So, for my BattleTech game I've been increasingly frustrated by my inability to rely on the Internet's planet generators... they are always too realistic, too earth-like, or lack the details I would need for a BattleTech-style writeup. I could write them up by hand and just make up the details, but I'm someone who enjoys random tables and being surprised by the world unfolding around the heroes, and I hate coming up with planet details myself anyway.
So, I made my own generator to do the work for me. Link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?bylfbyb5wb3xey5I'm looking for input on it. As a brief blurb on my techniques for writing up the tables and statistics in it:
I basically just downloaded all of the Sarna BattleTech wiki's planetary data, put it into a spreadsheet, and gnawed on those numbers a while until I felt I had a good concept of distributions. For example, with the USIIR rating, there is a .75 to .85 correlation between a planet's Technological Sophistication, Industrial Development, and Industrial Output ratings, but they only have a .25 to .35 correlation with Raw Material dependence, and Agricultural Dependence has a mere 0.05 (tops) correlation with any other USIIR rating, and none of them have a strong correlation with planetary population. Or, while there were some exceptions, the Surface Conditions table for gravity, air, water, etc. is accurate to like 90-95% of the wiki.
At first it was entirely random with no roll modifiers between sections with as close a correlation to the wiki as I could get, but after my first test yielded a A-A-A-A-A rated toxic desert, I decided to fix that a little, adjusting random table numbers to make more sense, and adding modifier tables so that on average the wiki would still be correct, but worthless hunks of dirt would be less likely to have thriving civilizations and paradise earth-like planets would be more likely to.
Also, I'm not satisfied with the population calculation; it doesn't account for planetary habitability (even though planetary habitability seems to have a low correlation in this setting, probably due to habitation domes and things) but also it doesn't represent the Sarna averages; it ranges from ~5,000 to ~7-billion, but in BattleTech the average planet has almost 2 billion residents. I spent several hours trying to do some problem solving with multiple variables to make the formula Population=Q*x^(2d6 roll * k), but gave up, eventually going with Population=Q*e^(2d6 roll * k). If anyone can do such complex math solutions better than I, feel free to tell me what the solution is! XD But at least I can put off this gap between my system and the currently written-up BattleTech worlds as "the worlds that got written up are the big, important ones--the ones without write-ups are probably much smaller, so my system is probably more accurate..." but it's a shallow comfort :P
Anyway. Take a look at it, tell me what you think; I don't think my group will be going to a new planet for a while, but when they do I hope to quickly generate some planets on-the-fly during contract negotiations, so they can decide on whether to accept the contract based on whether the planet is appropriate to their forces _as well_ as the actual pay rate and things. And hopefully, after some comments I can finish polishing it off, then leave a more satisfactory copy on the forums for people to use.