SO!
The follow thread started almost three years ago, when a friend of mine explored the following question…
Suppose a civilization with a StarWars level of tech and industrial capacity, wished to colonize another Galaxy. Well a number of questions come up that we followed to certain conclusions.
1: If you have advanced to the level StarWars tech, it is a safe bet that many other races have too, IE Going to another Galaxy you will most likely run into groups on par with your power.
2: With this in mind, ‘Colonizing’ another Galaxy may involve a fair amount of conquest as well. You would need a mix of warship and colony ship. From an efficiency standpoint, it would be very costly to have a large military fleet protecting a number of civilian colony ships.
3: If you can build something like a ‘DeathStar’ a mobile battle station of immense size, than you could build a similar ship but instead repurposed as a colony ship. Such a colony ship could be it’s OWN Defense ‘fleet’ as it were.
To explore this idea in a bit more detail, I created a thread back in 2011 exploring the use of a DeathStar sized ship for colonizing purposes.
Link Here
After a few pages of wonderful feed back, including a bit from Darth Wong as well, the consensus came down to the following conclusions.
*Such a ship should if Deathstar sized, should not need to be any larger that 100 to 200km in diameter.
*Such a huge ship should not be alone, there should be at least a few of these so as not to have all eggs in one basket as it where.
*A perfect Sphere is in fact not the optimal shape, it was discussed that you want a Reactor closer to space so there is less distance for waste heat to travel to a ventilation system. A sphere means having the same distance to travel in all directions.
*With the stated goals, the purpose of the ship would be much more than simply getting people from point A to point B. With the goal of building of a lasting multi-systems civilization in mind, as well as the possibility for military encounters and engagements, the Ship will also need to be a mobile command center as well, capable of defending not only itself but surface colonies once they are formed on a planet.
After re-discovering the thread recently, I decided to go back and to form a far more refined and finalized version of my Mega Colony ship.
So without further Adieu, I give you The Legacy Class Colony Ship / Mobile planetoid
The first thing is a quick overview of the size. The grid behind the ship represents 10km by 10km blocks. So the over all size is a ship that is ‘just’ 160km across and 230km from top to bottom. This design is also for the “Main” colony ship, there will be five other ships, similar in shape and construction, but on a slightly smaller scale of 120km across.
You may notice the odd shape. In concordance with being energy efficient as well as splitting certain parts of the shape up, I landed upon this Inverse bell shape for the over all haul design. To better explain things, let me go next to a Cut away view and go through just what everything is.
(Firstly a quick note. Much of the details shown in the cutaway will obviously NOT be to scale. The transportation tubes, energy tracks, vents are obviously not as big as depicted. )
As one might expect, the ship is divided into two halves, the upper half is ‘mostly’ habitation. While the lower half is mostly industrial spaces and ship systems.
I use the word ‘mostly’ because one of the things Wong stressed was, with that with a ship of this size; primarily you focus on building the “important” parts of the ship first. Engines, reactor, drive systems, ships systems, shields and weapons, machine shops, on and on. Despite being a colony ship, things such as living spaces are actually of a secondary concern.
An exception to this is what I call the “open air habitats”
Overview 1A: General Habitation
In such a trip the need for large open areas will be essential. People on a ship for a long duration will need large open air spaces to shed the feeling of being crammed into a giant enclosed space. The habitats I have come up with are spaced out in four levels. The middle two rings are comprised of individual domes, each one approximately 20km long and 5km long. 20 by 20 gives a flat square meter space of 400 square km in total.
The lower middle set is comprised of a ring of eight individual domes, while the upper middle ring has six. Every other dome is either a mostly urban city dome (much like New York or San Chicago in population density) or a mostly rural natural park setting. This gives a total of seven mostly city domes and seven mostly nature domes for the middle part.
The top and bottom rings however are full “Rings” still 20km across and 5km wide, but full ‘donuts’ instead of individual domes. These are designed for more high-density habitation. Still ‘open air’ but a far denser environment.
The bottom ring, being located closer to the lower half of the ship, is constructed to house for the most part, ‘industrial jobs’. Those that spend much of their time working on the ship itself, which are in the lower part of the ship; this puts them physically closer and allows for quicker access.
The top most ring is of a similar size and purpose, however it’s habitation and use will be gone over in a later part.
Overview 1B: Population sizes
As stated earlier, of the middle rings, seven would be nature based, and seven would be Urban City based. At 400km surface area per dome, that is a total of 2800 square km of space for the “City” domes.
Doing some rough calculations on large cities in America, looking at places like NYC and Chicago, at ‘modern’ city densities you could fit a population of 6,000,000 into a single dome with relative comfort. That gives an approximant total population of 42,000,000 for just the seven domes of the middle rings. The bottom habitat ring, having a larger density will possibly have a similar population mix.
(note, with my poor math skills, calculating the square Km of the bottom ‘donut ring’ habitat was something I couldn’t quite figure out how to do. I know the formula is “Area = pi (R1squared – R2squared) Where R1 is 40km, but I wasn’t sure how to exactly find R2 just by eyeballing my pic)
This gives a population for JUST the open air spaces of roughly 80,000,000.
Given the immense cubic space available throughout the rest of the ship, there will be living space enough for easily the same amount (though in not as much comfort obviously) giving the ship an approximant Civilian population of 160million.
Overview 1C: Climates
The vast habitat domes and habitat ‘rings’ on the shape try to mimic a real world environment as much as possible. To this end, they will cycle through winter and summer like heat patterns. Heating for the habitats in generals is provided in large part by utilizing waste heat from the main reactor. The amount of heat from the reactor would of course be more than sufficient for virtually all of the heating needs of the population, both for maintaining a pleasant temperature in the habitats themselves as well as other civilian and industrial needs.
A further method of establishing a somewhat ‘realistic’ environment within the habitats, is the inclusion of ‘winter / summer’ cycles. Through out the course of a given calendar year, heat would gradually be reduced to a dome to a cooler (although not harmful) temperature to simulate a cooling of season toward winter.
A further step in terms of ensuring a ‘natural’ feel is a slow rotation of this season within the dooms.
Basically instead of them all going cold to warm at once, the ‘season’ would gradually shift from dome to dome. As an example, it would be ‘winter’ in one dome, and ‘summer’ in the dome on the other side of the ship.
Overview 2: Large scale transportation
In a vessel of such size, moving from point A to point B in a speedy method is of course of the upmost need. With a circumference of aprox 500km (502.4 exactly), the longest distance one could expect to travel would be along the edge from one side to the other, or about 250km. With the speed of even modern day rail trains pushing pass 300km per hour, such distances will not be an issue, especially as one might expect that trains using more advance tech would travel even faster.
In the cut-away of the ship, you can see a number of blue lines going back and forth, representing the largest of the ships passenger rail lines.
(There will be of course innumerable smaller tram lines for service work, repair, military and other needs that are not show for purposes of not cluttering the image too much)
These main civilian transport tunnels are set in groups going horizontally around the main habitation areas, and than vertically connecting the rings to one another.
Each habitat dome has a primary transportation artery connecting it to the adjacent dome as seen in the image below.
Upon reaching the dome, the artery splits and encircles the dome allowing for entrance or exit at any stop along the circumference of the dome. Additionally the artery also moves under the dome, to all direct trains to bypass the dome completely if making a large train trip. Once again there would be innumerable smaller transportation hubs within the domes to allow quick access to the main hubs along the edge.
Travel from level to level would be obtained through similar methods and indeed even using the same high speed trains. In such an advanced tech, it would be trivial to make large transportation tunnels utilizing a separate gravity grid so that “Down” becomes the floor of the tunnel instead of ‘down’ in relation to the rest of the ship. This would allow the use of the exact same trains, parts and components, instead of devising a whole different transportation system, say some sort of giant high-speed ‘elevator’
Overview 3: Primary reactor, Engines and energy conduits
It goes without saying that with a ship of such size, an equally large power source shall need to be required.
However, knowing that we are working with a ‘StarWars’ tech level, and knowing what sort of power outputs they are capable of, it does not need to be as large as those of the DeathStar that all of this was originally based upon.
Back in the original discussion thread, one of the problems I ran into was, because I used the word ‘DeathStar’ to describe the nature and size of the ship, many posters thought the ship was some sort of Battle station converted to civilian use instead of a purpose built ship. This led to many people assuming that the interior would be needed to devote similar space to power and weapon systems as the original DeathStar (Cutaway view below)
The main power core for this ship, while still large, is noticeably smaller than that of the original DeathStar, as it does not need to fuel a planet-busting weapon, although it DOES have a large offensive weapon system, which shall be reviewed in more detail later on.
One aspect of the Power core that should be noted are the dark brown tubes leading away from it seen on the main Cutaway pic. These are emergency heat sinks and are located at the point where the Core is closest to the outer hull. Again back in the original conversation, the discussion of waste heat was a reoccurring concern. Specifically, getting rid of heat in an efficient method without ending up with a vent system which caused the original DeathStar so much trouble. Part of the reason for the ‘Inverse bell’ design, was to have a shape that would allow the Core to be much closer to the cold of space in certain areas.
As mentioned earlier, much of the heat from the core is used throughout the ship, both for civilian uses such as heating habitat areas to industrial uses. However not all heat can be used up in such a fashion and it will be necessary to vent large amounts in a safe and secure method.
As for the energy produced by the reactor, looking back at the original Cutaway pic, much of the Energy from the reactor is pushed into the large array of Drive Engines that encircle the lower half of the ship. Something discussed previous, was how the Deathstar was much more like a Station than a starship. It could move in normal space, but very VERY Slowly.
For this colony ship, while it would do most of its travel in Hyperspace, moving in normal space is an important aspect, especially if for some reason the Hyperdrive is temporary incapacitate. To this end, an extensive series of large high-energy ‘normal space’ engines are installed along the underside. A view of the layout of the engines can be found below.
The orange circles are of course the engines themselves, while the lighter orange circles are a form of “Reactionless Drive” for additional propulsion.
Overview : Military forces and Offensive and Defensive capabilities.
This section I had wished to leave for last, largely as it relies upon concepts and aspects that I wished to lay out in all the previous overviews.
As stated earlier, the ship would need to function as far more than a Civilian colony ship. It would need to maintain an ongoing military force as well as be sufficiently armed to defend itself from ships of similar size or power.
To begin the Overview, I’ll start with the primarily location of the military, such as it.
In the habitation overview, I mentioned four habitat rings. Three of these are of civilian use, the four ring located at the top of the ship, is in fact devoted to pure military installations. Its vast open space is devoted to a mix training camps for all conceivable environments as well as military schools, barracks, food and munitions stores as well as several other facilities needed for a functional military.
The ship itself is also extremely well armed and outfitted with a vast amount of anti ship and anti Capital ship weaponry. Each of the five gray bands going across the ship horizontally, as well as the eight gray bands going down the ship vertically, are in fact Military structures for mounting large Anti-Ship weaponry. The underside of the ship has three similar weapon emplacements as well.
Going back to the basic idea that we are dealing with StarWars level tech, and that by extension, the Galaxy you are going into may also have similar tech, there is the possibility of having to face down ships on par with StarDreadnaughts such as the Eclipse, Executor, or even a DeathStar like vessel.
To this end, while the ship does not have any sort of ‘planet buster’ weapon, it does have a “Super laser” of sorts, running up the length of the ship to the very ‘top’. The nature of this weapon is designed purely in the event of encountering another hostile vessel of similar size or power, and would not be drawing any power from the main reactor unless such an eventuality presented itself.
The weapon itself need not take up that much space. As shown by the ‘Eclipse’ it is possible to design a Super Laser of sufficient destructive power that it can fit in a ship a ‘mere’ 17.5 km in size.
The weapon itself, as mentioned is located up at the top of the ship; this is one other reason why the military habitat ring is also located at the top, away from the civilian rings and able to be isolated in case of emergency.
SO!
In conclusion, I hope that the previous layout be taken and evaluated by the more engineering and mathematical inclined members of the board and graded in appropriate manor. As I mentioned in the beginning, feedback of ALL sorts is appreciated. If I have made some egregious engineering oversight in any of this, or some sort of Sci-Fi faux pas, I deeply wish to know about for the purposes of furthering the exercise.
