
[Q] Are there any other Classic or MT Sectors which can be run
with this program? I looked for the Sunbane FTP archive but
couldn't find it.

[A] Several years ago, Digest Group Publications (DGP) released
about thirty-five sectors to an archive they had at GEnie. Mark
Cook and Mike Metlay, two Traveller Mailing List members,
transferred these sectors over to the Sunbane FTP archive which
was _the_ Traveller archive back in those days. It was even
administered by Dan Corrin who once also ran the TML back before
James Perkins was doing it. Unfortunately, Dan changed jobs (as
system administrators are wont to do), and the Traveller archive
at Sunbane is now quite defunct (i.e. non-existent). Fortunately,
however, I made copies of the sectors on my hard drive just in
case such an event were to transpire, and I can email them to you
in pkziped/uuencoded or pkziped/mime-encoded format.

Alternately, you can find them online:

   http://deceased.hb.north.de/hosts/bakunin/traveller
   ftp://elendor.sbs.nau.edu/pub/rpg/traveller/sectors

I also included with this package a short program that attempts
to separate these (Sunbane-format) sector files into subsector
files which Galactic can read. Check out section2.exe which in
the section2 directory.

A word of warning, however. At present, section2 won't work on
a sector file in which any of the worlds are unnamed. This is a
significant problem, because the majority of the sectors from
Sunbane are incomplete, particularly when it comes to world
names. What I figure happened is that DGP must have had a
program to shoot out a bunch of sector data for the entire
Imperium and surrounding areas, but apparently they had to go
in and do most of the world naming by hand, and they just never
got around to it for many of these sectors, or if they did get
around to it, they got to it after the sectors had already been
released. The thirteen classic sectors I included with Galactic
v2.0 are the only sectors of the Sunbane archive (aside from two
which seem to be unofficial) which contained complete data (i.e.
where all the worlds have names).

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[Q] Any ideas for fixing the problem?

[A] There are a few different ways I can think of in which the
incomplete sectors could be incorporated into this program. The
first would be to simply make-up names for the unnamed worlds.
The second would be to simply put a period "." as the world name
for all the unnamed worlds. Galactic will interpret this as
meaning that the world has no name.
   A third way would entail going through old DGP Traveller
Digests & copying the world names into the data files. It seems
that after DGP released its incomplete sector data to GEnie, it
continued to work on the data and finished naming the worlds of
a few more sectors. It then published this data in its Traveller
Digest Magazine. Hence, it would relatively easy to take one of
the incomplete Sunbane sectors and simply add world names to it
from the sector data published in the Traveller Digest issue
covering that sector.

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[Q] Would that be legal?

[A] Under current policy, I'm guessing that it's condoned.
   Roger Sanger (rodge@cyberspace.com) recently purchased the
copyrights to the old DGP material and said on 16-Oct-96 (see
the Traveller Copyright Archive at the bottom of the main help
page) that he considers much of this data to be background
info, and that he feels it should be open game for Marc Miller
or his designees to republish. Marc, without making things too
terribly explicit, seems on the same date to have indicated
his okay to our use of this data.
   I have to admit that I still worry that Marc or some future
holder of the Traveller copyrights may reverse this policy at
some point in the future (as TSR did with respect to fan-
authored, AD&D-compatible material). He might even say that he
never actually gave permission in the first place, that it was
a misunderstanding (this was also TSR's claim, see my homepage
for more information about all this).
   Perhaps this is just the paranoid side of me coming out,
but I can't help but think how such a scenario would raise
interesting legal questions with respect to the copyright-
ability of UWP data. Given its nature (just a bunch of
randomly generated statistics), I'm not at all certain how a
court would rule. The world names, of course, particularly if
they were not randomly generated, might be viewed as a
separate matter entirely, and the relation between those
names and the UWP stats of a series of given worlds might,
likewise, fall under some rationality for copyright
protection, but fortunately, at least at present, we don't
have to worry about such legal maneuvering, as premission to
use this data has been given (albeit vaguely).

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[Q] Is there any way to be 100% safe?

[A] I think that if Imperium Games granted the TML an explicit
license for the purpose of developing Traveller sectors, then
we would probably be on pretty firm ground. That would be sort
of the ideal situation, where the fans themselves are constantly
contributing to the official setting, and, of course, distributing
that setting via CD-ROM and/or FTP would drop production costs to
such a level that, really, there would be no upper limit with
respect to how much work could be accepted. I'm not sure if this
idea is very realistic, however. It represents a big change in the
way that things are done in the RPG publishing industry, and
Imperium Games may not be willing to take such a high-profile risk.
   Because of these concerns, I think perhaps the best option for
netters is to just start an alternate Traveller universe and
not worry about trying to keep up with the official setting. No
doubt, most TMLers will shy away from this option, first because
it involves starting from scratch, but second, and even more so,
because they are interested in participating in the advancement
of the "official" setting. This, of course, was Digest Group's
original interest, and they did quite well for quite a long time
in advancing the setting that GDW initially created, but
conflicts over where to take the setting inevitably happened, and
the end result, as we all know, is that DGP bailed out. In short,
it's a choice over which of the two is more important: absolute
creative freedom or being "official".

