On Tue, 3 May 2016, Onno Meyer wrote:
I'm envisioning a scenario roughly like this:
A space mission is going to take several decades of flight time, subjective
time, plus a lengthy stay at the destination to make it all worthwhile.
Building a generation ship was considered and rejected for various reasons.
Instead, the ship uses cryonic capsules.
At the destination, the ship computers (no true AIs) will prep the life
support; this is sufficient for a small fraction of the crew. They mine
asteroids to build a habitat. The key components like the computers are part
of the payload while crude stuff like walls or pipes is manufactured out of
local raw materials. As the habitat is expanded, more and more crew come out
of cryosleep. After some years the crew refits their ship for the return
trip. Either all of them go home or a flight crew returns the ship while most
become colonists. This might be decided only after arrival, when the
suitability of the destination is evaluated.
Problems:
- Is the total life support going to run "idle" for several decades, or is it
going to be restarted from a total shutdown? Both are difficult.
- Is it possible to predict what trace materials for the biosphere can be
found and what needs to be carried along? Spectrographic analysis of the
destination?
- How many "imported key components" does it take to build a station with
life support and a shipyard?
I agree that cryo technology will help you with that scenario. Organisms
that are components of life support can be cryo frozen. If your cryo
technology can preserve bodies to be "revived", it stands to reason, that
it can also preserve food to be edible for the same time, so if you need
humans to kickstart the life support, you can provide them with food, for
the time the kickstart needs.
How much is the avaiability and minability of materials dependent on
factors that can be observed from light years away? I don't think we have
an answer to that question yet, which means that GMs are free to make up
their own answer for their campain.
I guess the way to the answer would be to build the most low tech space
station, that fits the specs, and they go over it's components and decide
for each, if it can be produced locally, or should be brought along.
Johannes
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