BattleTechWiki talk:Project Planets/Planet Overhaul

Era Specific Data

This is a great idea for a project! Is there any formal consensus on adding time periods to the displayed information, especially for the nearby planets section? With the new handbook series, a lot of the written history has been canonized with really nice maps by Øystein Tvedten. Among the many potential periods not displayed, nearly all Inner Sphere and (near) Periphery planets (excluding the Draconis Combine, which has not been published yet) have faction info for:

The birth of the Star League (2571)

The end of the 1st Succession War (2822)

The end of the 2nd Succession War (2864)

The beginning of the Jihad (3067)

...and this list does not even mention Dark Age dates or maps at the founding of each Great House. The Succession War data may be really vital to add, since borders really change and planets disappear (albeit over the course of decades). I realize this is a huge amount of work if done by hand, but I just though I might ask.--S.gage 02:21, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Eeeeh, I'm afraid you may be a bit disappointed in us, S.gage. We're actually going to be doing away with those massive nearby planet/ownership tables because we know the current ones are as flawed as the coordinates and 2-jump maps also being used. The intention right now is to replace the 2-jump map with a cropped image of one of Øystein's maps, so that neighboring worlds are easily identified in a manner that is recognizable to anyone who has ever seen an official BattleTech map. The coordinates will be using an extrapolated method that matches up with Øystein's maps and the tables are being done awy with because we just don't have the capability to check each planet within 2 jumps and for each period. I'm not ruling out the possibility someone may want to do that work and re-add them in, but the Overhaul is going to clean up all suspicious data and either correct it or remove it.

Ownership is still being worked out: BrokenMnemonic has been doing extensive prep work for the Overhaul by reviewing (and uploading) maps, and then re-writing the Ownership section to reflect more periods of who owned what when. Ideally, we'd use concrete dates to indicate a change in ownership, so the traditional ownership list may make way for a narrative form...but we're still in the early stages on that. So, in that way, we hope to make ownership data more informative and complete.--Rev ^{(talk|contribs)} 11:42, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm not disappointed in loosing the 2-jump maps, on the contrary I'm really happy there is a reasonable consensus on what to do with the history of planets on BTW. Ownership can get pretty complicated, so may I propose a solution (one that I don't particularly like but I'll propose anyway)? On worlds with little change in ownership (ex: El Dorado), we could just put the date of ownership change (although by the same token, a planet that never changes hands might be confusing if there is only a founding date...).--S.gage 16:05, 22 August 2011 (UTC)