Hyper Ships As Generation Ships

Peregrinator wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:If I remember correctly, Grayson (and a couple of those planets the Hexapuma visited in the Talbot Quadrant) KNEW the planets were there and (probably) bought the rights to them for a colony. It was only after the journey using cry that they discovered that there were PROBLEMS with the place the bought that didn't show on the surveys.

If I remember right Grayson had not even been surveyed.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Peregrinator" quote="Brigade XO wrote:If I remember correctly, Grayson (and a couple of those planets the Hexapuma visited in the Talbot Quadrant) KNEW the planets were there and (probably) bought the rights to them for a colony. It was only after the journey using cry that they discovered that there were PROBLEMS with the place the bought that didn't show on the surveys.

If I remember right Grayson had not even been surveyed.

Fearless moved steadily forward with the other outbound vessels. In time of peace, she had no greater priority than any of the gargantuan merchantmen who dwarfed her to insignificance, and Honor leaned back in her chair to savor the bustle and purposeful energy of the Junction in action.
Under normal circumstances, the Junction handled inbound and outbound vessels at an average rate of one every three minutes, day in and day out, year after year. Freight carriers, survey vessels, passenger ships, inner-world colony transports, private couriers and mail packets, warships of friendly powers—the volume of traffic was incredible, and avoiding collisions in normal-space required unrelenting concentration by the controllers.

George J. Smith wrote:From chapter Five On Basilisk Station

Fearless moved steadily forward with the other outbound vessels. In time of peace, she had no greater priority than any of the gargantuan merchantmen who dwarfed her to insignificance, and Honor leaned back in her chair to savor the bustle and purposeful energy of the Junction in action.
Under normal circumstances, the Junction handled inbound and outbound vessels at an average rate of one every three minutes, day in and day out, year after year. Freight carriers, survey vessels, passenger ships, inner-world colony transports, private couriers and mail packets, warships of friendly powers—the volume of traffic was incredible, and avoiding collisions in normal-space required unrelenting concentration by the controllers.

Bold my emphasis

It would seem that hyper capable survey and colony ships were being used a long time ago in the story arc.

The original hyper drive was a man-killer. The casualty figures over the first fifty years of hyper travel were daunting. Worse, vessels which were destroyed were lost with all hands, which left no record of their fates and thus offered no clue as to the causes of their destruction. Eventually, however, it was determined that most had probably been lost to one of two phenomena, which became known as "grav shear" and "dimensional shear" (violent energy turbulence separating hyper bands from one another). Once this was recognized and the higher hyper bands were declared off limits, losses due to dimensional shear ended, but grav shear remained a highly dangerous and essentially unpredictable phenomenon for the next five centuries. Despite that unpredictability and continuing (though lower) loss rates, hyperships' FTL capabilities made them the vessel of choice for survey duties and other low-manpower requirement tasks. Crews of highly paid specialists willing to accept risky employment conditions were enlisted for survey work and for the early mail packets, but the loss rate continued to make any sort of interstellar bulk commerce impractical and insured that most colonists still moved aboard the much slower but more survivable cryogenic ships. As a consequence, the rate of advance of colonization did not increase terribly significantly during the period 725-1273 pd, although the ability to pick suitable targets for colonization (courtesy of the FTL survey crews) improved enormously.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:Yet, Haven was an expansionist society. They needed to conquer to survive. Yet why hasn't Haven and the rest of humanity continued to look for new worlds?

I meant to respond to this as well in my earlier post, yet given that it was already a wall of text maybe it's better it temporarily slipped my mind.

Haven was expanding to loot economies for quick cash and trade to prop up it's failed economy. It was a short term win, long term problem issue because they were infecting those newly conquered planets with some form of the overgrown dolist state Haven had fallen into, plus damaging their internal economies by sucking away the ready cash - starving them of the investment money needed to keep their economy healthy and growing.

Colonizing new planets is kind of exactly the opposite of what they were trying to do by turning conquistador. Setting up a new colony is a short term economic cost (and a big one) followed - hopefully - by a long term economic payback (once they get established to the point of being a viable trading partner with you - or at least a viable resource producer). If Haven had been able to hold off BLS increases long enough to come up with some medium to long term investment money there are probably better places to have spent it (bigger economic returns sooner) than in setting up a new colony. But they went to war as the only way they could see to pause the increase in BLS spending. I don't think they'd have had any luck trying to sell the same freeze to support a new colonization effort. (And they certainly didn't seem to have lots of people eager to move out of their comfortable urban lifestyle to be pioneers on some brand new planet - so finding willing and skilled people might have been just as hard as finding the money)

munroburton wrote:You don't need fan fiction for this information. Much is revealed in More Than Honor, which contains a chapter part of The Universe of Honor Harrington examining how the Honorverse Diaspora worked.

As for generation ships, it's an inefficient way of transporting a colony. Cryo hibernation is more practical, especially for extremely long duration voyages. As well as reducing the mass of the colony ship devoted to everyday living requirements, it avoids imposing psychological effects and cultural change upon the pioneers and their descendants.

pnakasone wrote:A few questions

What is the outer limits of human occupied space?

How far beyond that has been explored and surveyed ?

How many worlds inside the limits of human space are still waiting to be colonized?

I do not think we have solid answers to any of these question.

cthia wrote:

munroburton wrote:You don't need fan fiction for this information. Much is revealed in More Than Honor, which contains a chapter part of The Universe of Honor Harrington examining how the Honorverse Diaspora worked.

As for generation ships, it's an inefficient way of transporting a colony. Cryo hibernation is more practical, especially for extremely long duration voyages. As well as reducing the mass of the colony ship devoted to everyday living requirements, it avoids imposing psychological effects and cultural change upon the pioneers and their descendants.

As alluded to earlier on, I imagine that a current generation ship would be replete with the best of practical current tech. Which definitely utilizes cryo. I think that would be unavoidable, especially considering the vast reaches of space suddenly opened up to the idea.