On Sun, 8 May 2016, Onno Meyer wrote:
It is quite difficult to get a "sufficient" delta-V for an interstellar
sleeper mission with TL9 reaction drives. Perhaps the Oort cloud.
Reactionless is another matter, of course.
Hyperdrive craft could use cryosleep if the technobabble requires it (like
Aliens) or if it is a long voyage. But a bunk and total life support are
marginally lighter than a cryonic capsule at TL10, and much lighter at TL11+.
They are cheaper, too.
A question would be how long people can realistically live in 3E-style
bunkrooms. 100 cf for the bunk, the space between the bunks, a share of the
communal toilets and showers, galleys and mess halls. Understandable that
people would take cryosleep if it was safe. Of course one could try to make
the ship faster instead of taking heavy and expensive cryosleep units.
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Does that factor in additional support crew? With cryo you should have a
doctor in case of complications at the wakeup process, and one or 2
spares, in case there is a complication with waking up the doctor.
(Arguably waking up could need a wake doctor, but that would invalidate
the sleeper ship so i assume we don't take the assumption here)
With a wake crew you also need medical personel (and you can't reduce it,
by letting the total wakeup process take longer) you need a command
structure with all it's overhead and you need security and probably
something like a ship councelor.
Arguably you need some of that also at the destination if you are out to
establish a bridge head. If you are going to an existing colony, however
small, some of the social overhead might already exist at the destination.
More so if you are simply a passanger transport, not a colonisation ship.
You could also add psychobabble, that colonists are in a better state of
mind, if they recently started the journey rather then if they had a long
and monotonous journey.
If there is a clear divide between ship crew and passangers, you can also
have security considerations.
So i guess there are a number of reasons, why one might go for cryo sleep
even if it is heavier.
Johannes
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