Simplifying Gurps Space world creation

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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.

Up until we started discovering exoplanets in 1992 the state of the art was Habitable Planets for Man (Stephen H. Dole, 1970). Dole's central estimate was 4.08 × 10^(-4) habitable planets per cubic parsec, which implies an average nearest-neighbour distance of 24 light-years for habitable planets. But of course not every habitable planet has a flourishing technological society on it.