Johannes replied to me: > Having millions of people enter a spaceship and find their bunk, will be > even with supertech be a logistical challange.
Boarding passes with built-in navigation functions? > 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. In Traveller, cryo-revival requires a qualified medic. Vehicles points to Space, which gives time requirements but no skills. > The next best i > guess would be a ship with lots of docking places for shuttles and have > the passangers shuttled in. How does that solve anything? You replace boarding hatches with shuttle dock hatches ... > 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. A long and flat ship, not a cube or sphere, then? On the other hand, you could get the same effect by assembling spherical wedges with hatches on the outside. With artificial gravity, there is no need to have the same gravity vector in the whole ship. Roger replied to Johannes: > One could get something pretty close to this quite easily. Work out the > minimum size that can be self-sustaining (i.e. with all necessary > maintenance and medical resources included), and build passenger pods in > that size. Load them at big airports all over the world, use heavy > lifters to get them into orbit, and assemble them round the spacecraft > frame. The pods are isolated until they get to their destination. If I have independent pods and lift shuttles, that means I have reactors, life support, cockpits, either fusion rockets (at TL10-) or reactionless thrusters (at TL11+) -- it would be trivial to add hyperdrives and power cells or warpdrives. The scheme would cost me the scale efficiencies I wanted from a few big ships, and I could go with transports in the 10,000 - 100,000-man range to start with. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
