Is this for the players or the GM? I have no doubt that a lot of this is needed for the GM to understand the colonial environment.
However, I thought the current push was to create a bunch of approachable player briefs. While you are correct that digital pagespace is effectively free, attention can easily be broken by two pages of scientific data.
Perhaps an appendix?
Both.
The current push is to create a document in which there will be about quarter of a page (150 words) each about perhaps sixteen or twenty, possibly as many as two dozen, example worlds. To carry out the plan I need to select the examples, complete worthwhile designs, and then draft, revise, and polish the prose until it fits into a due word-count. But I haven’t actually been working on that for about three weeks, for what seem like reasons but that I know aren’t really. Instead, I have been trying to stop the fire from going out.
Eventually there ought be some sort of separate product, perhaps a pair of gazeteers (Central Sector and one outer sector), perhaps a database, perhaps a generator with a fixed PRNG that provides players and GMs with a brief to examine about a chosen homeworld or setting for a particular adventure.
Ah, understood.
In that case, doing the full write up for a thing and then pruning to the bits that are proper in context is a time honored way to craft credible settings.
I like to know density because I can derive surface gravity from density and diameter, which makes it seem less arbitrary. That way I have more confidence in the physical plausibility of the setting.
Furthermore, you can easily derive the period of low orbit whenever you need it from the fact that it is proportional to the cube root of density. This saves you from having to make tedious comparisons between the escape velocity and the diameter of the planet.
I am suddenly struck by the cogency of reporting the escape velocity as a multiple of vesc♁ instead of in silly old kilometres per second.
The question arose in the thread about Navabharata as to what the “equality” rating means. The answer is that I am using one minus the Gini coefficient (of household income per household member)
The rationale is there is a convention (now going out of fashion) of using that as a conversion factor to turn GDP per head into “standard of living” for international comparisons. The problem is that it’s completely obscure. For anyone except some economists you have to define the Gini coefficient, and though I know how it is defined it really doesn’t communicate anything even to me.
So, what are the alternatives?
A 10% Rich/Poor ratio? (e.g. the income of the richest 10% in Australia is about 12.5 times that of the poorest 10%. The corresponding figure for Denmark is 8.1, for the USA 18.5, for South Africa 33.1 and for Bolivia 93.1).
A figure for X% of households earn 100-X % of all income? (50% earn 50% at perfect equality, 0% earn 100% at perfect inequality.)
@whswhs suggests a scale of 0–6 of qualitative descriptions set out in a key, like “Control Rating” in GURPS. I’m going to have to think about whether to provide a scale of equality or of inequality, and have a care to write the descriptions so as to indicate inequality per se and not the material misery of the poor etc.
0–6 seems like a strange range to me. I would naturally think more of a scale of zero to ten, or of no stars to five stars. I could be done in a text document like this: ★★★☆
And then I had a really ditzy idea. Emoji!
Tau Ceti could be: 
Navabharata could be: 
What could convery more than that? It only emoji didn’t look all alike.
Well, emoji surely won’t work for me, as I can never figure out what the expressions are supposed to mean. When I read an e-mail or newsgroup post with emoji I just don’t even see them any more.
I like 0-6 because it fits the cognitive psychologists’ idea of “the magical number seven, plus or minus two” as the number of categories the human mind can grasp as an intuitive whole. Zero to five is nearly as good, except that with an even number of categories, it doesn’t provide a “neutral” response, and I kind of want to think of there being a neutral response from which other responses depart. Zero to ten seems like too many categories for all of them to be intuitively meaningful.
Equality ratings as such don’t do anything for me; I have no intuitive sense that inequality is objectionable, and my instinctive feeling is to regard people who complain about it as envious and therefore wicked. Pragmatically I’m inclined to see inequality as a power source in economic dynamics just as it is in thermodynamics. Now I would rather that inequalities not be frozen in place and impossible to change, but I tend to believe that if you adopt a system of “natural liberty” (to put it in Smithian terms) you severely hinder any attempts to freeze inequalities, and get closer to “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” Given this, I wouldn’t incline to make much use of an equality index as such, though I might be interested in an index that was correlated with inequality, if it told me something I cared about more. (I could believe, for example, that extremes of either equality or inequality are likely to involve a repressive political system.)
However little one might object to inequality as such (and like you, I am not troubled by the wealth of the rich provided that the poor are not in misery), it still makes a qualitative difference whether the community is financially diverse or not. Ought one to describe the cities having gilded towers? Is there a spreading apron of cardboard shanties around the urban core? Can the PCs lose themselves in the stews of the waterfront? Or is the typical city a scabrous blight of terracotta-roofed subtopia from the mountains to the sea, like Sydney in the Fifties.
It’s a dimension of information that GMs and character-players might want to have and use in about every colony, and so I try to jam it succinctly onto the summary sheet.
I like 0-6 because it fits the cognitive psychologists’ idea of “the magical number seven, plus or minus two” as the number of categories the human mind can grasp as an intuitive whole. Zero to five is nearly as good, except that with an even number of categories, it doesn’t provide a “neutral” response, and I kind of want to think of there being a neutral response from which other responses depart. Zero to ten seems like too many categories for all of them to be intuitively meaningful.
Fair enough: I guess we see that in (for example) the Kinsey scale, and not just in GURPS.
Now which works betteron a scale 0–6? Equality or inequality?
Do positive and negative skewness produce symmetrical effects on the Gini index?
Sometimes that’s arbitrary. For example, in the Big Five personality scale—OCEAN, for Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism—the last variable can be called either “Neuroticism” or “Emotional Stability,” depending on which direction you want to count as positive. Do you want to say that the positive trait is Equality or Stratification?
I was thinking about how you might make it correspond to the Control Rating system, but I think actually it can work either way. Stipulating that ER stands for Equality Rating, we can have
CR 0, ER 0: Some one person has all the wealth and does whatever they like, but it can change at any time if someone comes along and takes it away
CR 0, ER 6: Everybody has equal wealth, and it’s kept equal by mob violence against anyone who sticks out
CR 6, ER 0: Classical tyranny
CR 6, ER 6: Dystopian socialism, or Rousseau’s General Will
I’m not certain, but I don’t think so. It is a pretty horrible statistic, mathematically.
While I probably wouldn’t start with equality, I do think it would be nice to have more game-mechanical support for the GM to answer the question “we’ve just arrived on this planet, what’s it like”. CR is obviously biased towards the American obsession with firearms; I wonder whether extending CR to deal with more interesting things, in the spirit of “the law is a thing that stops PCs taking the easy option”, might also be a workable approach.
Another area in which GURPS’ definitions of CR nails a distinctive set of colours to the mast is when it treats taxes as a burden with little regard for whether they are spent on free medical care or hauled off to Blighty by the HEIC.
I wonder whether “shames” would be a better heading than “taboos” for what I have in mind there.
GURPS does recognize precisely the distinction you’re pointing to. A society that spends tax money on largely things that are arguably beneficial is CR2 or 3; one that spends it abusively is CR 5 or 6. See for example p. B506, which says of CR3 that “Taxes are moderate and fair” and of CR5 that “Taxation is heavy and often unfair.”
And in practice, every political system you can expect to encounter in the real world has CR2-6. The only example for CR0 is the hypothetical case of anarchy, and there is no example for CR1.
But logically, “the state takes none of your money/income/wealth” does seem to be at the other end from “the state leaves you only bare subsistence, or perhaps not even that,” in the same way that “everyone has the same income/wealth” is at the other end from “one person has as close as possible to all the wealth.” The CR continuum includes purely abstract, hypothetical cases, just as the Gini index does. That’s why I think it’s a good parallel.
Of course, I do basically think that taxes are a burden, and that Mancur Olson’s “stationary bandit” model of the state is essentially sound (see also James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed). That probably makes me sensitive to the need for a language that CAN express my point of view, rather than one that simply excludes it as inconceivable. But I think that the considerations above are sound independent of my fairly hard core libertarianism.
The thing that that CR model of taxes seems to exclude is the mode in which the state takes almost every output from economic activity… but genuinely does manage to provide for everyone’s needs. Call it a socialist utopia, if you like. I find the extreme case about as unlikely as an anarchy that doesn’t turn into warlordism, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t be supported.
If you follow Agemegos’s point about including goods and services provided by the state in “wealth” or “income,” then I don’t think that counts as confiscatory taxation, at any rate. It might be argued that it’s CR 3, in that people pay taxes, but they get goods and services back, so their net income is not radically decreased and may even be increased (if you believe in the efficiency of socialist institutions, which I don’t, but this is a utopia and that’s its premise). Or if you have an inefficient and wasteful but still somewhat functional socialism, it’s maybe CR4.
Though I have to say that it’s a question of your ethical judgments. By my standards, taking assets from person A, under force of law, to provide benefits to person B is by definition unfair; as Pratchett put it, it’s “a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.” Person A could perfectly well give money to person B (I have done so), or join in an actuarially fair insurance scheme with person B, or enter into various other voluntary arrangements. But if you have other ethical views, you will likely disagree. But I’m not sure how one would formulate a set of options that don’t include any ethical premises. If you have any suggestions, have at it.
Whether it’s fair is a different question. I don’t think that CR or whatever ought to conflate fairness in with its other dimensions.
My point was not that GURPS treats all taxes as unfair, but that it treats all taxes as burdensome. I believe that there are some types of goods and services (e.g. defences, courts, police, transport infrastructure, medical care, dentistry) that relieve burdens that are placed on human existence by our competing to flourish in a limited environment with frail and mortal bodies subject to injury and disease. For various reasons (assorted market failures) some of these services cannot be provided commercially, or the forms and quantities of them that result from commercial provision are defective, inadequate, or allocated with gross inefficiency. And in some of those cases tax-funded public provision of those goods and services is much better and also cheaper than the commercial provision. To me it seems nonsensical to describe the taxes that fund effective police and efficient courts as a burden. The feasible alternatives are far worse. Raising a tax and spending it on effective police and efficient courts is the opposite of a burden. It makes everything lighter than in any possible alternative.
Paying taxes, even progressive taxes, to maintain the systems that allow you the peaceful and secure accumulation of wealth, does not seem to me to be a burden when the feasible alternative is either paying more for less peace, order, and good government or living in a Hobbesian bellum omnia in which such an accumulation is not even possible. The fantasy world in which you get to earn the income and accumulate the capital of an industrial magnate without paying taxes is infeasible, and therefore not a valid basis for comparison.
Now, whether roads, defence, and socialised medical care are examples of such goods and services is a matter of fact and circumstances, to be addressed with evidence. And, I submit, beyond the scope both of this thread and this board (we can take it in private, if you like).
I feel the force of your argument that a GURPS CR or a Flat Black planet summary sheet ought to be able to describe a society which is contentiously realistic or unrealistic, even one that is uncontroversially unrealistic! Yes, there ought to be a code for an idealistic anarchy that does not collapse at once into banditry. For the same reason, it should not be impossible to describe a situation in which the government levies large taxes and spends them beneficially. I’m not saying that that is fair or even realistic, I’m saying that there ought to be a CR for it. That is, the issue of whether tax revenues are well-spent ought not to be included in CR.
Well, the point of my comment about “fairness” was supposed to be that it depends on one’s ethical premises, which makes it unlikely that we shall reach agreement on it.
On the other hand, with “burden,” I think it’s a matter of our using the words with different meanings.
I pay rent every month. This is a substantial expense, taking up, I think, the second largest percentage of C’s and my combined income. I would not hesitate to call it a “burden.” It’s a financial load I carry, and one that diminishes my ability to assume other loads, and freedom to dispose of funds.
On the other hand, the alternative is not to have a roof over our heads, and that would be worse. It would not in itself be a burden, but it would occasion other expenses that would be a greater burden, or hardships that would be a burden of a different sort. Paying rent is surely a lesser burden. (Though I see people regularly on the streets who clearly feel otherwise.) But to say that B weighs less than A is not to say that B is weightless.
The “tax” part of the GURPS CR scheme sets CR0 as having no coercive powers of the state, and therefore no ability to collect taxes, and therefore no funds with which to establish a state. “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.” That really seems to me to be a natural limiting case. I don’t think that GURPS actually uses the word “burden.”
Perhaps I am reading too much into GURPS use of “heavy” and “light” instead of “high” and “low” when describing tax rates.