Susan asked:
> Well that would sort of depend on how long you want to wait for your
> terraforming to take hold.
If terraforming is part of the adventure rather than part of the
backdrop, I need results in decades or even years. A terraformer
character who spends dozens of points in esoteric, non-adventure
skills deserves to see a result before the campaign grinds to a
hold out of sheer boredom ...
If terraforming is part of the backdrop ("Emigrate to New Eden,
early colonists get subsidized tickets and free plots of land!")
you can get away with a slower pace. The terraformers would be
NPCs only, so there is no raw deal for the players.
> Yes, or several smaller ones.
On the plus side, several smaller ships give redundancy. If one
gets a meteorite strike, or a GM bug gets out of control, there
are other ships to continue the mission.
On the minus side, the teams will be more dispersed. They won't
be able to do a small-talk-and-staff-meeting at lunch. The cost
for the fleet goes up without economies of scale, too.
Last but not least, putting everything into one ship means that
a gang of heroes/villains can affect the entire mission. Plucky
heroes deserve a chance to save the day after a crawl through
the air ducts of the Mothership and a fight with the Greedy
Corporate Paper-Pusher/Evil Genius/Alien Princess (pick one).
> If all you want to do is give yourself a beginning atmosphere,
> you could theoretically do this with just the microflora/fauna
> decreasing the size of the tanks you need.
Step 1: Scouting. Little, expendable ship.
Step 2: Seeding. Little, expendable ships with a standardized
collection of bugs. Skip this step if there is already
a breathable atmosphere.
Step 3: Introduction of homelike flora and fauna in a balanced
ecosystem. That calls for the big, expensive ships with
expert staff.
> If you are going for anything larger then you have to either
> have plants or plant them for the herbivores. However they
> have to become established before you place herbivores there.
> You also need a fungal population to get rid of the old plant
> growth and start turning it into soil.
>
> Alternately if you are talking a place which has edible plant
> life all you really need is a few rats and a few rabbits. ;)
See below.
And Jon wrote:
> What will the herbivores eat?
Herbs planted by millions of little agribots? Bio-Tech says that
forced growth tanks work for plants, too. (Possibly not the same
ones -- maybe there are three different types of ship for bugs,
flora and fauna.)
The realistic option is not to have any specialized terraforming
ships. Put the labs into standard shipping containers, send them
with a regular freighter, set up on the world, and the work will
last long enough to make shipping the labs home pointless. But
if that is the answer, I don't have a reason to write a special
ship, which was the point of the question.
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