Simplifying Gurps Space world creation

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I wrote some programs to do this a very long time ago (which don't seem to run any more) but as I recall the problem you run into is that you need to roll up an absolutely ridiculous number of planets before you produce anything interesting ).

Back for Space 1e I took a cube of space 216 parsecs on a side and hand-calculated how many results of each kind you got. That's starting off with more than 10 million rolls just to see if there's a star in each 1 parsec cube.

I don't remember everything but aside from some oddities like 400 habitable moons of GGs the headline was an Earth-like world every 100 parsecs. This reinforced my desire to throw rocks at Traveller's 1 parsec/week Jump drive.

A conversation with Agamegos a year or two ago moved that figure up to 200 parsecs between Earth-like worlds.

Interestingly, when I looked at Gurps Humanx again a few years ago this book that predates Space 1e (the TL scale stopped at 9) had hundreds of parsecs between major Commonwealth worlds and their KK Drive was proportionately fast. Some impressive homework from Alan Dean Foster unless he selected the scale at random.