T5 Second Survey

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T5 Second Survey is a project that is conducting an ongoing overhaul and clean up of the world and stellar data published primarily in the 1980s and 90s for the Official Traveller Universe (OTU).

This is a meta-story article about game design. For the in-universe article by the same name, please see the Second Survey article.

Description

This project has several goals:

  • Update the astrographic data to the current Traveller 5th edition rules, including the new extensions.
  • Address several shortcomings in the generation of the data in previous versions, including stellar data and UWPs.
  • Produce a consistent and known set of data for current and future Traveller publishers. All of the Mongoose Traveller books published since 2009 have used this data.

T5 Second Survey adjustments

In order to make the collection of legacy astrographic data more consistent, the project took the approach of overwriting the the previous versions if the new changes made sense. The T5SS adjustments to the previous versions of data includes:

  • Fixing stellar data to match the current understanding of stars. Specific changes would be:
    • Replace the dwarf (D) class stars with M class stars
    • Reduce the size of some giant stars (OBAF) to more reasonable sizes (GK)
    • Fix the M class stars to a minimum of M4 if the world is habitable
  • World generation changes include
    • Increase the size of worlds with thin or better atmospheres to match the physics that small worlds can't hold atmospheres
    • Adjust the TLs of all worlds in the Imperium to be a maximum of 15
    • Adjust the TLs and populations of worlds in several sectors to ensure each sector economy falls in a specific range of values
    • Apply automated tools to ensure UWP values are within T5 generation ranges, including the new Ix, Cx, Ex values.
  • Trade code changes would include
    • Fix the trade codes to match the rules in the T5 Core Rules
    • Add the sophont codes to worlds where they are known
    • Add the O: (owned worlds) or Mr notation to worlds that are Gov 6
    • Apply automated tools to verify the Trade codes are correct.

History

With the publication of the playtest version of the Traveller 5th edition core rule book (2008), Don McKinney, Robert Eaglestone, along with Marc Miller engaged in a project to collect and update the known astrographic data.

The early work was done by Rob with Dan "Far Trader" Burns, gathering details, supplying and filling in gaps, then Don (with the help of Andrew Ford and Roger Howe, aka "the Australian Specialists") picked up and continued working on the sectors within the Imperium, which was then reviewed by Marc and used for the rewards for the T5 Kickstarter.

As of April 2013, this project has all of the sectors with at least two Imperial worlds largely second-draft completed (some details, for example, owning worlds for some captive governments remain undetermined, and smoothing out inconsistencies in the stellar data).

Since 2009, most Mongoose Traveller OTU books have been produced using the data from this project. Ziafrplians Sector and Gvurrdon Sector have been done as part of the effort to supply baseline data for Mongoose Traveller projects.

Traveller Map serves as the publication source along with an interactive user interface. The T5 Second Survey began publication to Traveller Map in 2014.

References and contributors

This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Far Future Enterprises or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.
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