there wasn't much more details.
They created the shorthand to fit early computer limits, and every books and software added to it with no real coherence or master plan.