
What follows is a summary of two discussions concerning which brand of
science fiction gamers prefer... hard or soft. Fermi's Question is
also explored, and the difficulty of composing an alien atmosphere
under current gaming systems is briefly touched upon.


======================================================================


Sent 09-Nov-94

Subject: SF Genres: Follow-up (long)

Howdy, folx. For those with short attention-spans, I'm the weenie who posted
that little survey on 26-Oct regarding SF Genres. I asked which was preferred:
"Hard" (Low-tech) or "Soft" (High-tech). "Soft" was arbitrarily described as
including inertial compensators, warp/jump drives, humanoid aliens. Others also
included into the description such elements as psionics, reactionless drives,
and various other ill-defined crutches of many SF novels and RPGs. To quickly
recap the responses:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Eric Tolle brought up the term "gonzotech", stating that the division of
Hard/Soft-SF has not so much to do with technical sophistication as it has to
do with how loosely the game designer plays with the results.

Nick Janow opted for Hard-SF with the exception of fast interstellar travel
which he argued is necessary unless the GM is willing to make-up centuries of
social, economic, and technological development as the campaign progresses.

Shalom Zaidfeld opted for Hard-SF mainly due to a personal preference for low-
tech, near-future campaigns. Phil Goetz concurred, stating that the shallow
brand of futurism, presumably Soft-SF, was starting to get annoying.

Neelakantan Krishnaswami countered that Hard-SF is fun to read but doesn't work
so well in RPGs, particularly since players often delve into the social
ramifications of technology which readers of SF novels generally don't bother
to consider. In short, it is more difficult to suspend the disbelief of
roleplayers than book-readers, because roleplayers are able to interact with an
inconsistent setting and poke holes in it, whereas book-readers don't have that
luxury. However, he agreed with Tolle's thesis that self-consistency is more
important than actual technical sophistication when determining the "hardness"
of any given SF setting. He also stated in another article that rigorously
thought-out space fantasy was vastly preferable to calculating the delta-vee of
your standard, non-reactionless, STL planet-hopper.

Erol Bayburt agreed, opting for the Soft-SF genre, preferring a cinematic
flavor for his gaming to the cold, hard, realism of the Hard-SF which I
described. He also agreed that internal consistency is important. "I'll
cheerfully break the laws of physics, but not those of logic." His only sore
point was over the frequent assumption of psionics in Soft-SF.

Joerg Rhiemeier's sore point was over humanoid aliens. "If they really
developed independently from us, they would be really alien."

I've been running a PBeM set in the Star Trek setting this past year, and so
I've been paying closer attention to ST:TNG and ST:DS9 than I might otherwise,
and needless to say, I've seen more of the humans-in-disguise routine than I
care to stomach. In the PBeM, we've also been guilty of this, so much so that
I'm reminded of a rather famous quote by Harry Harrison for this brand of SF:
"Bright young things voyage out from Earth in miraculous ships that get
anywhere in a flash, to alien planets with oxygen atmospheres where exotically
shaped aliens talk colloquial English and think exactly like their American
counterparts."

Joerg proposed using the old "space-seeding of humans by some ancient star-
faring presence" scheme to deposit humans about the universe and hence create
all sorts of alien cultures populated entirely by humans. Neel extended this
notion by suggesting genetically altered humans as per various books by Poul
Anderson. Of course, neither of these two propositions are unexplored by RPGs.
GDW's Traveller used this space-seeding of humans and humanoid mutants for many
of the aliens ingrained into the setting. I'll talk more about this later.

John Kim offered several other options for staying out of the ever-present
crutch of FTL, suggesting that players take on the personas of especially long-
lived silicon-based life or even slowed-down humans in order to survive the
long-durations of STL space-travel. For a more playable alternative, he
suggested 'Brigadoon' societies composed of cold-sleepers,

James Nicoll extended the idea of cold-sleep with a curious scenario which
helps get the party together in the first place. They are "lost luggage", woken
dozens of light-years from their intended destination and several centuries out
of their era.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I will admit that the responses are a mixed-bag. There seemed to be a slight
tendency for people to prefer the Hard-SF/Low-Tech approach, but this may have
been weary-gamer-in-search-of-novelty-syndrome rearing its head. Despite
various games which profess to be Hard-SF, and Traveller is a chief example, we
still see FTL, reactionless thrusters, inertial compensation/gravitics,
psionics, not to mention a whole slew of cat-humanoids and dog-humanoids
raining down like... well... cats and dogs. Anyway, this isn't meant to be an
indictment of Traveller, but rather an examination of our choices as how best
to create an "exiting" SF-RPG without succumbing to all the varieties of traps
which hinder the suspension of disbelief and which often lead to glaring
internal inconsistencies.

I'll talk a bit about one of the inconsistencies which has always had me a bit
puzzled, and this is one I mentioned on the TML back when I was a member.
Basically, it concerns humanity's role in the game setting, and fundamental to
that question is the teaming vs. vacant universe theories. In short, if there
are no "real" aliens in the universe, then it's probably going to be a pretty
boring game. After all, part of the fun of SF-RPGs is in meeting the aliens and
trying to figure out how they tick. As Joerg Rhiemeier pointed out, it may not
be easy. However, if there are aliens out there, I mean real aliens, not the
kind we genetically fabricate in our little test-tubes, then we've got some
serious questions to answer. First of all, why didn't one of these alien races
find us, say, a thousand years ago, or even a hundred-thousand? Why didn't they
take direct control of our society? Either exterminate us as a potential threat
or uplift us for their own purposes?

Of course, there are numerous responses to this one. Maybe the predominant
alien race or set of races has a code of non-interference ala Star Trek's prime
directive. Or perhaps, even more likely, they are manipulating us behind the
scenes, ala the ever-present UFO theorists. But here's the important point. If
either is the situation, then these aliens can't stay hidden forever. Once we
achieve interstellar flight, we should bump into them in short order. But if
you look at every SF-RPG on the market, this doesn't happen. No super-
technically-advanced interstellar society of which Earth is just a puny
newcomer. The reason, I think, is a general fear that it would make the game
boring, us being these little peons who have no power in the universe
whatsoever.

The problem is a fairly serious one, because even if there is only one other
civilization in this galaxy, if we assume it can spread out at something
approaching the speed of light and that it can double its population every
century (something I could envision our own race doing in a not-too-distant
future), then it could effectively colonize the entire galaxy (every remotely
hospitable planet of every star) in a matter of millennia. Humans have been
around for many millennia. Hominids have been around significantly longer.
Certainly, the first kid on the block with any sense of wanderlust whatsoever
must have swept across the galaxy in what is, both astronomically and
evolutionarily speaking, just the blink of an eye.

In short, we find ourselves in a slight logical bind, and nobody to my
knowledge has really addressed this beyond the most cursory handwaving. In my
own Traveller Campaign (where I basically redesigned the setting from scratch),
I tried to avoid this issue by making the Human race the first on the map, all
aliens being essentially test-tube mutations created by human beings. I allowed
for other sentience to exist, of course, but I made it so rare as to be
virtually non-existent. The only technologically advanced alien civilizations
ever encountered were long-dead, the victims of global suicide of one form of
another. In short, the probabilities against life existing were bad enough.
Adding to that the probabilities against sentience and then the probabilities
against survival after sentience, and we had a very vacant universe to play
with.

There are, of course, other solutions. In his book, _Antares Dawn_, Michael
McCollum proposed one which I found particularly intriguing. It's a very good
book, by the way, and except for a very constrained system for FTL-travel, he
introduces none of the standard High-Tech gimmicks. The FTL-System works
something like this. Space has more than three-dimensions, and it is crinkled
up like a ball of paper which God is hurling into the trashcan (sorry, is my
cynicism showing through again?). Anyway, each crinkle is composed to two
points (foldpoints) and a fold between them (the hyperspace conduit, if you
will). The points are naturally attracted to gravity wells (the bigger the
well, the more of them). Hence, most stars generally have at least one
foldpoint. Big stars have many. By going to a foldpoint, you can transition
along the fold to the foldpoint to which it is linked. This may be a journey of
a hundred light years or more, and it all transpires in an instant. To make
things even more confusing, to get to a system which is just next door, you may
have to jump to a system a hundred light years distant and then traverse to a
new fold point in that same system and jump over to where you want to go (i.e.,
traversing 200 light years to go 5 light years... beats hoofin' it). This is
actually a somewhat common situation, as most folds extend from coreward to
rimward, perpendicular to the galactic rim and the direction of spin.

The trick here is any given starsystem may not necessarily be connected to the
rest of the galaxy. In fact, an entire network of stars may be isolated. In the
story, Earth was apparently inside such a network for most if not all of our
race's written history. This network may have contained only a few dozen
starsystems and no alien presence, and this network may have been stabile for
thousands of years. However, at some point after interstellar travel is
achieved, the network is modified by one of its stars going Nova, and hence, an
alien presence is introduced from another network. Hence, McCollum was able to
introduce a system whereby you can have a teaming galaxy, yet the human race
is still protected during its infancy and has a chance to explore during
the early days of space travel. Of course, our race was very lucky, assuming
such a situation. If that star went nova a measly thousand years earlier, we'd
have interstellar aliens vs. the Dark Ages. The well-timed isolation from the
larger galactic foldspace network was a generous blessing. However, such luck
isn't out-of-hand. It's possible to believe this could happen to a good number
of races depending on how many isolated worlds/networks exist. And given a
fairly close technology ceiling, say within the next thousand years or so, the
races could be put on a more equal footing once things get rearranged by
incidents of nova or other major astronomical events.

Anyway, I have to admit that as nice as this solution sounds, I still don't
like it. And this is just a personal preference, but I like the idea of being
able to look at a 3d map, point a finger, and say, "I wanna go there" and then
go there. This is the kind of feel I personally like in an SF game, and while
limiting the choices may make life easier for the GM, it still doesn't convey
the sort of "feel" I'm looking for. Of course, this is probably a result of
watching too much of Captain Kirk during my more formative years. "Go that-a-
way, Mr. Sulu." The absolute freedom of having a starship at your disposal
which is capable of going in any direction you choose... basically, it's cool.
It makes the explorer instinct jump out and say "Hi!" But reconciling this
freedom with the natural consequences of every race having this same freedom...
that's the problem. And it's just one problem of many.

Agreed, the Soft-SF of Star Trek and pals is so firmly ingrained that most
players won't bat and eye at such sundry topics as I prefer to dwell on.
Nonetheless, they are something to think about for those interested in SF
setting-design.

And that brings me to my final topic of this long-winded article. I'm currently
twisting about the idea of putting together an entirely new SF-setting, and
some of the technical aspects are coming together better than expected. My
reasons derive partly out of dissatisfaction with the settings currently on the
market, and partly out of the need after this recent TSR-fiasco for a totally
non-commercial SF-setting so we internet-gamers who like to contribute to such
works can assure ourselves that we won't be bothered by those pesky profit-
hungry companies :-)

I was secretly hoping that everybody and their mothers would answer my recent
survey with such comments as "Yea for Soft-SF, down with Realism!" but that
didn't exactly happen. Why do I care what you guys think? Well, I guess I'm
shooting long-term. The maps are going to be tri-dimensional (I'm pretty much
locked on that, and I've got most of the details worked out), but the problem
is that 3d maps mean lots of stars. Lots and lots. I could use some help
fleshing out various sectors, and I'd like to make it all available over the
net. However, before I write even one page of world-description, I have to make
decisions about the overall technological level, the presence of aliens (ala
teaming or vacant-universe theories), not to mention the overall history of
humanity (assuming it's going to be human-centric in the first place). So if
anybody else has any comments to add, suggestions to make, or just a
willingness to lend a hand and take part, you know where to reach me.

Oh, and before I forget, I've also been toying with a broad classification
scheme for various worlds which is still very sketchy at present. Here it is.

Solar Companion: Not technically a world but not the main star or even a part
of the close-binary pair.

Gas Giant: Fairly obvious. Great for wilderness refueling if we're using
hydrogen to get around.

Greenhouse: A world gone to hell because of too much greenhouse gases.

Planetoid: A very small world, generally. Not necessarily round. No atmosphere
to speak of. Composed of rock or ice.

Belch Ball: You don't want to breath the atmosphere. Probably corrosive in the
extreme.

Primordial: A very young world. Atmosphere varies. Geologically instable. Lots
of volcanos and magma seas.

Desert World: Breathable atmosphere (at least with filter or compressor) but no
water that isn't tied up as ice crystals in the soil.

Exotic: Not an atmosphere you want to breath, maybe because it contains
poisonous gasses or even lethal micro-organisms. But not a place you can't
otherwise walk around, so long as you have your own oxygen supply. Note that an
alien ecosystem may well be thriving.

Magma Ball: Ouch, this place is hot.

Vacuum Ball: Like the moon, essentially. Lots of rock. No atmosphere.

Shallow World: Has atmosphere but not enough to breath, at least not without
descending to a very deep altitude. Mars could be an example.

Dead World: The place is certainly colonizable, but for one reason or another,
life either never existed or went extinct long ago. Maybe its an ice-world. Or
maybe it's a near desert. Maybe the sun flared and knocked out the entire
ecosystem. Or maybe a slew of meteors struck, churning up enough dust that the
sun was blotted out for decades.

Garden World: Earth is a prime example. Not only can you breath the atmosphere
without mechanical aid, but life, either native or transplanted, thrives in
abundance.

Water World: Over 90% covered by water and ice. Possibly a breathable
atmosphere. Possibly a teaming native ecosystem which got evolutionarily stuck
due to the total lack of any freestanding continents.

Any suggestions on these or new ones would be useful. That's about it for now.


============================================================================


Sent 22-Nov-94

SF Genres / Fermi / World Building

As many of you know, on 26-Oct I started off a discussion on SF
Genres, basically asking people which they preferred, Hard-SF or
Soft-SF. Responses came back indicating that Hard-SF was
preferred predominantly over the more cinematic styles of Star
Wars, Star Trek, and the rest of their Soft-SF ilk. It wasn't so
much the technological level of Star Wars (versus, say, 2001)
which bothered people. It was more the logical discrepancies, the
"gonzotech" in Eric Tolle's words, and the "annoying shallowness"
to paraphrase Phil Goetz. Neelakantan Krishnaswami argued that
High-Tech is okay, but only insofar as it is rigorously thought
out, not only in terms of technological repercussions but also in
terms of the social and economic ramifications. Even Erol
Bayburt, who preferred the cinematic style of Soft-SF, agreed
that no matter how you bend (or break) science, the final result
must, at least, be internally consistent.

All these responses got me to thinking that if rigorous internal
consistency is so highly prized, then we've got ourselves a
whopper of a problem right off the bat. What problem? Fermi's
Question, of course. And that was the central subject of my 09-Nov
follow-up article.

What is Fermi's question? Basically, stated, it's: "Where are
they?"

"They" as in the extra-terrestrials. Enrico Fermi, the nobel-
prize winning physicist purportedly posed this question at a
social dinner many moons ago, captivating his listeners with the
perplexity of probabilities which argue that extra-terrestrials
ought to exist versus the apparently obvious fact that they are
nowhere to be found. For us modern-day munchkins, this isn't so
much of a problem. We can rationalize the dilemma in any number
of ways, the three most obvious being:

   (1) Extra-terrestrials don't exist, at least not in this
       galaxy. We are the one and only example of technological
       sentience anywhere in the Milky Way.

   (2) They do exist, but they can't visit us because of the
       imponderable difficulties of interstellar travel. And
       while they might be able to communicate with us, they've
       never seen any point in trying.

   (3) They do exist, and they have visited us, but they want
       to leave us alone for the time being and see how we do.
       If they do interact with our governments at all, it's
       behind the scenes, where they won't be noticed. As for
       us trying to tune in to their interstellar Internet,
       it's beyond hopeless. They use real-time fractal
       compression and spread-spectrum communications and
       tachyon pulses and whatnot, so don't even bother.
       We're not in the same league, much less the same
       ballpark.

However, for the writer of a science fiction setting which is
"rigorously internally consistent" and yet has a high-speed,
cinematic, starwars/trekish, go-anywhere-and-quickly sort of
flavor, we find that none of these rationalizations hold up.
Number one doesn't hold up for obvious reasons. After all, there
are aliens in Trek. Number two is weak. You mean we're the only
ones to discover warp drive? And number three... well, if this
were true, then any voyage into the unknown would stumble across
some monstrously huge, tremendously ancient, and extraordinarily
advanced alien civilization. Obviously, since humans dominate a
huge section of space in Star Trek as well as Star Wars, probably
the single two most famous SF settings to date (which is why they
are being used in this discussion), one would think that this is
not the case.

So the questions is, how do we rationalize this inconsistency?

I mentioned one possible solution from Michael McCollum's
_Antares Dawn_, but forsake it as being too limiting on
interstellar travel for my own personal tastes. Bertil Jonell,
one of the more renowned of the TML denizens, replied with a
whole laundry list of explanations. I've taken two of these and
perverted them slightly.

   (1) Berzerkers: Some ancient space-faring civilization, the
       first boys on the block, in fact, decided to send out
       a huge armada of Berzerker robots. These robots were
       capable of self-replication through some fixed number
       of iterations. They were also loaded with all manner
       of nuclear armaments. When they'd detect the first
       signs of a possible competitive civilization, usually
       though reception of radio broadcasts and whatnot, they'd
       mosey on over and drop a few bombs. End of problem.
       Well, due to some error in the programming, the
       berzerkers in this section of the galaxy just sort of
       stopped functioning for some reason (who knows, maybe
       they became self-aware and developed moral qualms),
       so all of a sudden, we get lots of races popping their
       heads up at roughly the same time, and we Humans just
       so happen to be in this wave. Stumbling across one of
       these high-tech berzerker relics could be a major event
       of the campaign.

   (2) Battlefield Earth: Warring/Scheming High-Tech powers fight
       their battles indirectly, through puppet societies and
       various low-end civilizations. Earth (or the "Terran
       Republic") becomes entangled in this conflict. We are
       supported by one power and embroiled in a war with other
       races which are supported by other powers. It may even be
       the case that Humanity was "uplifted" for this very
       purpose. In an odd sort of way, the situation is
       reminiscent of that of Gods settling their petty disputes
       though the races which they created and which they
       control.

Bertil had some other interesting ideas, but I omitted them as
they resulted in settings with a far different feel from what I'm
looking for. Plus, a few of them seemed so bizarre that even
Bertil admitted they were cop-outs.

Richard Baker suggested another idea which I'll touch on briefly.

   (3) The NanoVirus: Way back when the first two civilizations
       had their great war, some whacko conceived and released a
       nanite (a microscopic machine) capable of infiltrating a
       lifeform of fairly broad parameters, replicating and
       surreptitiously spreading through the lifeform's species,
       and after a given delay, killing all the lifeforms with
       which it has come into contact. Hence, not only did it
       destroy the first war's winner, but as other civilizations
       came to inspect the ruins of that war, it infiltrated and
       destroyed their civilizations as well. The downside of
       this idea is that it is only a matter of time before it
       comes after us. "Spock, look at this. These ancient
       records say that the Argoans were destroyed just like all
       those other civilizations.... by a little mach.... ack!"

While Geoffrey Grabowski felt this idea smacked of political
statement, my only qualm with it is that it doesn't leave enough
room for *lots* of aliens co-mingling in a vast interstellar
community.

Anders Sandberg suggested another option having to do with
current worm-hole theory. "If wormholes work as they appear to do
in theory, an expanding wormhole empire will meet other empires
at roughly the same era, regardless of their age and distance!
(See Traversable Wormholes by Michael Price, archived at
http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/Trans/wormholes.txt for this)."

I haven't yet taken a look at it, but I'm sure I will sometime in
the near future. As for other reading/viewing material:

*  Neil Mackie suggests _2001 Nights_, a collection of Japanese
   graphic novels. An English translation is distributed by Viz
   comics.

*  Peter Tupper suggests David Brin's _Uplift_ series which
   incidentally served as the basis for a GURPS supplement by the
   same name. He also suggests David Gerrold's _Chess with the
   Dragon_.

*  Jim Cambias echoed Peter's comments regarding _Uplift_. He
   also suggested a new television series: Earth 2.

Just to finish up the recap of responses, John Kim was annoyed
over my intimation that SF campaigns should have aliens in order
to be interesting. "SF campaigns can be about anything:
espionage, colonization, mystery, war, police work, trading
missions, horror, and loads more." John also stated that advanced
civilizations could stay hidden if they wanted to (for example,
the Q-Continuum, ala Star Trek fame).

As to the second point, I feel it ranks down there on the list of
cliches. I think John actually felt this way as well, judging
from his remarks.

As to the first point, I apologize if I sounded like I was
putting down anyone's campaign. I guess I'm wrapped-up in the
idea of putting together an SF-setting with a StarWarzish flavor,
and since that flavor necessitates aliens (and preferably lots of
them), I've been steering the discussion in that direction.

No disrespect intended to those of you who don't make use of
aliens. I actually count myself among your number, as I've been
steering away from aliens for several years now mainly because
the Fermi question has been such a bother.

It is worth noting that J.D. Frazer posted some details regarding
his 21st century science-fiction cops campaign in response to the
aliens issue. He was trying to show that you can have a perfectly
good SF campaign without aliens, and it's true, you can. But, of
course, for those of us who want to incorporate aliens due to
whatever personal prejudices we hold dear, this bit of reasoning
isn't extrodinarily helpful. Hence, while I felt his key point
(and John's) was somewhat off-topic, I felt his basic reason for
steering clear of aliens to be very much on topic. Enough so that
I'll do a full quote.

>Here's a problem: Introducing this super powerful alien
>civilization means that the game has to take into account the
>vast economic, social, psychological and technological
>differences. Ferchrissakes, I can't even predict what *we're*
>going to have a lousy 50 years from now. An advanced alien
>civilization? By definition it would drift into the realm of
>science *fantasy*.

Unless, of course, we have a technological ceiling up ahead,
which would derail this argument, at least insofar as the
technology issue is concerned. And if social and economic aspects
are tied to technology, as one might argue, well... you can see
my point easily enough. In any case, yes, having aliens in a
campaign necessitates lots of work, at least if you want to do it
well. Is it really worth it in the end? I guess that question can
only be answered on an individual basis. My supposition in
starting this thread was that it is worth it, or that it's at
least worth exploring.

At this point, however, I think I'll hang back and switch over to
another thread, even though there were numerous other responses
which I could site (including a rather Malthusian thesis proposed
by Bertil that Fermi's question may be solved by the notion of
mandatory self-extermination, i.e., that any given race, even a
space-faring one, must outstrip its resources and self-destruct
as a mathematical inevitability due to the rather mundane fact
that spherical volume grows more rapidly than surface area as a
sphere of colonization expands in size). I leave you techno-
junkies to calculate this out on your pocket TIs.

Now, as to that other topic I promised... ah yes... here it is.
World Building.

Ahem. This could take some time.

In my follow-up article of 09-Nov, I proposed a fairly generic
classification scheme which, me being a humanities major (that is
my perennial excuse, by the way), I felt was just vague enough to
be useful. It went something like this:

   Solar Companion: Not technically a world but not the main star
      or even a part of the close-binary pair.
   Gas Giant: Fairly obvious. Great for wilderness refueling if
      we're using hydrogen to get around.
   Greenhouse: A world gone to hell because of too much
      greenhouse gases.
   Planetoid: A very small world, generally. Not necessarily
      round. No atmosphere to speak of. Composed of rock or ice.
   Belch Ball: You don't want to breath the atmosphere. Probably
      corrosive in the extreme.
   Primordial: A very young world. Atmosphere varies.
      Geologically instable. Lots of volcanos and magma seas.
   Desert World: Breathable atmosphere (at least with filter or
       compressor) but no water that isn't tied up as ice
       crystals in the soil.
   Exotic: Not an atmosphere you want to breath, maybe because it
      contains poisonous gasses or even lethal micro-organisms.
      But not a place you can't otherwise walk around, so long as
      you have your own oxygen supply. Note that an alien
      ecosystem may well be thriving.
   Magma Ball: Ouch, this place is hot.
   Vacuum Ball: Like the moon, essentially. Lots of rock. No
      atmosphere.
   Shallow World: Has atmosphere but not enough to breath, at
      least not without descending to a very deep altitude. Mars
      could be an example.
   Dead World: The place is certainly colonizable, but for one
      reason or another, life either never existed or went
      extinct long ago. Maybe its an ice-world. Or maybe it's a
      near desert. Maybe the sun flared and knocked out the
      entire ecosystem. Or maybe a slew of meteors struck,
      churning up enough dust that the sun was blotted out for
      decades.
   Garden World: Earth is a prime example. Not only can you
      breath the atmosphere without mechanical aid, but life,
      either native or transplanted, thrives in abundance.
   Water World: Over 90% covered by water and ice. Possibly a
      breathable atmosphere. Possibly a teaming native ecosystem
      which got evolutionarily stuck due to the total lack of any
      freestanding continents.

I didn't get quite as many comments on this puppy, but I was
surprised to see that one reader did catch me red-handed in the
act of plagiarism... er... I mean research.

Mitch Gold, (if memory serves) the former moderator for
rec.games.frp.archives, sent me a copy of the following planetary
classification scheme which was posted to rec.games.frp many eons
ago and which bears a suspicious similarity to the one I posted
on 09-Nov.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|                        PLANETARY CLASSIFICATION                         |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|CLASS | SURFACE         | ATMOSPHERE      | DESCRIPTION     | EXAMPLE    |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|A     | Tenuous, may    | Reducing,       | Radiates Heat,  | Jupiter    |
|      | not be present  | methane, etc    | "failed" star   |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|B     | Tenuous, may    | Reducing        | Non-Radiant     | Neptune    |
|      | not be present  |                 |                 |            |
|      |                 |                 |                 |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|C     | Iron Silicate   | Reducing, dense | High Surface    | Venus      |
|      |                 |                 | Temperature     |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|D     | Metallic        | Fluid, very     | Small, young    | Excalbia   |
|      | Silicate        | dense           |                 |            |
|      |                 |                 |                 |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|E     | Silicate, some  | Reducing        | Large Molten    | Janus VI   |
|      | metals          | Oxidizing       | Core            |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|F     | Silicate, some  | Oxidizing       | Very Young      | Delta-Vega |
|      | metals          |                 | (less than      |            |
|      |                 |                 | 10**9 years     |            |
|      |                 |                 |                 |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|G     | Silicate        | Oxidizing, thin | Desert Planet   | Rigel XII  |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|H     | Silicate        | Variable        | Geologically    | Gothos     |
|      |                 |                 | active          |            |
|      |                 |                 |                 |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|I     | Nickel-iron     | (A-G) none,     | Asteroids       | Ceres,     |
|      | Silicate        | (H-N) tenuous   |                 | Yonada     |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|J     | Silicate        | Very tenuous,   | Moons           | Luna       |
|      |                 | noble gases     |                 |            |
|      |                 |                 |                 |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|K     | Silicate        | Tenuous, some   | Adaptable with  | Mars       |
|      |                 | water           | pressure domes  |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|L     | Silicate Water  | Oxidizing       | Geologically    | PSI 2000   |
|      |                 |                 | Inactive        |            |
|      |                 |                 |                 |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|M     | Silicate Water  | Oxidizing       | Geologically    | Terra      |
|      |                 |                 | Active          |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|
|N     | Water Entirely  | Oxidizing       | Pelagic Planet  | Argo       |
|      |                 |                 |                 |            |
|------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|------------|

In fact, this table was originally printed (to the best of my
knowledge) in a book entitled _Worlds of the Federation_ by
Shane Johnson. I chose this table as a basis for what I was
doing, not so much because I like the trek classification system,
but because I always feel this strange compulsion to base my work
on *something*, and this table happened to be sitting in front of
my when the compulsion hit me. In any case, my perversions of
this system were never approved by Paramount. :-)

As for comments on the system, Bertil suggesting looking into
2300AD. I did, briefly, and I have more to say about that later.
Anders, meanwhile, noted that while broad classification can be
useful, it's important to recognize that each planet is unique,
and hence, one must not overlook the details. And speaking of
details, Nick Janow took me up on my explanation of "Desert
World".

>> Desert World: Breathable atmosphere (at least with filter or
>> compressor) but no water that isn't tied up as ice crystals in
>> the soil.
>
>Ummm, if there's no liquid water available to support life,
>what's generating the oxygen in the atmosphere?

Now this is just the sort of thing a dorky humanities major would
foul-up. Oops.

After years of watching Captain Kirk traipse around dead worlds
without so much as a filter mask, after watching Luke moan about
his lot in life on that desert world he grew up on, well... I
guess I just got taken in.

Never mind about technological inconsistencies. Never mind about
Fermi's Question. Let's just talk about some simple chemistry.
The majority of popular SF is literally drowning in these sort of
inconsistencies, and because the majority of the audience is
scantily educated in such matters, they get away with it time and
time again.

The problem is so pervasive that even our popular SF-RPGs have
succumbed. Traveller, arguably the most popular SF-RPG, uses in
its basic planetary profile system a classification scheme for
atmospheres which focuses primarily on density, not composition.
When they finally got around the handling atmospheric composition
in the World Builder's Handbook (this being produced by DGP, not
GDW), they came up with the following atmospheric taints:
disease, gas mix, high oxygen, low oxygen, pollutants, sulfur
compounds. That's it. Honest. That's the whole damn list. Well,
okay, I think "radiation" was mentioned on a separate chart, but
even including that, we're talking seven taints. Think about it.
This book was entitled "World Builder's Handbook". Atmosphere is
arguably the most important component of a world. "So like, Jim,
can we like breath on this world or what?" And this is what they
came up with. Okay, I'll stop ranting. No need for a
tranquilizer. Really, I'm okay. :-)

SJG goes into slightly more detail. For atmospheric composition
we've got: Reducing (Methane, CO2, and/or Hydrogen), Oxygen-
Nitrogen (with only the most vaguely established percentage
ranges), Polluted (pollen, ash, industrial pollutants, etc),
Exotic (hydrogen, methane, carbon oxides, nitrogen), Corrosive
(ammonia, chlorine, fluorine, high-oxygen, nitrides, sulfur
compounds, and water vapor). However, this detail is never really
fleshed out. What are the peculiarities of such atmospheric
compositions. Under what conditions are you likely to find them.
Do you really need life in order to sustain free-standing oxygen
in an atmosphere? Which gases are incompatible? In short, give me
a process to follow.

To give SJG the credit they deserve, they touch on a lot of these
issues, and they make a good attempt at formalizing it all with a
process, but I still get the feeling that if what we're looking
for is Hard-SF, detail-oriented, chemical mucky-mucking, we can
go even further (and yes, we can *always* go further).

I decided to take Bertil's advice and take a look at 2300AD. This
time, GDW provides us with a list of gasses along with their
molecular weights, but no means to determine the percentages of
dominance. Here's the list, by the way.

   Molecular Hydrogen (H2)      2.0
   Helium (He)                  4.0
   Methane (CH4)               16.0
   Ammonia (NH3)               17.0
   Water Vapor (H2O)           18.0
   Neon (Ne)                   20.2
   Molecular Nitrogen (N2)     28.0
   Carbon Monoxide (CO)        28.0
   Nitric Oxide (NO)           30.0
   Molecular Oxygen (O2)       32.0
   Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S)      34.1
   Argon (Ar)                  39.9
   Carbon Dioxide (CO2)        44.0
   Nitrous Oxide (N2O)         44.0
   Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2)      46.0
   Ozone (O3)                  48.0
   Sulfur Dioxide (SO2)        64.1
   Sulfur Trioxide (SO3)       80.1
   Krypton (Kr)                83.8
   Xenon (Xe)                 131.3

The basic idea is that you figure out your planetary diameter and
density, and from that you can figure out the minimum molecular
weight retained. Then you consult this little table, and you can
figure out which gasses have bled off into space. For Earth, I
guess that would be Hydrogen and Helium.

2300AD does give rules for determining oxygen content, but they
are pretty much based on the world's hydrosphere. The presence of
absence of life never figures into the equation. Likewise, there
are no rules for determining the preponderance of other gasses.
Nor are there rules to determine what effects these other gasses
might have, if any.

Looking toward net publications with my last lingering strands of
hope, I found that even Ross Smith's _Planet Generation System_
which was posted over a year ago makes no attempt to determine
atmospheric gasses. Indeed, taking together the sum of these four
separate systems, there seems to be a strong argument issuing
forth that such details are unnecessary, even cumbersome.

I think, going back to my original question of 26-Oct, that this
was at least part of the sort of question I was getting at. I
mean, in Soft-SF, not only do we see lots of violation of various
rules of chemistry as the setting plays a subservient role to the
story, but we also see a real disregard for the details of
setting in general. I don't mean "disregard" in a negative sense.
All I'm saying is that such details are viewed as trivial... as
entirely irrelevant and beneath consideration.

After all, Classic Traveller used a single digit to represent a
planet's atmosphere, and they got away with it for an awful long
time. I heard people on the TML (the Traveller Mailing List if
you need some help with this acronym) complain about all sorts of
things, but the issue of atmospheric composition wasn't a
memorable part of the discussion. My guess is that while many SF
gamers would like to think of themselves as enjoying "Hard-SF"
over "Soft-SF", most don't want to be concerned with such mundane
matters as a planet's atmosphere. Far more fun to just "wing it",
even if there are freeware programs to generate and record such
minutia.

I remember a long discussion we had on the TML back in February
of '93 regarding main world generation. I still have a copy of
the discussion, in fact, which is why I'm able to remember the
date. But the reason I bring it up is because Bruce Pihlamae said
something conspicuously noteworthy. He said, instead of looking
at mainworld generation or even at star system generation as a
frozen process, that is, as a process which you undertake without
any regard to the age of the star or the age of the planets, how
about instead looking at it as an evolutionary process.

For those of you who have generated characters in Traveller, you
probably know what I'm talking about. You don't just role
attributes and pick skills as in many other games. You undertake
a career. You make choices in that career. And as you go through
this process, not only do you generate a character, but you also
generate the character's career history. How appropriate it is,
then, to transfer this concept over to star system generation.
Start with a cloud of dust breaking off from some stellar nursery
and take it through an iterative process. Time consuming if done
manually, but a computer could do it quickly and perhaps even
generate results which make more sense than the results from a
frozen process. Why, they'd have to make sense, because they
wouldn't be just random die rolls. They'd be part of a world's
geologic history, and the process would make sure they fit into
that history.

Well, as you can see, this whole issue of planetary generation
can get somewhat cloudy. Here I've managed to ramble on about
planetary atmosphere for God only knows how long, and yet there
are so many other factors to consider, and the difficult part is
that they're all interrelated. And so instead of scooting on
ahead into yet more mundane and possibly mind-boggling matters of
world generation, I'm going to return to a subset of my original
question of 26-Oct. In short, do you as a gamer (either player or
gamemaster) prefer to deal with this stuff, or do you prefer to
just ignore it? And how you answer that question, I think, says a
bit about what sort of gamer you are. I personally can go either
way. I find most of my players don't give a rat's hindquarters,
however, and I really don't blame them. But your groups may be
different, and whichever the case, I'd like to hear about it.

jimv@cs.ucr.edu

