First Landings

kenl511 wrote:Buying a license to produce our goods on your colony, I could see this as a major part of big businesses, licensing updates for products! We just collect our monthly fee from the accounts you set up on departure. We send you digital copies of plans and formulas. Hey maximum income stream for minimal production! And we charge you for the years you are enroute, too!

Software upgrades for the life of your subscription! And our LOW LOW price on proprietary hardware upgrades to drive that new software! Now how much would you pay?

saber964 wrote:If you want a recommendation on a couple of Mars themed books try The Martian Race by Gregory Benford and The Martian by Andy Weir which is being released as a movie this fall staring Matt Damon.

Thought the book was good, and I'm waiting for the sequel. Where he has to fix all the things that to go wrong on the mother ship as it returns to pick him up, if that wasn't a big fat hint of a sequel then what is?

SWM wrote:

kenl511 wrote:Buying a license to produce our goods on your colony, I could see this as a major part of big businesses, licensing updates for products! We just collect our monthly fee from the accounts you set up on departure. We send you digital copies of plans and formulas. Hey maximum income stream for minimal production! And we charge you for the years you are enroute, too!

Software upgrades for the life of your subscription! And our LOW LOW price on proprietary hardware upgrades to drive that new software! Now how much would you pay?

Probably more than we like, if terrestrial experience is anything to go by. It does help account for interstellar wars as soon as the technology for safe, easy hypertravel became available. "You have sown the wind, Microsoft - now reap the whirlwind...."

I'm not completely clear on the logistics of Colony Ships. I suppose that they are built to land because they were dismantled at the target location. Yet they were built in orbit. I seem to remember something about Grayson's Colony Ship being scavenged for parts and I think I vaguely remember that it was kept in orbit? But sooner or later its orbit would decay if that was the case, so I'm not sure my memory is intact on this one.

It took 674 years for Grayson's Colony Ship to reach its destination. (Trips to the promised land are always long? Good thing they had a ship, took them half the time it took Moses ETA=>Distance lol) RFC doesn't believe in automation, so someone had to pilot the ship the entire trip -- at least monitor and make course corrections. No? Going in and out of stasis often enough would ensure aging and possible sickness, it seems. That meant that at the end of their journey, someone onboard needed to be able to land. What am I missing?

It certainly seems as if at least a rudimentary artificial intelligence was deployed to monitor for dangerous galactic phenomena, natural or anomalous. "Danger Will Robinsons! Hey, hey, HEYYYYY, someone had better wake up! Your heading is for a disaster!"


Known colony ships

⦁ The ⦁Prometheus was the first interstellar colony ship launched by humanity. Her departure from the Sol System marked the beginning of the Diaspora of Man.
⦁ The Gideon, a sublight cryoship, departed Earth in the early 4th Century PD to bring the Reverend Austin Grayson and his Church of Humanity Unchained to the Yeltsin's Star System. It took 674 T-years to make the journey. ( Companion)
⦁ The Jason was a sublight vessel used by Roger Winton and his followers to travel to Manticore.
⦁ The Icarus was the first Warshawski sail-using colony ship sent into space by humanity. Unlike other colony ships which were dismantled at the target location, she remained in use for over two hundred T-years.

cthia wrote:I'm not completely clear on the logistics of Colony Ships. I suppose that they are built to land because they were dismantled at the target location. Yet they were built in orbit.

If they were built in orbit, then they can be dismantled in orbit. Sub-light colony ships would have been designed to provide raw materials to the colony and be made to easily come apart in manageable pieces that could be landed in the shame shuttles used to ferry colonists to the surface.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm not completely clear on the logistics of Colony Ships. I suppose that they are built to land because they were dismantled at the target location. Yet they were built in orbit.

If they were built in orbit, then they can be dismantled in orbit. Sub-light colony ships would have been designed to provide raw materials to the colony and be made to easily come apart in manageable pieces that could be landed in the shame shuttles used to ferry colonists to the surface.

On the flipside, you could expect a portion of the colony ship to be left in orbit as the core of a space station (if you were expecting to continue to have space presence.) A sublight ship with a hydrogen catcher field could be designed so the Fusion engine section became an asteroid smelter for the basis of orbital industry.

Lots of options - I guess it's all in what your future colony's priorities are.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm not completely clear on the logistics of Colony Ships. I suppose that they are built to land because they were dismantled at the target location. Yet they were built in orbit.

If they were built in orbit, then they can be dismantled in orbit. Sub-light colony ships would have been designed to provide raw materials to the colony and be made to easily come apart in manageable pieces that could be landed in the shame shuttles used to ferry colonists to the surface.

Well, the thing about that re the Graysons is that they were abnegating/eschewing technology. It would seem blasphemous to take the sort of equipment along with them that would have been available in orbit to assemble a Colony Ship, even if there was room for what I imagine is gargantuan tech.

Moreover, in Earth orbit there is an ever present support structure emplaced -- docking/space-station and the like -- that wouldn't be available at the destination. Is it possible to build a ship on a C.S. scale maintaining shuttle-manageable size pieces throughout the design? It seems inevitable to me that there's going to be a significant 'core structure remaining in orbit' problem.

Theemile's suggestion of having the foresight to plan for other uses of the ship in space is reasonable and brilliant but would supersede Grayson's religious slant on the use of technology.

cthia wrote:Well, the thing about that re the Graysons is that they were abnegating/eschewing technology. It would seem blasphemous to take the sort of equipment along with them that would have been available in orbit to assemble a Colony Ship, even if there was room for what I imagine is gargantuan tech.

A disassembled Ship wouldn't necessarily mean "technology" and wouldn't require "gargantuan tech" to disassemble it. It all depends on how the ship was designed and constructed.

Grayson would have used a ship that broke down into prefab housing pieces and whatever minimal tech Austin Grayson was willing to accept as necessary. Using a starship to escape technology would seem "blasphemous" enough that some survival tech -- like primitive gene-engineering tools -- would be inevitable.

Other colonists, like the Manticore group, would opt for more usable ship features, like bootstrapping orbital industry, or a basic space station/weather satellite, for recycling/repurposing their ship when it reached its destination.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:I'm not completely clear on the logistics of Colony Ships. I suppose that they are built to land because they were dismantled at the target location. Yet they were built in orbit.

If they were built in orbit, then they can be dismantled in orbit. Sub-light colony ships would have been designed to provide raw materials to the colony and be made to easily come apart in manageable pieces that could be landed in the shame shuttles used to ferry colonists to the surface.

And if kept in a quite high orbit (geosync; for example) won't degrade in any timeframe the colonist will care about (thousands and thousands of years)

And with fusion powered shuttles it's no problem to reach that orbit to strip the ship, or just offload supplies.

The differences between any interstellar ship and a planetary shuttle are huge. Far larger than the differences between a sea freighter and a row-boat. Even a pre-hyper sublight colony ship has to be large enough to haul tens of thousands of people(even in suspended animation), all the stuff they need to build settlements on a potentially hostile world and crucially, the fuel to accelerate and decelerate, as well as keep minimal power online for the entire journey.

The design of colony ships really depend on what resources, materials and technology are available. I'd probably go with a large central cylinder(allows spin-generated gravity) containing all the key components for the structure to be a ship. Then attach however many detachable modules are needed for the colonists and their future homes to the cylinder. Some of those 'drop pods' would actually be jettisonable fuel tanks, depending on the means of propulsion. The colony pods would be equipped to survive atmospheric entry, gently land and unfold into various buildings/installions. The core can remain in orbit and become a space station.

That's your basic, bare-bones purpose-built colony ship. Later on, there are probably corporations specialising in colonisation services. They'll sell you a system, provide a colony kit tailored to your cultural/political requirements and the planet, lease transport ships and advisors and then run a courier boat through every year or so to check everything's alright. Maybe scrape up an old warship or two for system defense.

Much like the Manticore Colony Trust, except with multiple customers.

I wouldn't be surprised to find one or more such companies based on Manticore. There's textev of colony expeditions using the Junction to travel north of Basilisk and hence into virgin territory unlikely to encounter the OFS within a prolonger's lifetime. Having access to Manticore's colonisation experience would also be very useful(three different planetary ecologies, none made for humans).