First Landings

munroburton wrote: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.

Any colony ship intended for a one-way voyage would, itself, be part of the "stuff they need to build settlements." A ship big enough to fulfill all of the functions you describe for the voyage would be a tremendous store of processed materials even if NOT designed to break down into shuttle sized bits to be reused as building materials.

Weird Harold wrote:

munroburton wrote: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.

Any colony ship intended for a one-way voyage would, itself, be part of the "stuff they need to build settlements." A ship big enough to fulfill all of the functions you describe for the voyage would be a tremendous store of processed materials even if NOT designed to break down into shuttle sized bits to be reused as building materials.

Just stripping the wiring and conduits from the ship would allow for multiple years growth of the Colony's infrastructure without the need to build those industries. You could say the same for control monitors and computers. If designed properly, every monitor on a ship would fall into a relatively small handful of sizes and be fairly powerful multipurpose computers independent of their original role, allowing for easy spare replacement and so the colonists have the ability to strip them fro secondary purposes later.

You will probably end up with a ship that is insanely overengineered and over cost - for it's primary job - but can also be repaired with just a few IKEA wrenches.