From: "Abrigon Gusiq" <[email protected]>
Going more for those who might be a threat? Strip a planet and move on? Loomking more from books, movies and TV shows for examples?!
Maybe the civilizations that don't develop strong social norms about quote trimming need the huge ships to hold their e-mail archives?
The original "world ship" going by that name to my knowledge belonged to Marvel Comics' Galactus, built to contain a selective recreation of his homeworld from the previous universe before the Big Bang. It also held various useful items like planetary ecosphere life energy drainers and the Ultimate Nullifer, a tiny psionic weapon that causes mutual annihilation of the user and any target they can properly visualize. Taa II was a kind of Mobius tube-shape, several times larger than most terrestrial planets, but considerably less massive due to its hollow structure.
Gene Wolf has written about a couple of world ships, one is The Whorl of his Long Sun series; a cylindrical habitat with a light source down the axis and spun for gravity, it holds both a living society and an uploaded complement of computerized "gods". Its purpose would seem to be to preserve the personalities of a royal family and their genepool to allow them to re-establish their rule on a new planet.
Wolfe's New Sun series includes the machine-planet "Yesod", apparently the only world in the higher dimension of the same name. Likely much larger than a terrestrial planet due to its interior housing not solid layers of rock but galleries and halls of machinery but still having close to normal gravity, the surface is entirely ocean speckled wwith archipelagoes, each cluster of islands housing quasi-human beings who oversee the development of intelligent life in one galaxy in our dimension. Yesod travels through time rather than space, and the stars in its sky are portals different times and places in our own universe's history. I think.
-- Jeff Wilson - [email protected] IEEE Student Chapter Blog at < http://ieeetamut.org > _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
