My initial question lacked some important information, I think, because I'm writing this to explore VE and Spaceships, not for an upcoming game with a predetermined setting.
* Why evacuate the planet? And is it Earth in a recognizable future or somewhere completely different? It can't be an imminent alien attack, or we'd be talking about ways to convert freighters, not custom-built colonizer transports. It could be a strategic move to disperse population and industry in a hostile setting, trying to make Earth only one "basket" among many. It could be a move by one high-population power on a still-divided Earth, trying to create another high-population colony world to add to their power. Perhaps there are treaties allowing unlimited entry to the most desirable planets (discovered by some UN space agency?) and now they want to make sure that the new worlds have many of their citizens as voters. It could be a move to desert a wrecked Earth, towards new worlds with fresh resources to plunder. The decline of Earth won't be immediate, but flooded coastal plains could create lots of emigration pressure. It could be a move to stabilize Earth by reducing population to some sustainable capacity. Instead of birth control, or in addition to it, people get incentives to emigrate. The difference to the previous option is that they rich and powerful are not the first to jump the sinking planet ... * And where do they go? Is it a single earthlike planet, ten days of FTL flight away, or are we talking about multiple worlds? I presume the destination world is habitable in a shirt-sleeve (or at least coat-and-boots) environment, or the evacuation is a total non-starter. But are there waiting apartment blocks and factory jobs, or will each colonist get a box of tools, a bag of seed corn, and enough food to last until the next harvest? That raises the question of cargo capacity on the transport. * Does the destination world have enough transport infrastructure to disperse the influx of colonists? If you think embarking a million on a day is bad, how about unloading them? * How voluntary/desirable is the move? Are people desperately trying to get the ticket out, are they desperately trying to avoid forced transportation, or is it a careful deliberation weighing the pros, cons, and incentives? * I've written a transport for cryo-containers before, in the Traveller background. I've written non-cryo colonizer ships as well, but on a smaller scale. I'm trying to justify the million-man transport, but only if it can be justified without too much fiat. The fact that bunks are half the mass and twice the volume of freeze tubes helps, since it encourages large ships to exploit the cube-square-relationship. And then I have some more technical considerations: * So far, I've assumed a distance in terms of flight days, but GURPS stardrives are not operating at a fixed speed. So the travel time could be reduced at the expense of payload, perhaps even to the point where airliner-style seats become acceptable. The obvious way to avoid such 'cheating' would be to assume that the ten-day figure includes a decent FTL speed, say ten to twenty times minimum hypershunt. 30 parsecs to the average colony world if the multiplier is at the default 0.2 for hyperdrive, or 150 parsecs for warp with the default of 1. There would still be some fiddling to get the optimum payload percentage, but no gross distortions. * How much cargo per passenger? And should it go on the colonizer transport or a separate freighter? * Where does the maintenance happen? For non-shuttle systems, one way I could see would be shipyards on the moon, where the ships stop over every couple of flights. Johannes replied to me: > > Boarding passes with built-in navigation functions? > > Helps somewhat, but you'd still need someone or something for parants who > lost their kids to turn to (and vice versa) and unless you have > supersociology as well, you will still have people who know their way > better then the stupid boarding pass, who demand that there has to be an > error, they are in the wrong bunk, who want to complain about the people > in the next bunk, or other passangers who move too slow or too fast, or > sure are not going the right way, or who just make up reasons to question > the information their boarding pass gives, so they have an excuse to talk > to someone. > > Basically i don't think large amounts of people without some sort of > police or quasi police works good for long. > > Some or all can be done with sophisticated enough robots. But then > depending on background specifics you might need include costs for enough > computing power. Besides, people who don't believe what their boarding-pass-display says might also refuse what a robot or computer terminal says. The ratio of citizens to police is usually around 300:1, but this is a high-stress situation, so call it one steward or service crew per 50 colonists. They'll have to dispense rations, find lost kids, and mediate conflicts. > > In Traveller, cryo-revival requires a qualified medic. Vehicles points > > to Space, which gives time requirements but no skills. > > My idea is to cryo them on their source planet and uncryo them on the > destination planet. So the problem is shifted from the high-tech ship to the primitive colony? (See above for possible conditions on the destination world). > > How does that solve anything? You replace boarding hatches with shuttle > > dock hatches ... > > The shuttles don't need to start all from the same spaceport, so you don't > have the logistics to move all passangers to the same place on ground > first. And you are less likely to have all the passangers waiting (and > complaining about waiting and requirering food ect while they wait) in one > place, if your schedules don't work that well. But unless the passengers stay on their shuttles (a variant of the pod idea), you have to get them off the shuttle and onto the ship, in time to turn the shuttle around for the next flight. Roger replied to me: > Yes, but you can have millions of pods and only thousands of > pod-shuttles - it'll still be quicker than marching people on and off > individual spacecraft. (I'm talking about practicality here, the real > difficulties of shifting millions of self-willed beings around the place > especially if they're a bit panicky, not the VE rules which reasonably > enough say nothing about this.) If there's a riot at one spaceport, the > shuttles just load up from somewhere else, and the people keep flowing. The assumption was that one trip takes ten days of flight, plus one day at each end, plus a fudge factor for maintenance and delays. Say it takes six hours of shuttle time to swap a loaded pod for an empty one, or vice versa, and each ship uses shuttles for 25% of its pods for one day out of 22, at each end of the flight. If there are 22+ ships and just one destination (see above), you need two pod-shuttles per 100 pods. Another option with pods is to make them reentry-capable and non-reusable. That saves shuttles at the destination worlds and creates instant shelters, but of course it is rather expensive. David replied to Roger: > Ship's crew is on the ship, and there's room enough for a couple hundred pax > as well (Though normally, ships carry a small number of luxury pax.) At a > big star port, with loading facilities 252 containers can come off a ship in > about seven hours, and loading 252 new ones takes the same amount of time > [Really, really big places have robotic facilities that can load and unload > at the same time, doing the whole ship in 8 or 10 hours. ] That would imply travel to and from industrialized worlds. I had emigration from an industrialized world to a developing colony in mind. Of course ports would be among the first things built on the new world. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
