At least I cut the bits on variations in architecture and urban form.
Perhaps I am too intimidated by the accusations that I grind out hacky planets of hats. On the other hand, my last two campaigns have each included one player who pored over the description of Tau Ceti to choose exactly the place of origin that would characterise his PC. I got a soldier from Hell and the son of two feckless fringe-dwellers from Avalon.
A Tau soap opera might have a mysterious stranger moving into the area who claims to be a lottery winner, but his dark secret is that he built a megacorp from the ground up…
Heh!
With a third page I could add a paragraph on “soap opera plots” for each world, and they might be very evocative. I could also restore the “Attractions”, which were well-received though technically trivial, and add a section on the Imperial presence and activities.
Or, if I cross out two out of every three words in the blather about national differences between the octants, and scavenge another 350 words by using 11-point type, I could spend 500 words on “attractions”, “soap opera”, and “Imperial presence and activities” while still fitting each briefing onto a two-page spread or one leaf of printout.
Perhaps my best way forward now is to write the extra sections and worry later about sweating the word count down.
For “Climate”, in an ideal layout I’d have something like “-10-30°C (worldwide), 2-15°C (inhabited areas)”. That may take too much space though, and hyphenating negative numbers so that they won’t look wrong is hard.
Well, human permanent settlements are never found where the annual average temperature is less than 0 °C or more than 30 °C. So the habitable areas listings could be trivialised by a sentence in the key.
The first paragraph of the running text says where the inhabited zone is, characterised the uninhabitability of the zone beyond it, and describes the pattern of settlement within it. What it omits is to say that as Tau Ceti’s average temperature of 9 °C is about 6 K cooler than Earth, the thermal equator on Tau Ceti is probably about 22 °C.
I’ll give it some thought. I might need to hack a little model of meridional transfer of heat to get figures that depend in a plausible way on the world’s size and air density.