The End Result
Iomaria A99889A-8 Trade codes: PH, PA, PI.
A satellite of a larger planet in orbit 2 of a dwarf orange sun, Iomaria has a tainted dense atmosphere requiring filter masks for outdoor activity. Almost 80% of this temperate world is covered by ocean. It's class A port sits on the edge of the one of the many oceans giving it easy access to water for both raw and refined fuel.
The process
I've had these books for how long and have yet never tried the system generation there. Figured I'd give it a shot as I'll be running a Traveller game probably early next year. Or another SF game, but as Traveller is not just an RPG but a toolbox of Makers that really transcend any specific game rule set.
As always when reading the T5 rules, it takes me a few times to figure out what they are actually trying to do. A lot of text before the main process starts and things seem oddly placed sometimes. Reminds me of Microsoft documentation on their site: technically correct but you have to find it, and it is not always what you really need to get the job done.
We start with the World Gen Checklist and section A. There are up to 10 steps in this process, each taking a page or more of tables and text. The very first step is to pick the sector name, hex location and main world name. As I am not sure where I am going to stick this, there is no sector name nor hex location. If I recall correctly, originally you grabbed a sub-sector map, and started rolling for a planet per hex. And that was based on how dense the system was. A hex crawl of stellar proportions! Skipping the location and name, we should have a name. As usual for name, I turn to a random name generator and found this site which is cool and one I've not visited before. We'll pick Iomaria as our planet's name.
Starport type is next. This seems me to be really in the wrong place: the starport type really should be determined after we have a population and tech level. This is why we get type A ports on empty planets in Classic. Though we'll see - hoping that they port type creates DMs for the population and tech level. Rolling a 4, I get a starport type A - the biggest and best. Rolling on the space ports table, we have at least a type F, a good quality space port.
Using the flux roll for the home star, I get a 2, giving me a K class star. I think I roll again for the size on the same table as there is a column for the stellar types, so we end up with a KV star. Looking into what that means: it is an orange dwarf star. This is in-between a red dwarf and a star like our own.
And where does Iomaria orbit our orange dwarf sun? A flux roll of -2 gives this the habitable zone, so Iomaria is a temperate world. And is our garden world (well, so far!) a planet of a satellite? A -4 roll gives the interesting far satellite. And oddly, we're a satellite around another world, in the Vee orbit. Which at the moment I have no idea what that means.
Next, we have the PBG rolls for population digit, planetoid belts and gas giants. The population digit lets us know within the population code what it is. A random 1-9, but no indication of how to roll a random number between 1 and 9. Grabbing one off the internet, we get a 4. 0 planetoid belt. Rolling for gas giants, we have 2 gas giants in our system. Our PBG is 402.
Now on to our actual planet! Size is 2D-2, which really gives us small planets. Yet I roll an 11, for a size 9 planet. A tad larger than Earth. And yet it orbits yet another planet! Atmosphere is flux + size, and having a 0 flux, we have a type 9 atmosphere, dense and tainted. So much for my garden world. There is a P1 note in the environmental effects. I looked around and could not find a table or other reference nearby in the book so at the moment I am clueless (this is the main issue with T5: things are not well formatted and linked to find what you need easily. A simple page reference would have helped!)
Hydrosphere is Flux + atmosphere + mods. At least the mods are listed in the table, and we have no mods. A -1 plus our 9 gives us 80% water, so again, a tad more than Earth. Of course, this is really 75-84% water the way I use it generally, so about the same as Earth.
Population is 2D-2, rolling a 10 gives us 8, for hundreds of millions. With our previously rolled PBG of 402, the 4 gives us 400 million inhabitants. Our population is a modifier for government. Another flux roll of 0, and we have a type 9 government: an impersonal bureaucracy. Impersonal agencies isolated from the population. Having done early voting today, I sometimes feel like that is what we have at times! Finally, government is the modifier for law level. 1 + 9 gives us law level A - extreme law.
The final part of our planet is the technological level. 1D plus 6 (for starport A) and...that is all the mods. 1 + 6 is 7, circa 1970's really. Wait - missed my space port F, another +1 for TL 8. Which originally was early grav technology, but I think got bumped to TL-9 later.
Our planet is A98989A-8.
Checking for trade classes, which is a bit more extended than Classic, we have no planetary trade classes, we are a pre-high population (PH), pre-agricultural (PA), pre-industrial (PI) world.
Checking the inner system reference, with our KV star and being in the habitable zone, we are in orbit 2.
I'll do the rest of this in a follow-up post. This is basically where Classic Book 3 ended, and there are really only minor changes to the system generation.
But fun with planetary image generation!
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