Colonized Interstellar Vessel: Conceptual Master Planning

[Tom Kalbfus]

Volume wouldn't directly equate proportional numbers of people. It seems to be a habitat rather a coffin hotel to the stars meant to naturally expand the population SOMEWHAT as the generations roll by. Lots of the volume is going to be life support for a living biosphere as well as facilities for limited food production. If this is a non-suspension population they absolutely need all the essentials of a world and community especially work and recreation to keep mind and body healthy and at peak and prepare their decedents for the colonization. This also, and may especially, go for the gene pool so cross contact with all modules would be essential. Then again look how communities on Earth only miles apart or neighborhoods blocks apart can become islands of local behavior and even animosity. Separation of any sort could be the wrong way to go except for a Traveller game. I would prefer the cylinder approach , one for all.

Population is proportional to surface area so a hundredfold increase in all dimensions means a ten thousand fold increase in surface area, the volume of air increased to the cube of scale and at this scale you can have weather in each box in fact you could have different climates and seasons for all eight of them. For a Traveller Game I would not want the maximum population possible, I would like each module to have natural vegetation with buildings in the midst of all of that, maybe 10,000 in each box for a total of 80,000.

 

[dragoner]

Add Strontium Dog, and viola! You have the Warden. 8)

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Add Strontium Dog, and viola! You have the Warden. 8)

A dog made out of strontium, what use is that? I'm sure it can't fetch.

 

[locarno24]

We don't see MG vessels in Traveller, especially 3I because the galaxy has many worlds using jump drives. This means any world with sufficient tech to create a MG ship will have the communication tech to know others are out there and use something better. MG ships would be incredibly expensive and ultimately useless if it takes centuries to reach even a one parsec star that everyone else can reach in a week. Using the old formulas from another edition of Traveller, a world could develope a couple TLs to jump tech before a MG reaches it's destination. THAT would be interesting!

Major Victory (out of Guardians of the galaxy) essentially experiences just this - deep-frozen in a cryostasis ship, he arrives as an explorer on a distant planet centuries later....to the sound of a marching band, as Humans discovered FTL less than a hundred years after he left and have been waiting for him to arrive.

As to viability.... I dunno. The option of continuous high-G acceleration due to grav drives might make them tempting to a race that somehow never develops jump physics, or can't get it to work:

Imagine a system whos indigenous inhabitents are TL9-10 but there's a leftover Tripwire device or similar from the ancients' war hidden in the system - theoretically jump drives should work but they just don't for reasons no-one understands, so a 6G generational ship is your only option.

 

[Reynard]

Sounds like a Red Zone world if I ever heard one! Probably all the worlds around it are settled.

What would happen to people locked up in a starship for centuries with hopes and dreams of an exciting life as THE people to conquer and settle a would only to find it's been settled decades or centuries earlier by their people? I smell bad psyche trauma.

As to the welcome of an MG, can you image the Starship Warden arriving in a system with no radio contact and filled with killer robots, strange androids and a zoo of mutated flora and fauna much of it intelligent bearing down on the planet?

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Sounds like a Red Zone world if I ever heard one! Probably all the worlds around it are settled.

What would happen to people locked up in a starship for centuries with hopes and dreams of an exciting life as THE people to conquer and settle a would only to find it's been settled decades or centuries earlier by their people? I smell bad psyche trauma.

As to the welcome of an MG, can you image the Starship Warden arriving in a system with no radio contact and filled with killer robots, strange androids and a zoo of mutated flora and fauna much of it intelligent bearing down on the planet?

What if the arrive in the midst of The New Era when the Third Imperium has collapsed? Might the new arrivals set up their own civilization amidst that? Lets say a Generation ship from Earth arrives somewhere in the 1160s to 1170s amidst the ruins of the Third Imperium and finds a habitable planet with humans on it tech level 3 or something like that, and they orbit the planet, send down a shuttle to establish a colony just as they planned, and various relics and artifacts keep turning up.