Nils wrote: > Just a single idea that I have not seen so far. If I were to design a > starship dedicated to evacuating planets, I would include a space > elevator for cheap travel to orbit. Maybe design it paternoster/conveyor > belt-style and put it in geostationary orbit over a large city for a > steady flow of evacuees. > > I assume it could work better than a fleet of shuttles at the lower tech > levels.
* For the lower TLs, I was presuming a timeframe in decades, not months or weeks. At TL9 or TL10, that should leave enough time to build an orbital elevator at the industrialized homeworld (Earth?) that is being evacuated. At the nonindustrialized destination world, the way down is much easier. * The elevator cars could be loaded with habitat containers that go into container ships, or the elevator cars themselves get carried on the container ships. That would be somewhat wasteful if the cars are not reused but turned into drop pods. * Having a single beanstalk would bring the problem of ground traffic management, which multiple shuttle ports were supposed to solve. But at a sufficiently high TL, several elevators could become affordable, say one or two per continent on the equator. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
