On 9/13/2013 11:15 PM, Onno Meyer wrote:
Dear List,
I've been wondering about interstellar passenger liners, and one obvious
question are lifeboats or pods. I'd like to brainstorm a bit.
* A starship can't sink, so why abandon ship? If required, find a way to
eject the reactor core, not the passengers. The damaged ship is easier
to find than a bunch of little pods.
* Abandoning the ship can be a great roleplaying opportunity. A 'random'
collection of characters in a life or death situation, but without the
usual chain of command. Who will take the lead? Wo will panic?
I like this one, mainly.
* The starship could have passenger shuttles, anyway. But shuttles won't
have seats for 100% of the passengers and crew. Nice drama, of course.
* There is a difference between lifeboats and shuttles, too. I wrote a
TL15 lifeboat (back in February 2011) to explore the upper end of the
scale -- hyperdrives, cryosleep chambers, nanofactories in the hold.
* ISTR that real-world ships require lifeboats for 125% of their maximum
capacity, in case some are blocked/disabled by the accident.
* Just eyeballing the numbers, a passenger liner could be 10 tons per
person -- 1,000 passengers and crew in a 10,000-ton starship. Roughly.
Can I get a lifeboat with less than 1 ton per person? That would mean
10% of the liner for escape mechanisms. Too much?
* Of course it would be possible to build a TL11+ escape pod with less
than 0.1 tons per person, but that again raises the question if the
survivors are better off in a pod than in the wreck.
* Default assumption that survivors stay in/with the ship, but escape
capsules only for the specific case that the ship is going to crash
really soon. No long endurance, just a safe reentry and soft landing.
* But then, why not space suits with grav belts/manned maneuvering
units? They could be used for comet sightseeing, too. What do you think?
Regards, Onno
Okay - how Starships work in the game-world is important. The FTL drive
is an important factor to consider.
Imagine a hyper drive - there are dozens of mechanisms for a hyperdrive.
One, I imagine is an "Instant Elsewhere" device. The ship just
disappears at one point and appears at another point, light years away.
Blink!
But the ship retains it's original speed and direction - So what the
passengers experience as interstellar travel is actually accelerating to
match speeds with the target star. The greater the difference in
velocity, the "further away" it is.
So a ship from Able's star goes to Barnard's Star, and hits
something. depending on the difference in velocity you get a bullet
hole, or the ship vaporizes. somewhere in the middle it's ruined.
People at barnard's star see telemetry from an incoming ship suddenly
change radically, and it's large normal space drive is disabled.
What they'll have to do is accelerate a rescue ship to match velocities
with the wreck, somewhere in the vicinity of the wreck to pull people off.
In that case, life boats would over complicate the rescue vastly. You'd
only use them if the ship was completely untenable.
if you could put normal space drives on the life boats to allow them to
make the change in velocity to "match speeds" with their target, then
you could just as easily use that same technology to build redundant
life support, power and thrusters into the main starship.
Hmmm
When you think about it, most fictional and RPG starships are
metaphorical in nature. This is because hard SF is a difficult thing to
communicate with many folks.
If the ships are metaphors for ocean going ships, then they need
metaphorical life boats. If the ships are metaphors for airplanes, then
they need metaphorical ejection seats and parachutes.
So any discussion really needs to know the GMs setting, his chosen
imaginary technologies and his metaphors,
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