On Sat, 2 Jan 2010, Onno Meyer wrote: > * Time for boarding will be an issue. The largest airports in > the world have less than 100 million passengers per year, > so the spaceport would need five or ten times the capacity > of Atlanta or Frankfurt. Still, ground facilities are a > minor problem compared to the ships themselves ... > > Comments? Thoughts?
Having millions of people enter a spaceship and find their bunk, will be even with supertech be a logistical challange. Regardless how foolproof instructions or guidence devices you give them, you will still need a lot of stewards (or robot equivalents) to tell them where they should go and who have the authority to mediate conflicts between passangers and the ability to search for lost children etc. Almost every possible floorplan for the ship will have bottlenecks for people who enter of leave. The best way i guess would be to freeze the passangers on the planet and ship them in containers. The next best i guess would be a ship with lots of docking places for shuttles and have the passangers shuttled in. I guess it also would be helpfull if you have no issue with minimizing the surface area of the ship. I guess logistics would be easier with many distinct habitatmodules, each having its own entrypoint that is far away from the other entrypoints or other bottlenecks, so logistical problems don't spill over. One mans groundfloor is an other mans earthmissle @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Johannes Trimmel @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
