ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
So, I'm reading my new MJTAS issues, 7&8, and I come across the article detailing the Krungha class Processing Ark by Adrian Tymes.
OK, a K'kree generation ship? Yeah, mind blown.
The fact that it can carry hundreds of thousands of K'kree, all alive and breathing? Mind blown twice.
Now, most civilizations design mega-ships to meet a desperate need. There is simply NO reason to build a ship of a million dtons, not even a warship, and especially not at TL10, unless the cause was dire. And the Krungha is hugely wasteful of space. They're K'kree... every crewed ship they build is wasteful of space. And this flying barge is actually a balloon... it's 70% atmosphere!
But imagine if someone, say the Terran Confederation around the time of 2nd Interstellar War, were to build an efficient ark of similar capacity. An ark with a large enough population that a healthy and stable genome could be maintained without excessive scientific controls [force-breeding, birth lotteries, creche-raising the young, etc.]. What if the Confederation had built an ark one third the size of a Krungha [the Krungha is 93 million dtons -- yes, million with an 'm'-- and sent, say, 100,000 people off into space with a J2 drive and all the bells and whistles... some colonists in cryo-berths, factory decks to break up asteroids into raw materials, a flight deck with sufficient small craft to defend the ark, explore locally, maneuver captured rocks, and maintain external repairs, the whole menu? The Confederation sends that off into the Void in the hopes that Terran life will survive elsewhere.
Now, we know that there were some STL generation ships launched. Some were found after Jump 3 was developed, some made planetfall [Islands Subsectors], and there were smaller private ventures as well [the Darrian and Sword Worlds projects]. But all these projects seemed to be somewhat inefficient... a flotilla of ships launched instead of one large self-contained colony package. There's logic on both sides of that, of course, but for the sake of argument, how about a real, actual ark... Multiple tens of millions of dtons, multiple hundreds of thousands of people aboard, with full facilities to completely restart the Terran civilization that existed before the RoM. And all done at a very low TL... TL 11 at the most.
Doesn't that spark anyone's interest?
And no, I'm not talking about the Metamorphosis Alpha and the Starship Warden. I'm not talking about Gamma World in Space. I'm talking about a Traveller campaign where the ark arrives at a colonizable world. The colony has all the tools they need except one thing: Nobody except a very few reconnaissance personnel have ever felt rain, or been in real weather. A ship with 100,000 of the descendants of the original crew arrives at a pristine world and now they have to go from being technicians to being pioneers. There's a big wide difference between training and propaganda and being shin-deep in snow cutting wood while it sleets on you -- and knowing that tomorrow will be more of the same. People go from turning wrenches and soldering circuit boards to seriously unpleasant, physically exhausting stoop labor. And those conditions will likely be the shape of the rest of their lives.
Kinda gets the brain going a little, don't it?
OK, a K'kree generation ship? Yeah, mind blown.
The fact that it can carry hundreds of thousands of K'kree, all alive and breathing? Mind blown twice.Now, most civilizations design mega-ships to meet a desperate need. There is simply NO reason to build a ship of a million dtons, not even a warship, and especially not at TL10, unless the cause was dire. And the Krungha is hugely wasteful of space. They're K'kree... every crewed ship they build is wasteful of space. And this flying barge is actually a balloon... it's 70% atmosphere!
But imagine if someone, say the Terran Confederation around the time of 2nd Interstellar War, were to build an efficient ark of similar capacity. An ark with a large enough population that a healthy and stable genome could be maintained without excessive scientific controls [force-breeding, birth lotteries, creche-raising the young, etc.]. What if the Confederation had built an ark one third the size of a Krungha [the Krungha is 93 million dtons -- yes, million with an 'm'-- and sent, say, 100,000 people off into space with a J2 drive and all the bells and whistles... some colonists in cryo-berths, factory decks to break up asteroids into raw materials, a flight deck with sufficient small craft to defend the ark, explore locally, maneuver captured rocks, and maintain external repairs, the whole menu? The Confederation sends that off into the Void in the hopes that Terran life will survive elsewhere.
Now, we know that there were some STL generation ships launched. Some were found after Jump 3 was developed, some made planetfall [Islands Subsectors], and there were smaller private ventures as well [the Darrian and Sword Worlds projects]. But all these projects seemed to be somewhat inefficient... a flotilla of ships launched instead of one large self-contained colony package. There's logic on both sides of that, of course, but for the sake of argument, how about a real, actual ark... Multiple tens of millions of dtons, multiple hundreds of thousands of people aboard, with full facilities to completely restart the Terran civilization that existed before the RoM. And all done at a very low TL... TL 11 at the most.
Doesn't that spark anyone's interest?
And no, I'm not talking about the Metamorphosis Alpha and the Starship Warden. I'm not talking about Gamma World in Space. I'm talking about a Traveller campaign where the ark arrives at a colonizable world. The colony has all the tools they need except one thing: Nobody except a very few reconnaissance personnel have ever felt rain, or been in real weather. A ship with 100,000 of the descendants of the original crew arrives at a pristine world and now they have to go from being technicians to being pioneers. There's a big wide difference between training and propaganda and being shin-deep in snow cutting wood while it sleets on you -- and knowing that tomorrow will be more of the same. People go from turning wrenches and soldering circuit boards to seriously unpleasant, physically exhausting stoop labor. And those conditions will likely be the shape of the rest of their lives.
Kinda gets the brain going a little, don't it?
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