Simplifying Gurps Space world creation

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by ericthered

And the cutoff is different for Large Worlds, at +5. And Ocean worlds can have native life, just not photosynthetic.d.

I suspect that the development of photosynthesis is pretty inevitable once life comes along although not necessarily before humans or people similar to humans come along to interfere with things.

[ericthered]

The changes listed below are now on the site, as is adding notes to planets!

Originally Posted by ericthered

Wow, its been a while, and I've been working on this. Right now the version I have has societal stats up to control rating, better formatting, better saving, correct garden world generation, better automatic naming, more consistent editing, a list of systems that can be sorted by star size, resources, habitability, affinity and population, and the ability to save specific systems, load specific systems, and generate fewer systems.

This is a big step beyond the original program. There are still things that can be added, but this is almost complete: economics is the big thing left.


Generating populations is a big job, and that one question of "colony age" is left to the GM and surprisingly complex. There is a lot that could happen there.

[David Johnston2]

Generates a lot more habitable planets than the vanilla planet generation system.

[ericthered]

What do you calculate the correct rate to be? (even if you're just ball-parking it).

I'm going over the math. I think the main factors are:

• stellar age
• chance of having a habitable orbit
• planet size and type
• Time to garden

I've found one error that could be causing an issue: My stellar age was multiplying the base age by (1d6-1), rather than just adding it. That drops system habitability from about 1 in 4 to 1 in 5.

I do think that the vanilla system is fairly generous though.

EDIT: 1 in 5 is per system. its 1 in 7.5 per star.

[ericthered]

I just updated with economics and CR ranges. Star Locations can now be changed as well. And the star age fix is now in there.



I made a bunch of changes to the GUI. As requested, a grid was added to the sector, as were captions on the various displays and the ability to make them white for nice printing. I also added visual cues for tectonics and vulcanism on the planet, as well as boxes indicating settlement type and population rating on the system diagram, so you can now look at a system and tell where the big population centers are.



I also changed the generation at the start to only make a single system, so that it won't hang for five seconds on load. The default sector settings still generate 100 systems, you just have to click the button. Its a little clearer when the system is generating and processing the new planets as well. I also changed the default colony age settings to be 300-500 instead of 0-500.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by ericthered

• Every single system is colonized, even if its just resource 0 tiny rocks.

Yup. I consider that silly.

One interesting thing I've noticed is that sulfur moons get a lot of colonies, because they tend to be very volcanic and thus have high resource numbers.

The high resource numbers are plausible. A lot of important industrial elements (e.g. copper, tin are chalcophiles in the Goldschmidt classification, which means that they tend to form sulphide minerals. They are not concentrated in any type of asteroid, and they are depleted from the rocky crusts of terrestrial planets except in isolated ore bodies. They are useful, their ores are scarce, and there aren't any promising asteroidal resources. But since sulphur moons are characterised by numerous large volcanoes that spew sulphur and what looks like ultra-mafic lava. It's plausible that sulphur moon like Io have rich fields of sulphide-rich volcanic rocks at the surface, the like of which would be found nowhere else. They might well include valuable ores of industrial metals that would not be glutted by asteroid mining.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Yup. I consider that silly.

I'm wondering if I can set up different colonization schemes, as in, choosing which planets get settled first. Its a GM set value, because the real dynamics of it depend so much on so many things. High Affinity (or maybe just habitability) systems are likely to get settled first, either because FTL can travel fast enough to check them all out, or because if you're going to send a generation ship, you should research all you can out of your destination first. Which gives high affinity worlds a bigger leg up... but I really don't mind that.

The high resource numbers are plausible. A lot of important industrial elements (e.g. copper, tin are chalcophiles in the Goldschmidt classification, which means that they tend to form sulphide minerals. They are not concentrated in any type of asteroid, and they are depleted from the rocky crusts of terrestrial planets except in isolated ore bodies. They are useful, their ores are scarce, and there aren't any promising asteroidal resources. But since sulphur moons are characterised by numerous large volcanoes that spew sulphur and what looks like ultra-mafic lava. It's plausible that sulphur moon like Io have rich fields of sulphide-rich volcanic rocks at the surface, the like of which would be found nowhere else. They might well include valuable ores of industrial metals that would not be glutted by asteroid mining.

No arguments there! its "Interesting" rather than "Problematic" or "Silly". I've long thought that Gas giant moons are interesting and promising from a space colonization viewpoint. Thanks for the extra information about its exact plausibility.