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Post by oprean on Dec 26, 2016 17:03:51 GMT
A ship designed to go for centuries should probably have the recycling and manufacturing capability to replace broken things, along with a small stockpile of raw material. By the time it arrives, most of its systems may be rebuilt at least once, with better technology even. Right, if you go somewhere away from civilisation and don't have the tools to make new equipment might as well name it a suicide trip to nowhere. So you have the 3d printers and/or lathes to make what you need on the fly with raw materials or what you recycle from broken down equipment. By the time you get there new and better technology might have been invented back home, you can incorporate and use it, there's nothing stopping you.
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Post by dwwolf on Dec 26, 2016 18:05:34 GMT
That reminds me of the alternate history Scifi in which saurains invade an ww2 era earth with roughly 90s tech with some more advanced. ( propulsion). The aliens are shocked to find we went from biplanes to early jets in under3 decades. The aliens went on a roughly 30 year trip ship.
Increased Need and pressure for survival meant the humans reached a comparable tech base by the 70s. And promptly sent a ship as an envoy to the saurians homeworld. Completely shocking them senseless by the rapid advance of humanity after a mere 70 years...a progress gap which took the concensus seeking saurians nearly 10x the time.
Only to be shocked themselves a bit later after the arrival of a new human ship that made the trip in a mere 6 months by some hoodoovoodoo physics.
A fractional c ship could get scientific updates after it left ofcourse.
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Post by amimai on Dec 26, 2016 18:08:38 GMT
Yes that's why I used the words "critical failure"... Like the life support breaking down Or the thrust control shorting out Or fuel tank rupture Or... you get the idea
One important thing goes wrong and you are on a one way trip to the edge of the universe with no way to stop.
Actually even a simple fire could probably end a ship pretty easily if it is in the wrong space and burns a tiny bit too long.
A space ship is a tiny tin can flying through the second most hostile environment known to man, things will go wrong, Murphy's law says given time it will go wrong at the wrong time in the worst way possible. That's why long trips are a pipe dream...
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Post by apophys on Dec 26, 2016 18:43:33 GMT
Yes that's why I used the words "critical failure"... Like the life support breaking down Or the thrust control shorting out Or fuel tank rupture Or... you get the idea Life support system breaks down? Good thing you have redundant systems you can use while you fix the broken one. Thrust control breaks? It's not like a few days of cruising is a problem while repairs are underway. Propellant tank rupture? Good thing there's a double wall, catching spilled fuel in the gap while the main leak is patched (probably pumping the tank contents out into the other tanks in the meantime). All these issues can be predicted and worked around with clever engineering to keep catastrophic failure from occurring. Any single points of failure must be designed away. More of an issue would be a rogue psychopath being born sometime during flight and making a bomb out of available materials. It only takes one clever bastard to kill everyone.
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Post by David367th on Dec 26, 2016 19:25:01 GMT
More of an issue would be a rogue psychopath being born sometime during flight and making a bomb out of available materials. It only takes one clever bastard to kill everyone. Good thing you have a security team with an arsenal of less than lethal weapons that closely monitors passengers.
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Post by thorneel on Dec 30, 2016 23:09:12 GMT
Don't go for another system, then. Go for Oort cloud objects (a giant colony ship may stop at multiple destinations), the Kuiper belt or even close by brown dwarves. It is possible the closest one is under 1 ly from Sol.
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Post by jageriv on Jan 3, 2017 9:42:41 GMT
Hm, I think, given the nature of the setting and game system, one should set this for in system colonization: say from earth to Jupiter. Designing all the ships used in those early, colony founding missions. Now, here's the important things:
1) Get there reasonably quickly. Under a year is probably ideal. So, for a theoretical Earth to Jupiter ship (since a ship that can do that can do more or less the entire inner solar system) in one year, going from earth orbit to Jupiter orbit. Probably want to assume these are one way, somewhat disposable ships: first, a colony ship is going to have limited means to refuel anyways if its the first big thing out there, our reactors aren't assumed to have fuel for years on end anyways, so ships designed to do so would have issues in our system, and finally there's little reason to have the ships capable of going back: after all, if they would be hard pressed to produce enough fuel to refuel themselves, they don't exactly have much out there they can send back to earth either.
2)Transport a reasonable number of people. You need colonies that can support a reasonable number of economic activity over fairly long periods of time. Besides devision of labor concerns, people just don't operate that well if limited to a very small pool of people for very long periods of time.This is of course highley dependent on tech assumptions, but for a more developed, complex economy, I would assume the minimum size would be larger, not smaller. So, maybe something between 10,000 to 100,000 crew/passengers. 10,000 should allow about 2,000 professionals (the rest being menial, children, and unworking). And you will need a fair number of menials: for example, a Mcdonalds style restaurant for the crew requires something like 10 people if its busy. Assume 4 six hour shifts (to make up for sick, weekends, surge manning, excetera) One of those restaurants would have 40 or so people assigned to it. Those 10 on hand at any one time could probably serve about 400 an hour at very rushed rates. Feeding a crew of 10,000 at that rate would take 25 hours. You assume 3 meals a day per person, that's 75 hours. That's clearly unexcepable for daily feeding. So, instead, assuming you need to feed everyone on average every 6 hours (for multipe meals, different shifts, excetera) that would be about 1,700 an hour, which at our 400 an hour assumed pace would require 4 Mcdonald style restaurants, which collectively would employ 160 people. Combine inventory management, some food prep that on earth is done off site, and the hierarchy (160 people is large enough to require a set hierarchy) you're looking at some 250 or so people involved in the end stage of food preparation for a crew of 10,000. That's nearly 2.5% of the crew right there in a fairly menial task. But, the more people you get, the more efficient you can get as well: for example, the Mcdonalds like store might need 6 people to handle 200 an hour, but only need 4 more to handle 400. More people can mean they can stay busy for more hours, rather than having longish down times.
3) Transport enough stuff for colonization: the people (unless the trip is obsurdly long) are likely to be fairly light to move: a person might eat 1 kg of food a day, so each person over a year would have maybe 400 kg. Other consumables probably only push this weight up to around 1 ton a year per person. A bed and other things might weigh 1-2 tons per person in private, personal goods. But, you need one Ultra class truck to move 100s of tons of dirt at a time when you reach your destination: 200 tons per truck. Maybe 500 tons when you include spares, extra equipment, fuel, and who knows what else.
And what about living space? A somewhat standardish family home is probably on the order of 100-200 square meters of space. The B330 inflatable space habitat would provide about that in floor space, and weigh approximately 20 tons. If you assumed 4 per household, on average, then each person might need 5 tons in just habitation models for the surface. For 10,000 settlers, this would suggest about 50,000 tons of just habitation modules and equipment. How much other equipment will partially depend on what exactly the settlers will be doing: if it involves a lot of heavy lifting, such as getting fuel and raw material production off the ground to support future, that will likewise require a lot of heavy machinery: Maybe 1,000 of the crew are going to be dedicated to getting a methane factory producing: that might require some 15,000 tons of heavy machinery.
So, probably about 1 ton of consumables per person per year: lets assume that you want reserves to last 5 years (1-year trip, plus reserve for 2 more years before potential resupply, and then 2 years for emergency rations if something spoils, or you need to wait longer, or population growth). That's 5 tons of consumables. Another 5 tons per person for habitats. Maybe 5 tons per person for "industrial" purposes. Through in 5 more tons for stuff I'm probably forgetting/fudge. So, this would suggest a well-supplied colonization mission would have about 20 tons of material per colonist. A relatively poorly supplied colonization mission, with narrow margins of error, would be 10 tons per person. So, for a 10,000 man expedition, this might suggest about 100,000 to 200,000 tons of supplies for the actual colonization.
4) Moving the goods to the surface. A transport delivering to a developed area can count on shuttles, space stations, and whatnot to assist with unloading and moving material to the surface. A colony ship cannot. It must have the shuttles to move stuff from orbit to surface on its person. So, the colony ship can't simply have the ability to move 10,000 colonists and 200,000 tons of supplies to the planet, they must also have the ability to move that material to the surface. This must either be in the form of having a large number of one way drop ships, or shuttles that can go down, drop off their cargo, and then return. If shuttles do return, then the colonyship must also have the onbord means of refueling those shuttles.
5) Cost: the more people you can move for a lower cost, the better. For this exercise, it probably makes the most sense to assume private colonization: people or corporations are paying for a ticket to go forth and colonize the stars. Thus, you want to have each ticket as cheap as possible. What is being sold however should be kept in mind as being the delivery of a person and their 10-20 tons of stuff to the planet surface, not simply moving people from one orbit to another: this is a colonization ship, not a cruise liner.
Well, that's all my thoughts on this topic at this time.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 3, 2017 20:44:38 GMT
jagerivCheck out my Highliner concept. For colonization, you'd probably add more cargo modules and remove deltaV.
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 6, 2017 21:16:24 GMT
I think you are presuming a bit too much here, we have to take into account that the majority of colonies not directly founded and governed under a resourcing corporation, and there to establish a community, always effectively reset much of the societal complexity. This naturally makes sense, if you dig up and move a tiny chunk of garden you will probably have enough plants and animals for a biosphere, but not enough room for squirrels etc. The two points i mainly disagree with here are the use of "menials" and the assumption of private living spaces and lastly currency. The main reason we even have "menial" jobs on Earth is due in no small part to the surplus of human lives which, as you may have noticed are generously supported by naturally occurring environmental factors, free air, water that is abundant and still relatively cheap and a biosphere and climatosphere that is hospitable to humans. this is of course a DUH situation, as humans could only evolve and come to exist in such a place as Earth. However this surplus is not only obviously unavailable on outer moons and planets but the cost is directly burdened onto the entirety of the society. Even basic things on Earth like decomposition become a monitored carefully balance process, else it may destroy your crops or end up inefficiently recycling your bio-matter. So the very existence of supporting individuals of average intelligence and no discernible skills is not looking great. This brings me to the economic sensibilities of an extreme duration colony ship/permanent base. As im sure many of us will have noticed a crisis of labour is approaching on a scale perhaps equal with that of the industrial revolution. The automation of the generalised lower work forces and the ever increasing competition for the remaining average job pool will hit sometime this century. Where on Earth it will mainly be a cost saving measure in certain complex industries, in space id argue that it is a necessity. When a basic machine needs a little maintenance and a bit of electric juice, where it's training is stored so that even in complete destruction all you really need is to build a new one and ship it to the hydroponics/mining/labour area, the appeal of a human that requires litres of water, breathable air, waste removal etc, is once again not looking great. Lastly the idea of a series of privately owned and inhabited mid sized family homes is also somewhat questionable. On colonisation alone you would need another couple tons of airlocks or what not to connect and make front porches for these homes and so on. Instead i would suggest a Hakka/Toulou round village approach : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_Tulou en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_walled_villageen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_TulouSeeing as our hab pods are already cylindrical in design much of the designated living spaces can be built by "slicing off" the layars of the hab pods, then landing and shielding their top/ bottom. Additionally if needed many of these structures were made from rammed Earth, so combined with a radiation and pressurised plating, using the regolith of various moons additional space could be brought up and added externally. This would mean that you could have a slightly larger air processor and water purifier serving as many as 800 individuals instead of 4 at a time all over the place. Additionally this more communal centralised living will help build familial and communal bonds which will help with the long hard years of colonisation. Now we only need a few large airlocks to connect us all. They are also made to be defend-able just in case humans start resorting to their old violent ways. Conclusion: So the big question about the dumb dumbs, do you bring them? Well yes actually they can serve a far greater purpose. Today most american farms support roughly 150 people per farm. Assuming you took those ten "menials" and trained them in the year it took to get to Jupiter, split them in two and got them operating an off the shelf hydroponics farm on Europa or wherever, and where as before they were flipping burgers they now could support 300 people with food and produce, or generate other building supplies and clothing. Over time they should probably learn some basic engineering but this far more justifies their existence than frying chicken wings. And this is all before we even get into economics! I only brought this stuff up because i'm currently writing a philosophical/scientific work on the colonisation of Mars.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 6, 2017 21:26:18 GMT
argonbalt Rather than bring intellectually inferior individuals, a colonization effort should exploit the (soon to be) an abundance of mentally superior humans. Automation and expert systems will create a surplus even of trained 'white-collar' humans such as engineers, doctors, lawyers. For example; IBM Watson is already encroaching on paralegals and initial medical diagnostics. Well, the lower IQ castes have a higher reproductive rate than the higher castes, but space colonies are limited by life support, not maximal reproductive rate, so I don't really see a point to bringing the "dumb dumbs" (to quote you directly) when there is no advantage and a nontrivial disadvantage.
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 6, 2017 23:02:10 GMT
Well i mean duh generally. You sort of have to have a technically majorative colonists to even exist in outer space in the first place. The only reason i was including a more halfway example was because Jageriv brought up the "menial" task force issue. Personally id say the ideal society would be arguably mainly scientists and artists, the ones who generate technology(the thing humans need to understand the universe scientifically) and the ones who make culture,philosophy and art( the ones who entertain and help us to understand human existence and it's interpretations and multifaceted viewpoints).
But obviously their are numerous secondary more dangerous population groups like the soldiers(which ideally defend and expand nations, but ultimately end up convinced that brute force and destruction are the only way to control/compel peoples to action and responsibility) and Economists (Which ideally regulate and manage the input/output supply/demand of a society but ultimately end up manipulating ends toward their profit margins and can outright stifle science and censor art if it endangers the former.)
Behind this i guess i would say that i was compelled to consider the "dumb-dumbs" because it is an Earth evacuation scenario and one of the goals morally would be a mass exodus principle that places emphasis on preserving human life.
Obviously in a non crisis point scenario where we are aiming for an ideal colony and future societal end point Johnny from the KFC is obviously not candidate numero uno. I mean as a bit of an aside the amount of numb nuts i've argued with on various forums and facebook groups who think Mars will be A) the old west B) a bunch of indie start up businesses and breweries C) A white picket fence suburb from the 1950's D) a hippie drug commune and E) An anarcho capitalist/libertarian Utopia, is quite frankly staggering.
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Post by someusername6 on Jan 6, 2017 23:21:04 GMT
Yeah, do I have differing sociopolitics from what I'm reading on some of those posts. Fairly leftist person interested in space here, hello. (I appreciate the discussion though!)
Agreed with argonbalt on the evacuation scenario meaning there is a responsibility to provide transportation for as many as possible, not just qualified people. I follow a similar line of thought on colonization -- it is just an evacuation in a much longer timescale.
Assuming sufficient time and resources, I don't think there are people such as "dumb dumbs" -- given the costs involved in sending a single person, I'd expect that anyone would be qualified and/or receive relevant training. Much like crews on smaller spaceships need to be highly trained.
I'm in particular curious about space colonization because, while there are parallels to it in history, there isn't a hospitable place waiting for you on the other end (probably) -- you are bringing the house with you, or the materials to build the house. So it might play out differently.
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Post by argonbalt on Jan 7, 2017 0:49:31 GMT
someusername6 Don't worry you are by no means alone, i consider my self pretty Marxist as well, if anything extraterrestrial colonies provide a kind of beautiful zero state for resetting much of the familiar balances of governance and economics. Take Mars for example again, in the very near and slightly near time line Martian colonisation would essentially be an communist utopia, all the scientists, engineers and prospectors etc would directly be in control of and benefit from a very direct ratio of labour utilised and production understanding to resources extracted and benefiting said colonists. The traditional land owner/government bourgeoisie overseer is simply not energy efficient to the system. I mean imagine for a second a regional manager sitting at a desk "managing" a colony of PHD technicians who actually run everything and keep the colony operational all the while eating shitting and drinking through the colonies systems. Talk about a resource drain.
Likewise much of the impetus to be rich disappears on Mars. There is no easy access to champagne, giant houses, yachts. The already expensive prices only go up with the six million mile shipping costs. Not to mention many of the jobs that payout to that level simply don't make sense on Mars. What the hell good is a stock broker when you are once again six million miles away from the nearest meaningful exchange of those stocks(considering of course the three to twenty seven minute delay). I personally believe that many of the actual "dumb-dumbs" on Earth are not per say burger flippers and grocery mart clerks, but actually many parasitic and self serving jobs like US lobbyists, many top financial bankers and many Earth economic institutions, various M.I.C. companies that ultimately only retard space development and military ability and technology like Lockheed, Various overly developed government sectors.
Many of these are ultimately supplementary and self serving, they jeopardise future colonial interests and abilities by being more concerned with their own financial and political goals and motives than with either the actual self running maintenance and development of a colony or the ability to do so efficiently and accurately. That is not to say that merchants and traders should not exist, naturally trade and commerce is a part of life between any two groups that have more of one thing than their opposites. But the level of complexity that ultimately parasites the time money and effort of it's civilian populace is not something i think many would want given the ability to start over.
Needless to say i think we can all agree that we would like to live in a society that serves it's people while ensuring their freedom, the outer worlds hold that ability in plenty.
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Post by newageofpower on Jan 7, 2017 1:38:48 GMT
While I do agree on the problems of relying on market corrective forces (especially a market run by humans) I doubt state controlled organizations - even run by technocrats - would be able to optimally distribute resources in a manner maximizing good of the people, especially in the long run.
Look at Western Democracies today.
A successful colony will see selective pressure from outside sources (such as the harsh space environment) decreases over time (probably due to the efforts of externally hypercompetent individuals running the organization) and as a result the selection process will become dominated by those who are most competent at manipulating the leadership selection system rather than managing the issues facing said society.
Eventually, regression to the mean occurs as selfish, greedy, and incompetent (other than at acquiring votes/getting brownie points with other politicians/passing other selection criteria) individuals dominate the social/political mechanisms of the 'utopian' society.
Even starting with a pool of highly competent individuals with g a full standard deviation above norm only delays this problem.
I forsee most Marxist and Anarcho-Libertarian colonies without strong external advantages (for example, an extremely favorable colonization site) eventually failing.
Perhaps in the end, the only surviving human enclaves will be the 'pet' human reservations of unimaginably intelligent post-Singularity AI.
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Post by someusername6 on Jan 7, 2017 1:51:28 GMT
Sure. Tyranny of structurelessness, I fully agree that no structure means a structure will emerge, and not one you would have designed for / wanted. We may disagree on what structures are competitive, though.
I also agree that if there is such a thing as a post-singularity, it provides competitive advantages that obsolete everything else -- and people might be happiest under control of such an AI with aligned interests. Or transforming themselves into it.
We did sail a bit past the idea of how to build a colony ship / what would be required for it, though -- but I guess that's inevitable once we start thinking about how many people need to be aboard and what they need to bring along.
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