The primary/companion distinction is purely a game label thing.  It has no bearing on the stability of the system.  The system *will* effectively orbit around a much heavier star, whether humans label it primary or not.

In real astronomy, when a multiple-star system is detected, they are generally assigned designation in order from brightest down to dimmest.  This can lead to interesting situations when it 1st looks like a brighter star and a dimmer star, labeled A & B, later turn out to be a trinary, with B actually being brighter than A1 or A2, but dimmer than their combined brightness.  And of course, brightest doesn't *necessarily* mean most massive, either.

I would expect that Traveller does the same for 'primary stars' as it does for 'mainworlds': there's no physical significance, it's just what the Imperium considers to *be* the primary star or main world.  As such I wouldn't worry about it at all, unless some other part of the generation rules call for the primary to be the heaviest.

On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 11:50 AM, Christopher Sean Hilton <xxxxxx@vindaloo.com> wrote:
I'm still busy at work on my star system generator. I've been pretty
diligent about posting my progress to github. For now it's still a
private repo but I'll give an invitation to any fellow github coders
who ask. Having said that I anticipate that I will make the repo public
shortly. When I last wrote about this I was implementing moons for
worlds and gas giants and generally cleaning up the code. That stuff
is done. I'm moving on to systems with multiple stars.

When working with multiple stars I think I caught a game system error
in the rules. This was partially, but not completely addressed by the
errata unless I missed something. When you generate a system using the
CT rules you can end up with a system whose orbital companion star is
more massive than it's primary. If the two stars aren't a close binary
couple, I'm assuming that orbital dynamics makes such a system
unstable. I feel very safe in that assumption but I will still ask: Is
this a correct assumption?

As I said before, I was able to use the errata to fix part of this. In
my first cut I used the original Book 6 rules which generated Dwarf
stars. Those rules generated lots of anomalies. So, I looked at my
copy of the T5 Rules and the situation still isn't addressed.

To fix the problem in my generator I wrote code that can swap two
stars in the system. When I detect a primary that's lighter than it's
companion, I swap them before planet generation.

[Q] Does my assumption that the heavy companion, light primary system
isn't stable hold up?

[Q] Did I miss something in the CT rules that was supposed to prevent
this from happening in the first place?

[Q] Is there a mechanism in the T5 rules to address the situation or
did I miss something that prevents it?

[Q] Is my fix, swap the heaviest star into the primary slot,
reasonable?

--
Chris

      __o          "All I was trying to do was get home from work."
    _`\<,_           -Rosa Parks
___(*)/_(*)____.___o____..___..o...________ooO..._____________________
Christopher Sean Hilton                    [chris/at/vindaloo/dot/com]
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