Hyper Ships As Generation Ships

cthia wrote:

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.

They were. But at the time the need for them was a necessity, they were very hazardous and cumbersome at best. I doubt that 50,000+ people wanted to board those first death traps. As a surveying vessel where minimal lives are at risk, they were indispensable.

I doubt the inner-world colony ships mentioned in this 1901 PD quote as using Manticore's junction to speed their movement further out into the Verge were the death traps your talking about - those were ~1200 years earlier.


George was pointing out that there was text-ev from the first book that at least some level of colonization was even then still ongoing.

cthia wrote:

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.

They were. But at the time the need for them was a necessity, they were very hazardous and cumbersome at best. I doubt that 50,000+ people wanted to board those first death traps. As a surveying vessel where minimal lives are at risk, they were indispensable.

Jonathan_S wrote:I doubt the inner-world colony ships mentioned in this 1901 PD quote as using Manticore's junction to speed their movement further out into the Verge were the death traps your talking about - those were ~1200 years earlier.


George was pointing out that there was text-ev from the first book that at least some level of colonization was even then still ongoing.

That's why I stressed...

snip
...at the time the need for them was a necessity.
snip

Textev, somewhere, gave us that hyper capable colony ships were developed after those original maiden voyages and some of them literally became claim jumpers, arriving far ahead of the "legal" ships and setting up house beforehand.

Colonization happened in two phases...

1. Survey.

2. Colonize.

The surveying phase had pretty much exhausted its run. Out of necessity instead of (well, anything else, actually) curiosity.

I imagine that expansion into the Verge was initially made possible at the earlier expenses of life aboard those deathtraps. The Verge was probably already logged, at a considerable expense in deaths. (Ship and passengers) No?

One way to overcome not knowing what would be out there to make a blind hyper jump extremely hazardous to the health of the crew.

1 Obtain a CLAC.
2 Adapt all bar 4 of the LAC bays to accommodate habitation and additional storage & engineering modules.
3 Adapt 2 LAC bays to accommodate 1 or more DBs.
4 Crew the ship with a standard 3 watch crew but only 2 crews for each of the remaining LACs and the Dbs.
5 Head for Matapan, Midgard, Asgard or Phoenix and proceed at maximum N-space speed for one year. (or after jumping to the furthest known(logged) system from the terminus)
6 Log all systems, grav-waves &etc during the journey.
7 At the end of the year send a DB back (in Hyper as all the systems & grav-waves will have been logged) and transmit all the information logged.
8 Stake a claim for all habitable planets found en-route.
9 DB returns in Hyper to stopping point to meet up with the other DB and return via hyper to the CLAC.
10 repeat and rinse.

So the question are these:

How far would the CLAC get after the year.
How long would it take in hyper to get back to the starting point and then return to the stopping point.
Would the sensors on the CLAC be good enough to log a large enough swathe of space around the route or would one of the LAC bays have to be given over to additional sensors and their associated control systems and crews.
If any anomalies (possibly wormholes) are encountered during the journey, would it be preferable to stop & survey, or just record for a follow up survey.

Daryl wrote:There was an earlier topic similar to this, although it didn't use a generational ship.
As I said way back then I'm puzzled as to why the malign didn't simply go well out (apart from plot necessities). You wouldn't need generation ships, just a small fleet of passenger and cargo ships.
Travel for a year or so with a couple of respite and repair stops, and you would be well away. With the inverse square law the sphere would be so large you would never be found.
You would then leave it to future generations as to whether you simply started another civilisation, or developed your genome until you could send a high tech fleet full of super humans back to take over.

I wholehoggedly agree Daryl. I think it was fleshed out in one of my previous threads, "The Misalignment of MA Plans"...

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8015

The MA could have proven their point by doing exactly what you've contemplated, then letting it speak for itself. They could have offered free tours to their Shangri La long after it has been established and viable. They could have legally recruited people from "that other" realm out of interest or a need to be a bit more private or for whatever other reasons.

As I have also stated in that thread, the fact that they didn't utilize that route suggests they were dependent somehow on the currently seeded section of the "Honorverse."

Their streak boat tech could implement a form of a generational survey ship.

George J. Smith wrote:One way to overcome not knowing what would be out there to make a blind hyper jump extremely hazardous to the health of the crew.
<snip>
So the question are these:

How far would the clack get after the year.
How long would it take in hyper to get back to the starting point and then return to the stopping point.
Would the sensors on the CLAC be good enough to log a large enough swathe of space around the route or would one of the LAC bays have to be given over to additional sensors and their associated control systems and crews.
If any anomalies (possibly wormholes) are encountered during the journey, would it be preferable to stop & survey, or just record for a follow up survey.

Not very many planets. If you are traveling at maximum N-space speed, then in one year, you will by definition travel less than 1 light year (assuming a maximum speed on 0.8c, you will travel 0.8 ly in a year). Since stars are approx 3-4 ly apart on average, you won't get more than 25% of the way to the next star by the end of the year.

As Douglas Adams has said "Space is big. Really Big"

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.

crewdude48 wrote:If you are putting people into cryo, it is a cryo ship, not a generation ship. A generation ship has people living and creating new generations onboard,

IOW, a cryo ship was a form of birth control? LOL

Seriously, I indicated that I had a problem with nomenclature as this concept breaks entirely new ground. And when you discover something new, you inherit the right, or difficulty, in naming it. It conquers new space. (Pardon the pun.)

YET, it'd still be a generational ship because of the time spent on voyage. You'd have to employ cryo, or possibly no one left to pilot the ship.

I suppose it could be recoined as a "Hyper capable generational cryo survey ship." *shrugs*

fallsfromtrees wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:One way to overcome not knowing what would be out there to make a blind hyper jump extremely hazardous to the health of the crew.
<snip>
So the question are these:

How far would the clack get after the year.
How long would it take in hyper to get back to the starting point and then return to the stopping point.
Would the sensors on the CLAC be good enough to log a large enough swathe of space around the route or would one of the LAC bays have to be given over to additional sensors and their associated control systems and crews.
If any anomalies (possibly wormholes) are encountered during the journey, would it be preferable to stop & survey, or just record for a follow up survey.

Not very many planets. If you are traveling at maximum N-space speed, then in one year, you will by definition travel less than 1 light year (assuming a maximum speed on 0.8c, you will travel 0.8 ly in a year). Since stars are approx 3-4 ly apart on average, you won't get more than 25% of the way to the next star by the end of the year.

As Douglas Adams has said "Space is big. Really Big"

So I would have to modify my scenario to include hyper jumps towards (and just short of) stars for which a distance can be calculated from optical/radio observation?

What would be the possible distance covered after such a voyage of 1 year?

cthia wrote:That's why I stressed...

snip
...at the time the need for them was a necessity.
snip

Sorry I misunderstood your point. Yes, back when you had pre-impeller ships sneaking through the lowest Alpha bands of hyper to scout for systems hyper travel was insanely risky -- which was why, as you said, colony ships didn't use it. FTL scouts, then cryo sub-light colony ships.

But it's been over 600 years (1273 PD) since the dual inventions of the Warshawski sensor and Warshawski sail made hyper travel truly safe. So I imagine there has been a lengthy period of safe scouting from hyper followed by safe colonization through hyper. Still that period is only the later third of the Diaspora.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:One way to overcome not knowing what would be out there to make a blind hyper jump extremely hazardous to the health of the crew.
<snip>
So the question are these:

How far would the clack get after the year.
How long would it take in hyper to get back to the starting point and then return to the stopping point.
Would the sensors on the CLAC be good enough to log a large enough swathe of space around the route or would one of the LAC bays have to be given over to additional sensors and their associated control systems and crews.
If any anomalies (possibly wormholes) are encountered during the journey, would it be preferable to stop & survey, or just record for a follow up survey.

Not very many planets. If you are traveling at maximum N-space speed, then in one year, you will by definition travel less than 1 light year (assuming a maximum speed on 0.8c, you will travel 0.8 ly in a year). Since stars are approx 3-4 ly apart on average, you won't get more than 25% of the way to the next star by the end of the year.

As Douglas Adams has said "Space is big. Really Big"

Yep. I was thinking that same thing.
Also, traveling through n-space you can't see the grav waves (or more importantly rogue waves) because those are purely hyper phenomenon. So you still don't know whether it's safe to retrace your route through hyper.


But you can still play hopscotch through hyper to survey. Optical telescopic observation should easily be able to determine stellar positions to within a lightmonth or so out to hundreds of lightyears. (Actually probably far better since hyper travel would let you use a multi-lightyear parallax cross reference. That tells you where the stars aren't which is all you need to know to leave hyper safely.

So plot an exit point or two, jump through hyper to them, then perform an updated survey to better nail down exact stellar locations allowing you to (if a system looks promising) jump closer and approach through n-space for a detailed survey.


Though moving through hyper you probably want to take it slowly in case there is an unknown rogue wave. IIRC the max safe speed through the Selker Rift was about 0.14c. But even so in just the Delta bands that's good for 300x the speed of light. And with mil-grade hyper generators but playing it safe by going no higher than the Eta bands you'd double that. (Plus if you found a safe grav wave headed your way you can zip up to your full 0.6c because you don't have to worry about rogue waves while in a wave)


Repeated parallax surveys let you continue to plot safe emergence zone indefinitely. Though I guess, if you had the ability to service then you could still bring a few dispatch boats to serve as scouts as a belt and suspenders approach. Have one take lead at the limit of communications while in hyper to extend your safety margin - and use them to try the exit to n-space and back before taking your main ship. But honestly that's probably significant overkill as long as you can tell from long ranged optical surivy that you're initially emerging well clear of any star.

When the Alignmenet 1st discovered their "secret" wormhole network and then Darius, they were more or less set. They are hiden for most practical purposes with very few people knowing where this human habital (and not Mesaformed or Terraformed that we have been told, just occupied and developed) work is. Without knowing that 1) it exists and 2) where it is located, it is at least as safe as Bolthole- safer, the only "known" ways to get there seem to probably to be behind defended wormholes.
Besides, even if you have a human habitat world one years flight in hyperdrive from the present known borders of human space, that is going to mean that ALL your commuications are going to take a YEAR -in hyperdrive- to get there and anything you send from there back to the rest of the Honorverse is going also to take a YEAR in hyperdrive to arrive anywhere close to where you want it applied or operational.