Fwurg

[Mercury]

I noticed a discrepancy between the way the Active Sun special is used and the way it is described in the rules.

According to the rules, Active Sun applies to "Any Goldilocks Orbit or Cold Orbit" and explicitly mentions in the description "Note: This special applies to a single orbit only. It does not apply to the star itself and thus only one orbit is affected, not all orbits of the star."

However while the de-jure description is clear, de-facto the special is set as a special that applies to the star. These are the examples I could find, which I believe to be exhaustive:

• Brìghde & Caoimhe - Applied to star (Sundarian Federation)
• Shas - Applied to star (Unified Republic of Darya)
• CEDACEC0 - Applied to star (IO Protocol)
• Nevasa - Applied to star (Hiocan Society)
• Carcharoth Star and Pruela - Applied to both star and planet (Inter-System Charter Company)
• Naavin - Applied to planet only (Corporation for intergalactic exploration of Xi)

At first I though "Everyone is doing it wrong except Xi", but in actuality, nobody is doing this correctly. And with very good reason.

The Active Sun special applies to an -orbit- rather than a star or a planet. In fact, it can be applied to an orbit which doesn't feature any planets whatsoever (though I cannot imagine why you'd want that). However orbits don't have a data-entry, only planets and stars do. As a result, we're stuck improvising and adding the special to either a planet or a star, which is always wrong by the letter of the rules.

Now, stars already describe the number of hot, gold and cold orbits they have, so overwriting the default for the star type is easy and conceptually having an "Active Sun" apply to a sun makes a lot of conceptual sense, so almost everyone has gone with the star, rather than the planet, which admittedly is more precise but makes less conceptual sense.

Active Sun is the only special with this problem. While many specials apply only to worlds in specific orbits, Active Sun is the only special that is applied directly to an orbit.

For these reasons, I would like to propose that we make the current de-facto standard official. This would mean that from now we always apply Active Sun to the star instead of to an orbit. This would require some rewriting of the special, but in reality it would not change anything for anyone with this special except two Fringe Worlds which we can easily edit manually.

What do people think?

[Brend]

Sounds good. It's not a real change, and it handles the problem neatly.

[Chriz]

I agree, we need clarity on where to put it.

[Elmer]

Interesting issue, I agree with the chosen way of solving it.