Under 3E rules, cryosleep capsules are heavier and much more expensive
than spartan quarters with total life support. They make sense to spare
the passengers the tedium of the trip, month after month looking at the
underside of the bunk above them. But that requires a ship designer who
would more than double the project cost to do that ...
Here are the quarters and life support stats per person, excluding the
occupant and luggage which are part of the cryotube stats in VE68.
Luxury cabin, single occupancy 4,400 lbs. 1,020 cf $11,000
Luxury cabin, double occupancy 2,400 lbs. 520 cf $6,000
Cabin, single occupancy 2,400 lbs. 520 cf $4,000
Cabin, double occupancy 1,400 lbs. 270 cf $2,500
Cryosleep chamber 750 lbs. 50 cf $55,000
Individual bunk 600 lbs. 120 cf $1,100
Hot bunking, 1 bunk and 1 cramped standing room for two 500 lbs. 80
cf $1,050
Hot bunking, 1 bunk, 1 cramped standing room, 1 seat for three 473
lbs. 67 cf $1,067
Some time ago I wrote a TL10 hyperdrive transport for 120,000 colonists,
it costs $18k per passenger in an individual bunk. A TL10 hyperdrive
transport for 10,000 sleepers costs $90k per passenger, but it has twice
the hyperspeed. No sleeper ship will get much below $60k per passenger
due to the cost of the cryotube.
Things look different in GURPS Traveller (because of the volume-based
FTL drive) and in 4E.
One of the key decisions of a setting with FTL drives is how fast they
are and how far habitable worlds are apart. Using the default speed,
travel to the next world could take a few days or a few weeks. Spending
that much time in a sardine can should be acceptable. To get a travel
time of months or years, the ship would have to go well beyond "known
space" into the unknown.
Perhaps those people purchased their own ships or got them as part of a
"deal" to go away. Then it makes sense to go to the other end of the
galaxy, where they can build their own society.
- Give the sleeper ship a few scouts in addition to the utility
shuttles? And stealth/weaponry?
- Many small sleeper ships instead of a few big ones, to increase the
likelihood that at least some will survive? And also to allow a wealthy
family to buy one for themselves.
Johannes replied to me:
A background story for a sleeper colony ship, that is optimized for
plot hooks and for giving the Gm handweave material to explain away
suboptimal mission planning:
We have a first world nation (or equivalent) that is able to build
thoose ships. We have a large number of people who somehow are the
repsonsiblity of that nation or want to become so, who are widely
considered a liability within the first world nation however.
Refugees would be a good example, but you also could go with badly
integrated ethnic minorities, like for instance Roma in eastern europe.
Now someone, who might or might not be on the payroll of astro tech
corporations, starts selling the idea to send them off to make
colonies in outer space. A compromise beween the "left", who want to
help them here, and the "right", who want to get rid of them and
punish them for being a nuisance and it helps the ecconomy and
probably it also serves as good dry run, for later colonisation
projects with "real" people. (The last point would depend on the rules
for time dialation and generally how soon information will get back).
So we have colonists, who fit better to the classic wild west pioneer
tropes, then a state of the art selection program would produce, who
likely have sharp ethinic divisions (their ethicities being only
equivalent with respect to the first world nations political disourse)
plus maybe some first world volunteers, with a classic patronizing
colonialist superiority attitude.
The ships crew might be distinct from the colonists and be more
concerned to prevent the cononists from ruining the ship, then with
making the colony work.
The colony might be supplied with a constitution or similiar rules,
that reflect the first world nations political discourse, but don't
particulary fit to the actual colonists-
How much and what supplies the colonists get will not only depend on
what a colony needs, but on what the first worlds "left" considers to
be neccessary for a life fit for humans beings and what the "right"
considers frivolous luxury and which industry has the best lobbyists.
In short the perfect setup for a disaster, that the pcs have to fix
and "politics" as pretty universal answer for why saveguards that
should be there to prevent adventure situations, are missing.
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