Alternate Ship Design Systems
- Thread starter robject
- Start date
This is somewhat -- okay: rather -- off-topic, but for a truly excellent fiction series about what happens to a colony ship after its 300+ year trip from Point A to Point B, I recommend "The Book of the Short Sun" by Gene Wolfe. It consists of:
-- On Blue's Waters
-- In Green's Jungles
-- Return to the Whorl
It will help if you read his related works: Book of the New Sun (a tetralogy/quintology about the world of the colony ship's origin), and the Book of the Long Sun (a tetralogy about the colony ship before it has reached its destination).
The short summary is that the occupants descend in tech level, but no lower than approximately the Renaissance. And different towns inside the huge "Rama ship" have very different forms of government.
(The ship has three populations: "sleepers" (in low berths, to be awakened upon arrival), Crew (various hyper-modern types who maintain the TL17 or so of the colony ship), and the regular folk who are born, live, and die in the ship as it travels.)
-- On Blue's Waters
-- In Green's Jungles
-- Return to the Whorl
It will help if you read his related works: Book of the New Sun (a tetralogy/quintology about the world of the colony ship's origin), and the Book of the Long Sun (a tetralogy about the colony ship before it has reached its destination).
The short summary is that the occupants descend in tech level, but no lower than approximately the Renaissance. And different towns inside the huge "Rama ship" have very different forms of government.
(The ship has three populations: "sleepers" (in low berths, to be awakened upon arrival), Crew (various hyper-modern types who maintain the TL17 or so of the colony ship), and the regular folk who are born, live, and die in the ship as it travels.)
I think 100 km/sec is too slow. 1,000 km/sec would be more reasonable. A fusion torch drive could reach that velocity and large scale fusion reactors should be possible for generation ships. This reduces the travel time to 1,320 years or about 66 generations or 16.5 human lifetimes measured from birth to death. The exhaust velocity of the rocket would have to be about 2,000 km/sec. According to my Starflight handbook the specific impulse of a fusion rocket would range from 2500 seconds to 200,000 seconds. This gives a maximum change of velocity of between 2500 * 10 m/sec = 25 km/sec and 200,000 * 10 m/sec = 2000 km/sec. I'll assume the later. The book states that the expected thrust to mass ratio to be from 0.001 m/sec to 0.0001 m/sec. It should take from 32 years to 317 years to reach the velocity to reach 1,000 km/sec and another 32 to 317 years to slow down again. inbetween you have an expected cruise of about 1,320 years. Even with fusion rockets your still looking at a generationship, that is fusion that occurs inside the ship. If instead you had fusion pulse outside the ship, such as hydrogen bombs exploded behind, a pusher plate can resist higher exhaust velocities and travel the distance in only 132 years. Access to hydrogen bombs would be restricted however and you would need 200,000 of them. Most likely any group that wanted to leave the Solar System would have access to only the slow fusion multi generation ships.
Drakon
SOC-14 1K
Well, I am not so sure. Especially if we are talking about aboard a generation ship. There will be a tendancy aboard ship, due to the nature of the environment, both external as well as the artifical one created by the ship, to maintain training and maintenence. It is a matter of life and death, for the entire crew if the ship gets maintained.
This would tend to instill a certain conservative aspect in the culture. Doing things the old way, means staying alive. Changing things means taking a risk. A risk that is more readily apparent aboard ship, with an external hostile environment, than it is dirtside.
Granted, you will have whisper effect over the eons. We used to note particular phrases developed at sea that would become part of our common vernacular, but our wives, sweethearts and loved ones ashore would get very confused by. My wife used to call it "nuclear slang". And out patrols were only 3 months long.
But there are technologies now that will reduce that, video and recording technologies that will preserve the original words, meanings, phrasing and such of a language.
This would depend on the amount of maintenence the ship requires as well as how well a system has to be understood in order to repair it. Higer levels of maintenence and more detailed knowledge of the ship should prevent such social decay. The more automation the ship employs, the more likely this decent over the eons.
Which is kinda odd if you think about it. A lower tech space ship may be better in this respect than a higher tech one. It would require more maintenence, a better understanding of the systems and technology, and so that information would demand preservation. A higher tech ship would be more automated, leaving the passengers more likely to devolve.
Worldships require energy input in the form of an artificial sun, if that is provided, a carefully balnced ecology can do the rest. The ship could be designed to support an ecology of stone age tribes of humans. If the inhabitants know something of how the ship works, they may be more able to mess if up. If the humans are primitive, there actions can be more anticipated by the ship's builders. Perhaps the ship's original crew might voluntarily raise stone age children and only teach them the basics of a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. The humans in otherwords would be part of the food chain and have to compete with other animals for food and from being food. The ship would have to be vast, perhaps rivaling the largest of the Island Three colonies. The ship would also have to be fully automated and provide a source of sunlight for the ecology to use. Gradually through the millenia, the humans would develop a civilization hopefully in time to settle a planet upon arrival.
Drakon
SOC-14 1K
Hmmm... You are not a parent. are you? I don't see you getting that many volunteers to raise "stone age children". (In many respects this is a redundant term
) Besides which, knowledge is power, and so you will find some who will cheat, teach their kids some form of forbidden knowledge so that they can get ahead.
Now however, if you started off with a population and something wiped out the adults, leaving only the kids behind, then yeah, that would do the same thing. You would still end up having to recreate civilization from scratch. Although I see a lot of that as wasted effort.
Heck, history can serve as an example of what NOT to do.
Now however, if you started off with a population and something wiped out the adults, leaving only the kids behind, then yeah, that would do the same thing. You would still end up having to recreate civilization from scratch. Although I see a lot of that as wasted effort.
Heck, history can serve as an example of what NOT to do.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
How would you stop disease from eventually killing everyone onboard a generation ship?
Actually I am a Parent, I'm only presenting this as a science fiction scenario, I'm not saying that we should actualy do this, nor do I advocate 10,000+ year generation ship expeditions. It just seems to me that 10,000+ years exceeds the span of recorded human history. The only example I can think of are stone age humans living an unchanging life, there were tens of thousands of years of human history were modern humans lived as stone age primitives, their lifestyle didn't change at all. I think the only way to guarantee that recognizable modern humans will arrive ten thousand years from now would be in a primitive state, the humans left on Earth would have engineered themselves out of existance, merged with machines and possibly become near immortal with downloadable memories and would otherwise cease to be human, its hard to imagine 10,000 years of technological process, and its all too imaginable that they would be replaced by machines, wipe themselves out and so forth. A generation ship with primitive humans would pass tens of millenia unchanged however. At the appointed time the ship's computer would introduce ideas that would cause the development of human civilization. The ship could be launched as an insurance policy to see to the continuation of the species. The generation ship would be fully automated. As for living a primitive existance, the ship would see to it that the internal environment remains unchanging throughout the 10,000 years, which is more than can be said of Earth. People would hunt, gather, pass down oral traditions and draw paintings in caves. The ships computer would regulate the number of wild beasts that appear in the environment and serve as food for the hunters. Some predators would also be produced as replaced as necessary as the humans hunted them down. The ship would have cloning tanks to produce as many wolves, bears, and mountain lions as required. The prey animals would be more numerous and would require less management. The human population would be kept down by increasing the number of predetors. This wild environment would keep the humans on their toes and ready to tackle a new planet when their destination is reached. Perhaps a smaller ship could arrive ahead of the generation ship and begin terraforming the planet before the humans arrive.
Drakon
SOC-14 1K
I see what you are saying, and as a sci fi setting, its not a bad one. But I think the setup does not work. I don't see humans as being able to revert back to that stage, voluntarily.
There are a couple other issues with this that kinda bug me.
I don't know about keeping the environment the same. Some consistency is required I grant, but I would go for a more dynamic environment. Change the seasons from time to time.
You are talking about wiping out human civilization and starting over from scratch. And by introducing predators to keep down the human population, you are denying these folks all the tools we have developed over the centuries to deal with that threat. You are in essense condemning untold generations to a life of fear and misery.
Things break. Moving parts wear out, electronic parts break down, burn up, and fail. The ship will require maintenence from time to time, and that means a high tech understanding of how the ship works. So you are going to need some cadre of people to act "as God" and take care of the ship. Without it, the mission is a failure and the people end up dead.
There is one tool that you are not denying your population. That is their brain. And you are putting a threat to their survival in the boat with him. Now humans have only one evolutionary advantage, and that is his brain. To deal with threats, folks will think, and figure out how to remove the threat.
So your cloning vats are going to have to be heavily armoured and guarded against the time when those humans finally figure out that removing the vats, removes the threat not just for themselves, but for their children and their children's children. No matter what tricks and traps you use, (which have to have a diode quality, allow predators to escape, but keep everything else out.) people will figure out a work around.
Or to put it another way, "It is impossible to make things fool proof, because fools are so ingenious."
Okay, now supposed that the "gods" or "fairies" who run the ship, do their best to keep out of the settler's way. Hide themselves, isolate themselves from the rest of the ship, (or alternately, isolate the colonists from the rest of the ship, and keep the "fairies" out of the hab module) That satisfies the maintenence problem, and gets what you are looking for.
[The isolation could be due to some kind of accident or irrepairable damage. An interconnecting module got smacked by a rock and destroyed. Most of your space suits lost, and the access ports to the hab mod got fused or welded shut. All this can be set up by the original accident.]
[Of course, if the accident gets too implausible, it could be deliberate sabotage. Some nutcase wanting to do just this type of experiment.]
[Hmm... this dues ex machina of an accident could do a lot of things. Supposed that the trip was supposed to take only a couple of years at FTL speeds, but the accident destroyed the FTL drive? Now you got to travel slower, turning a 3 year mission into a 13,000 year mission.]
But it may be difficult to keep humans in a hunter gatherer, or primative mode. You will see a culture, or several build up during the trip. You will see technical advancement. You will see the people who may have started out as primative becoming quite advanced by the voyage's end.
There are certain meme sets and things you can do with the environment that might fallicitate keeping humans in a primative condition. Things have to be good, (and your predators kinda screw that up) and not present much in the way of challenges to the people. Problem solving builds technology. Challenges to life and happiness builds problems. So the fewer challenges to their life and happiness your people have, the more likely they are to stay in a primitive cultural state.
But they won't be ready to tackle a new planet, whether its been scouted or terriformed before hand or not. Why would they go from the ship which, in order to keep the folks primative, would have to be a paradise, to a new world fraught with dangers and terrors and more problems and risks than the heaven you have created for them? How do you expel them, voluntarily, from heaven?
Also, wihtout the technical information available to date, you are going to have a high loss rate or shorter life span than normal.
There are a couple other issues with this that kinda bug me.
I don't know about keeping the environment the same. Some consistency is required I grant, but I would go for a more dynamic environment. Change the seasons from time to time.
You are talking about wiping out human civilization and starting over from scratch. And by introducing predators to keep down the human population, you are denying these folks all the tools we have developed over the centuries to deal with that threat. You are in essense condemning untold generations to a life of fear and misery.
Things break. Moving parts wear out, electronic parts break down, burn up, and fail. The ship will require maintenence from time to time, and that means a high tech understanding of how the ship works. So you are going to need some cadre of people to act "as God" and take care of the ship. Without it, the mission is a failure and the people end up dead.
There is one tool that you are not denying your population. That is their brain. And you are putting a threat to their survival in the boat with him. Now humans have only one evolutionary advantage, and that is his brain. To deal with threats, folks will think, and figure out how to remove the threat.
So your cloning vats are going to have to be heavily armoured and guarded against the time when those humans finally figure out that removing the vats, removes the threat not just for themselves, but for their children and their children's children. No matter what tricks and traps you use, (which have to have a diode quality, allow predators to escape, but keep everything else out.) people will figure out a work around.
Or to put it another way, "It is impossible to make things fool proof, because fools are so ingenious."
Okay, now supposed that the "gods" or "fairies" who run the ship, do their best to keep out of the settler's way. Hide themselves, isolate themselves from the rest of the ship, (or alternately, isolate the colonists from the rest of the ship, and keep the "fairies" out of the hab module) That satisfies the maintenence problem, and gets what you are looking for.
[The isolation could be due to some kind of accident or irrepairable damage. An interconnecting module got smacked by a rock and destroyed. Most of your space suits lost, and the access ports to the hab mod got fused or welded shut. All this can be set up by the original accident.]
[Of course, if the accident gets too implausible, it could be deliberate sabotage. Some nutcase wanting to do just this type of experiment.]
[Hmm... this dues ex machina of an accident could do a lot of things. Supposed that the trip was supposed to take only a couple of years at FTL speeds, but the accident destroyed the FTL drive? Now you got to travel slower, turning a 3 year mission into a 13,000 year mission.]
But it may be difficult to keep humans in a hunter gatherer, or primative mode. You will see a culture, or several build up during the trip. You will see technical advancement. You will see the people who may have started out as primative becoming quite advanced by the voyage's end.
There are certain meme sets and things you can do with the environment that might fallicitate keeping humans in a primative condition. Things have to be good, (and your predators kinda screw that up) and not present much in the way of challenges to the people. Problem solving builds technology. Challenges to life and happiness builds problems. So the fewer challenges to their life and happiness your people have, the more likely they are to stay in a primitive cultural state.
But they won't be ready to tackle a new planet, whether its been scouted or terriformed before hand or not. Why would they go from the ship which, in order to keep the folks primative, would have to be a paradise, to a new world fraught with dangers and terrors and more problems and risks than the heaven you have created for them? How do you expel them, voluntarily, from heaven?
Also, wihtout the technical information available to date, you are going to have a high loss rate or shorter life span than normal.
Well first off, the human population of the ship will be smaller than the human population of Stone Age Earth; this means fewer people scratching their heads and figuring things out and thus a slower rate of technological advancement. Also consider that the initial population could be quite few and a bunch of dedicated luddite nutcases, people who believe that humanity may destroy itself with all of its technological innovation, they are afraid that they might eventually invent something that destroys mankind.
The ship is an ace in the hole to ensure the survival of mankind, so therefore they learn to live as the cavemen did and raise their children and pass on these stone age survival skills. One main concern with the world they left was the prevalence of intelligent robots that act as servants. You see in the Solar System they left behind, no human needs to work, the robots do everything and humans follow their natural inclination toward laziness. Naturally it is feared that human will atrophy and become extinct living a race of robots with no master and will there fore rust away from disuse. Harsh measure were deemed necessary by the ship's builders to preserve the human race. Individual humans were considered a secondary consideration compared to preserving the human race as a whole.
The ship is an ace in the hole to ensure the survival of mankind, so therefore they learn to live as the cavemen did and raise their children and pass on these stone age survival skills. One main concern with the world they left was the prevalence of intelligent robots that act as servants. You see in the Solar System they left behind, no human needs to work, the robots do everything and humans follow their natural inclination toward laziness. Naturally it is feared that human will atrophy and become extinct living a race of robots with no master and will there fore rust away from disuse. Harsh measure were deemed necessary by the ship's builders to preserve the human race. Individual humans were considered a secondary consideration compared to preserving the human race as a whole.
Actually what I'm talking about is leaving human civilization behind. The builders of the ship had fears that human civilization was going to destroy itself. If human civilization didn't destroy itself then the ship would arrive at its destination with humans waiting for them, but the point was this ship is an insurance policy in case the builder's fears were realized. If the human race did destroy itself, then this ship is a chance to restart humanity anew on a different planet. One of the possible ways that they think humanity may destroy itself was from an over reliance on technology in their daily lives. Humanity was going to atrophy to death or so they feared, so to combat this they decided to separate the technology (robots) from the humans on the ship, and this brings me to the next point.
The ship is fully automated, it has robots to repair itself and other robots. These robots stay out of the inhabited area unless they absolutely have to go there to perform ship maintenance. There is another habitate with no humans in it, only wild beasts and robot zookeepers. The animals are cloned from frozen tissue brought along on the ship for each animal type, this is to maintain genetic varity so that the animal populations don't inbreed. The resources of the starship are limited, if the humans hunted down all the predators and killed them, it would upset the ecological balance, so this second habitat has no humans in it, it is here that the adult animals are able to raise their young without human interference. When certain numbers of preditory beasts fall below a certain threshold then animals are transfered from one habitat to another. In the "Zoo" as the ship builders refered to it, predator animals typically outnumber prey animals. The robots provide sythetic meat for the predators to keep them alive and multiplying as a faster rate than the humans are killing them in the other habitat. If some humans get smart enough to find their way into the zoo, well all those predators can make their lives quite interesting until the robots catch them.
There are factories onboard the starship that produces robots from recycled material, some of these robots look human. When the ship nears the end of its journey, these android robots infiltrate themselves into the human habitat and act as "inventors". If human technological advancement is lagging, then these android "inventors" try to bring the humans up to speed before debarkation on the target planet.
What I've described above is the mission plan if everything goes as the ship builder's anticipated. Of course in science fiction rarely dos everything go as planned. One possible complication would be if the androids are accused of "witchcraft" and burned at the stake. the robots can't defend themselves as they have "Three Laws" programming in them that prevents them from harming humans, it allows them to release predators into the human habitat because they don't know for sure that a specific animal will kill a specific human and they don't watch, all they know is that predators are good for humanity in general in such a way that exercise is good for a human individual. But when a robot is confronted directly with a human that wants to kill it, it lets itself be destroyed. If on the otherhand there is a stray human who wandered where he shouldn't, the robots surround such a person and use tranquilizer darts to knock them out and bring them back to the human habitation. The robots try to keep the humans superstitious so there are taboos against wandering into certain sacred grounds, it is these same taboos that causes the "witch burning" later on. This is where the PCs typically enter the scene. An android scientist is being persecuted for making a particular "discovery". The android of course won't let on that he is a machine and acts human to the hilt so even the PCs think he is human. Of course this android character is a total pacifist and absolutely refuses to defend himself and so needs the PCs protection from the inquisition or whatever equivalent the ship has onboard. Eventually with the PCs help, the androids bring the humans to a level of technological sophistication that they are ready to settle the planet below. This all occurs toward the end of the journey of course.
This gives me an idea. Why not have a generation ship campaign? The idea is this, the players roll up 1st level characters at TL 0 and then go on an adventure aboard the generation starship. The characters accumulate sufficient experience points to advance a level and the the GM says, "One thousand years later" and the players advance their characters 1 level, they have the same ability scores as before and skills, perhaps the same physical attributes as well, but these are not the same characters, they have different names and are reequipped at TL 1, their skills and Feats are altered accordingly. These characters do some adventuring and accumulate experience points sufficient to advance another level and then the GM says, "One thousand years later" the characters are advanced another level, are given different names and TL 2 equipment. By the time the characters reach TL 8, 9,000 years has elapsed and the starship nears its destination planet and the characters are at 9th level.
Drakon
SOC-14 1K
Okay here is where you lose me. Things do not always fail in predictable ways. Sensors are limited, and that is why I have a job. To fix thing that cannot always be fixed automatically, or figured out by robots.
I work as an electronics technian at the local atom smasher. I keep the big machine working, so physist and the rest get to play. You are either talking here a highly intelligent AI, with decades of dealing with unique and unforseen problems and breakdowns. Or you are talking about adapable human brains to figure out what is broken and how to fix it. Otherwise, the ship will break down, and the robots won't know what to do to fix it.
There have been many attempts to automate the troubleshooting and repair operations, but these have proven some of the most intractible problems ever created. Things happen that you don't expect. Components that are not supposed to burn up, do. Sometimes a failure in one component sets things up that causes later failure of other components later on.
I don't see you doing this without some very serious AI. And since that AI would be controlling the ship and the lives and destinies of its passengers, it would in effect be God. Hmmm.. that might be an interesting idea right there.
Umm.. no, that won't work. Go through Asimov's stories in "I, Robot" again. He goes all sorts of variations in the "3 Laws Safe". Ambiguity in target does not make the target inhuman. Such actions will result in harm to humans, and as such violate the first law of robotics.
If you start abstracting this, as in specific humans, you are really going to get problems. But then again, for a game environment, maybe that is just what you want. <insert evil laugh here>
I suppose these robots don't have as sophisticated an interpretation of Asmov's three laws as Asmov's robots did. And there is also the zeroth law which states that a Robot cannot harm or allow to come to harm the human race. This zeroth law supercedes the other three. One way to harm the human race is to protect all the individual humans from all harm and danger during the trip so that life is unchallenging and the humans will be unready for the dangers that await them when they arrive at the planet. A population that deliberately controlls its population and lives a life of ease for 10,000 years is going to have problems when circumstances change. That is why the human race needs to be preserved as it is now, one that is willing to take up the struggle and expand.
A population that has grown used to living in a generation ship for 10,000 years may refuse to come out when it eventually arrives. Especially a generation ship where life has grown too easy and all the problems have been solved by robots. The robots themselves realize that their presence is bad for humans, because if they are among them, the robots must follow all their commands and protect them from harm. Protecting them from harm would mean killing off all the predators which may kill humans and thereby unbalance the ecology.
The robots sent ahead to terraform the planet don't have humans among them, they are obeying the last command they received from a human which was to terraform this planet, they haven't been told that humans will eventually settle this planet, so they strive to create a balanced ecology with dangerous predators to check the number of herbivores, the ecology is modeled after an Earth without humans. So in 10,000 years forests spring up across the planet and the planet is a primeval wilderness and when the robots are satified with their work they destroy themselves.
The robots running the generation ship avoid contact with humans and so can not be commanded by them. Their last orders were to stay away from all the ships human inhabitants and run the ship. The robots that are sent into the human habitats to perform maintenance do not have a sense of hearing and cannot read lips, so if a human approaches it, it cannot understand and performs its duties so long as performing those duties does not harm humans. These maintenance robots communicate with the other robots via radio waves. The robots that are androids are programmed to pretend to be human, but if any human commands them, they must obey, but if their disguise is convincing enough, no one bothers to ask them whether they are a robot and so they don't volunteer this information. A typical android might disguise itself to look like a human that got separated and killed in some natural calamity or by preditors. The robots have cameras that watch everything that goes on with in the habitat but under a 24 hour time delay, they see what happened 24 hours ago so if any humans are in danger, there is nothing the robots can do to save them, but they know which humans are dead, and if that human died alone, an android can be built to look like that human. the cameras follow all the humans throughout their lives and can pick up sound too, so the android has a good idea as to how to behave so as to convince the other humans that it is the human that it pretends to be. The androids are fairly fleshy too, so if they are cut open they bleed rather than expose wires, basically it is a synaptic interface between a robot brain and a flesh body, the flesh body is cloned from human stem cells that were taken from the dead human, usually the robots manage to aquire DNA samples from every human onboard the ship.
Ok the android inflitrates itself among the human population and takes the place of the human who had died of natural causes but no one knows about. The android then aquires some "inspiration" and begins inventing things that advance the tech level of the human society. People who lived among the human that the android pretends to be might get suspicous at this time, especially if that particular human has a reputation for being stupid or dumb, and suddenly having this person become a genious who begins inventing all sorts of things may get a little disturbing to that person's friends.
A population that has grown used to living in a generation ship for 10,000 years may refuse to come out when it eventually arrives. Especially a generation ship where life has grown too easy and all the problems have been solved by robots. The robots themselves realize that their presence is bad for humans, because if they are among them, the robots must follow all their commands and protect them from harm. Protecting them from harm would mean killing off all the predators which may kill humans and thereby unbalance the ecology.
The robots sent ahead to terraform the planet don't have humans among them, they are obeying the last command they received from a human which was to terraform this planet, they haven't been told that humans will eventually settle this planet, so they strive to create a balanced ecology with dangerous predators to check the number of herbivores, the ecology is modeled after an Earth without humans. So in 10,000 years forests spring up across the planet and the planet is a primeval wilderness and when the robots are satified with their work they destroy themselves.
The robots running the generation ship avoid contact with humans and so can not be commanded by them. Their last orders were to stay away from all the ships human inhabitants and run the ship. The robots that are sent into the human habitats to perform maintenance do not have a sense of hearing and cannot read lips, so if a human approaches it, it cannot understand and performs its duties so long as performing those duties does not harm humans. These maintenance robots communicate with the other robots via radio waves. The robots that are androids are programmed to pretend to be human, but if any human commands them, they must obey, but if their disguise is convincing enough, no one bothers to ask them whether they are a robot and so they don't volunteer this information. A typical android might disguise itself to look like a human that got separated and killed in some natural calamity or by preditors. The robots have cameras that watch everything that goes on with in the habitat but under a 24 hour time delay, they see what happened 24 hours ago so if any humans are in danger, there is nothing the robots can do to save them, but they know which humans are dead, and if that human died alone, an android can be built to look like that human. the cameras follow all the humans throughout their lives and can pick up sound too, so the android has a good idea as to how to behave so as to convince the other humans that it is the human that it pretends to be. The androids are fairly fleshy too, so if they are cut open they bleed rather than expose wires, basically it is a synaptic interface between a robot brain and a flesh body, the flesh body is cloned from human stem cells that were taken from the dead human, usually the robots manage to aquire DNA samples from every human onboard the ship.
Ok the android inflitrates itself among the human population and takes the place of the human who had died of natural causes but no one knows about. The android then aquires some "inspiration" and begins inventing things that advance the tech level of the human society. People who lived among the human that the android pretends to be might get suspicous at this time, especially if that particular human has a reputation for being stupid or dumb, and suddenly having this person become a genious who begins inventing all sorts of things may get a little disturbing to that person's friends.
I am sorry,
I have not backtracked all the way to the beginning of this discussion, so I am a little confused.
As I understand the concept of a generation ship, it is specifically because that tech does not exist to cross the distance given in any shorter time. (If a different reason was proposed, forgive me.)
If the tech does not exist for the humans to cross x amount of space in less than 10,000 years, why does that tech exist to allow the robots to cross the same distance with enough time to spare to spend even a small fraction of that 10,00 years terraforming the world? If the robots are allowed that long to territory, then the world is
A: a long way off the normal beaten path, AND
B: important enough to devote resources that would amount to the majority of the entire civilization’s budget for that entire 10,000 years. Therefore, the colony ship would unquestionably have the penultimate in experimental equipment, especially in drive tech. There would not be any "super x" technology to get the robots there ahead of the colonists, by any significant margin.
Again, if reasons that override these premises exist earlier in the discussion, then I am obviously out of line here. I am hard pressed however to imagine a scenario that would generate such a mission plan in the first place. In addition, if such a plan were devised how would it be feasible, or even possible, to stage it with such a wide separation between when the terraformers (the robots) arrive, and when the people do?
Pardon my confusion, maybe I am just plain confused anyway.
Peace
Mr Tek.
I have not backtracked all the way to the beginning of this discussion, so I am a little confused.
As I understand the concept of a generation ship, it is specifically because that tech does not exist to cross the distance given in any shorter time. (If a different reason was proposed, forgive me.)
If the tech does not exist for the humans to cross x amount of space in less than 10,000 years, why does that tech exist to allow the robots to cross the same distance with enough time to spare to spend even a small fraction of that 10,00 years terraforming the world? If the robots are allowed that long to territory, then the world is
A: a long way off the normal beaten path, AND
B: important enough to devote resources that would amount to the majority of the entire civilization’s budget for that entire 10,000 years. Therefore, the colony ship would unquestionably have the penultimate in experimental equipment, especially in drive tech. There would not be any "super x" technology to get the robots there ahead of the colonists, by any significant margin.
Again, if reasons that override these premises exist earlier in the discussion, then I am obviously out of line here. I am hard pressed however to imagine a scenario that would generate such a mission plan in the first place. In addition, if such a plan were devised how would it be feasible, or even possible, to stage it with such a wide separation between when the terraformers (the robots) arrive, and when the people do?
Pardon my confusion, maybe I am just plain confused anyway.
Peace
Mr Tek.
Mr. Tek said
Its not a matter of tech; its a matter of economics. The limiting factor is the exhaust velocity of state of the art rockets. If the exhaust velocity is 200 km/sec then the total change of velocity of a starship whose reaction mass takes up 50% in the Starship's initial mass is 200 km/sec. This is the cheapest form of transportation. A more expensive way to go would be laser sail. A giant laser accelerates a laser sail to 20% of the speed of light or 60,000 km/sec. Such a light sail separates into two parts, an outer ring that it 1000 km in diameter and an inner ring 100 km in diameter. A giant laser focuses on the 1000 km sail and accelerates the ship to 60,000 km/sec and then the ship cruises for 22 years and the the laser sail separates into an outer ring 1000 km in diameter with a hole in the center 100 km wide and the smaller 100 km wide sail. The 1000 km outer ring reflects the laser light projected from the Solar System to the smaller 100 km wide laser sail and slows it down. the total mass of the star ship is only 1000 tons for the payload and 1000 tons for the sail, but the expensive part is purchasing the services of a 1000 km wide laser sail and focusing lens for the duration of the mission. Not many can afford to travel to the stars this way so the payload constists of robots and a factory which can produce more of them out of local materials once the payload lands on the planet. The robots then produce more robots until there is enough robots in the labor force to begin terraforming the planet. Robots are more cost effective that way for the price of bringing them there. The humans take much longer to reproduce than robots, so they take the slow starship. Since it takes 10,000 years to get there, the robots make effective use of their time in terraforming the planet. The planet typically would not otherwise support humans except under domed settlement and if they are rushing a great expense to live under a dome on an uninhabitable planet, they might as well spend that time onboard a generation starship as it will take 10,000 years to properly terraform the planet in question to Earthlike conditions anyway. The worldship is huge on the order of billions of tons, and it is in the form of a cylinder 100 km wide and 500 km long, it rotates to simulate Earthlike gravity on its inner surface and the is a tall mountain range bisecting the cylinder into two segments each 250 km long. One segment houses the humans and on the other side of the mountain range is the "Zoo" where wild animals are raised by the robots. The only way to get to the Zoo from the habitiate is to either climb over the mountains or go through one of the tunnels underneath the mountains. The mountains are very high, about as tall as mount Everest.
Straybow
SOC-14 1K
Why have we sent robotic probes to the outer planets but haven't yet sent a live astronaut farther than the moon? Because life support is far larger and more complicated than simple power supply and radiation shielding for a computer and various electronic and mechanical systems on the probes.
Robots can be sent at a higher velocity because no life support system allows for higher fuel fraction. The robots should have a few millennia to work.
PS: Still waiting on that money.
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For a 100 ton ship, the fuel required for a jump-2 drive is 20 tons; the cost of this jump drive is therefore MCr4. A jump-6 drive for this craft would cost MCr12.
For a 400 ton ship, a jump-1 drive takes 40 tons of fuel, and costs only MCr5.
For a 300 ton ship, a jump-4 drive needs 120 tons of fuel, and costs MCr16.
This is untested. Opinions? [/quote]I mean this bit. Alternate rulesets for ship design.
BUt, I think I'll just assign this to the topic drift subsection, and return to silence.
That is all...
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