I am working on a campaign idea, TOS style, mystery and exploration, but 17 years before Kirk.
I am imagining a more hands on, risky style, with even less reliance on technology than in Kirk's era.
To this end I am looking to populate a sector with (mostly) accurate star systems, to present some real crunchy issues for my exploring players to overcome. I am using my beloved FASA rules for this campaign , but unfortunately the system creation rules are sketchy at best!
I have used GURPS Space rules for this sort of thing in the past, but wondered if anyone could recommend a moderately detailed and mostly accurate ruleset, to do something similar?
Not really, because most random system generation rules in RPGs were written before the big exoplanet discovery boom of the last 10 years. Astrophysics has had to throw out the book on star-system formation in that time.
So you can get detailed ones, but they will in no way be accurate.
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If my recollection of Traveller 2300 is correct, it would generate something that would feel plausible (assuming there is no one really into astrophysics in the group). It also had an older version (2.0?) of the Gliese database, of all known starts within 50 light years.