A convincingly gargantuan starship

[jollyreaper]

Since Star Wars, most scifi starships tend to fall along the lines of wet navy ships in space. Big engines in back, decks arranged as if gravity is 90 degrees off from the axis of thrust, you can lay that ship down on the ground on any planet and people are standing right where the floors should be. Ship sizes aren't all that different from what you see in the wet navies, too. When artificial gravity is in play, the designers don't get too cute with it. The Death Star is actually a bit unusual in that they went with multiple orientations: on the surface "down" pointed towards the core, beneath the surface "down" pointed to the south pole.

I've got a notion for a large ship. It's large, has enough people onboard to pass as a company town, maybe 50k or so. It's large enough that you're not going to know everyone by sight. It's the kind of ship you could disappear on. Maybe a quarter are directly involved with the "business", per se, the rest are involved with all the incidentals that go along with taking the money from the company employees. The ship moves freight and passengers between worlds. Travel times can range from months to years so the upper-class passengers need to be comfy. There's high levels of class stratification and not much automation so keeping the lights on and engines fired requires a lot of hands. There's a working biosphere inside. I'm not thinking strictly growing algae in tanks for recycling the air and protein cakes, I'm thinking a bit more elaborate than that.

The idea i'm thinking of is staring from a modified Rama, the Arthur C. Clarke variety. Rama is 12 miles across, 34 miles long, a giant cylinder spinning on the long axis for gravity. It uses a reactionless drive but otherwise obeys what we understand the laws of physics to be, orbital mechanics and the like.

I'm thinking of a ship that uses rotation for gravity but I'm not sure if it needs non-spinning parts. For comparison, look at Babylon 5. The central core spins but the main spine with the zero-G docking bay, weapon mounts, radiators, it's stationary.

The features that I want the ship to have are as follows:
0) Setting is plausible space opera so while initial conditions may strain credulity, everything that follows should play out logically. "Assuming that x is so, and I grant you there are good arguments for why it shouldn't be, what would follow from that?"
1) It's enormous, you can get lost in it, the inhabited areas only account for a fraction of the mass. Rotates on long axis for gravity.
2) There's quite a bit of cargo space to go along with everything else.
3) the ship is old, maybe a few thousand years
3) There's a biosphere to provide food and water but it's optimized for outputs, not aesthetics. In other words, it's not meadows and lakeside parks and natural selection has taken its course. I'm imagining something like a nightmare swamp with strange fungi, creeping vines, and all kinds of dangerous critters. It's not really managed since it's in an ecological balance with the needs of the crew -- wastes go in, fresh feedstocks come out and foodstocks are created at the periphery. That would be edible fungi, arthropods and mammals, etc. This is in addition to the more synthesized nutrient pastes that don't quite come from living feedstock. The upper classes kind of have a phobia about eating food that looks much like things that used to be alive, animal or otherwise. Light comes from the "long sun," a lamp running right along the long axis of the cylinder. I think much of the energy is at the high and low ends of the visible spectrum so it remains dim to human eyes, even though the biosphere is getting sufficient energy.
4) Society heavily stratified, not much mixing, lower classes keep things running, upper classes doing their own thing but remain hidden, mysterious and terrifying to the lower classes
5) Upper classes have nigh-magic technology with biological immortality, medicine that can heal any medical malady, pretty much living as clean and pretty as at a Greek commoner's conception of physical gods. The lower classes are denied access to such things and are living a far more basic existence. The upper classes have a ring of their own towards the front of the ship, extending from core out to the hull. It's gardens in the biosphere area and servant quarters and support structures below that. This garden area is still laboring within the limits of the long sun but is beautiful, like a twilight faerie forest. Things get progressively worse for the lower classes the closer to the stern they get, but none of them really go into the biosphere area without good reason. It's too dangerous.
6) Automation is inconsistent. Some things can be automated and are, other things aren't. So you can end up with the seemingly incongruous situation of starships and scullery maids, fusion drives and favelas. I'm thinking this is partially a matter of strong AI's not working, no expert systems either (authorial fiat due to setting), and general social dysfunction. The lack of automation is important because if the ship could maintain itself like Clarke's Rama, there's no need for a crew.
7) I'd like to have reaction engines for realspace maneuvering, simply for aesthetics, and slow FTL, could be several years between planetfalls.
Because there's not much need to rotate the cargo, I'm thinking what the ship looks like is a caging frame around the rotating interior. Engines, reaction mass, cargo on the frame, the habitat spinning in the middle. This would make for a visually complex design but might also make it implausibly complicated. The simple design would be directly cribbing from Rama, just a spinning cylinder with everything inside, cargo and reaction mass and people, everything. Would that make maneuvering more difficult? It's not like this sort of ship is going to be turning and burning in combat. It would be more like a fixed presence in a combat situation, the same way that the Death Star pretty much becomes the "ground' in any Star Wars starfighter game.

So, given premise and intentions, does this sound like it fits the bill? What are the oversights?

[biostem]

A few thoughts on the matter:

1. If the ship is 1000's of years old, then it must be extremely durable AND technology must not have advanced to the point where the ship hasn't been rendered obsolete to the point of simply being replaced by one that can make the trip without the extra baggage of having to house all the workers and other self-sufficiency requirements.

2. I could only buy the premise of a "wild jungle" being onboard if, for instance, the ship basically uses systems that most or all of its crew aren't totally in the know about - they know that there's this section of the ship that houses a "biomass generator" but don't go there because of the hazards it contains, and simply accept that it provides what the crew and passengers need, and leave well enough alone.

3. You couldn't have too low of a lower class, if they're the ones expected to keep the ship running. It could be a matter of how crowded or limited one's personal quarters are vs what is necessary - the lowest class would live in communal/dorm style housing, where lavatories are shared and everyone has a roommate or spouse/family, while the higher class would have private quarters with things like baths and be permitted to cook with open flames or even smoke. It could also be a matter of knowledge about the ship vs being assigned tasks - like a low level person goes around and just swap worn out modules or affects "crude repairs" - like just welding a plate over a panel that is showing signs of failure. A higher class person might actually oversee the design and construction of those modules, as well as supervise and prioritize workflow; This could be a point of friction, as maybe the higher ups delay the repair of one section's bathing facilities because some influential individual demands that their spa-house get fixed first.

4. Since the travel times are relatively long, there needs to be a truly meaningful reason why items need to be transported such large distances - the only thing I can think of to support this would be if either the means to produce certain high end goods is very closely guarded, if certain substances simply exist in only a very few select places, or the ones who are paying for these goods in the first place benefit from the "effective immortality" you mentioned - meaning that the 10 or so years it would take to get from one place to another isn't as big of an issue.

5. How capable are average citizens on this ship of producing their own goods? It might be interesting if the ship's course frequently involves scooping up asteroids or simply gathering space dust, as a source of raw materials, which is also automatically separates/sorts. In addition to any sort of energy units or food the crew get, they get a share of the materials gathered by these harvesting endeavors, which turns into a sort of commodities market on board. Maybe each person pays a "tax" of these materials to account for the air, water, and other stuff they use up, then get credits for their job and so on. People might then barter with units of iron, carbon, oxygen, etc.

6. How common are other ships in this setting? With as large as this vessel is, would visiting merchants or tourists be a factor? Perhaps there are many smaller ships which are much faster, but the sheer size of this vessel makes it a point of interest, and perhaps the "economy of scale" come into play with respect to transporting goods. If you need something sent somewhere ASAP, perhaps you send it via some sort of priority courier, whose ships are rather small, (think semi-truck size), but also much more expensive.

7. Pertaining to the reaction engine thing - perhaps the vesssel started out as something else, and was repurposed a long time ago - like maybe it was a space station turned space ship, so a lot of the external appearance of the ship is due to all the bracing and superstructure to attach the main and maneuvering engines.

[jollyreaper]

A few thoughts on the matter:

1. If the ship is 1000's of years old, then it must be extremely durable AND technology must not have advanced to the point where the ship hasn't been rendered obsolete to the point of simply being replaced by one that can make the trip without the extra baggage of having to house all the workers and other self-sufficiency requirements.

Right. Nigh-static technology is pretty much a requirement for this premise. What strains credulity is the Star Wars premise with technology essentially static for 25,000 years of galactic history and yet we see new technology progressing rapidly in the galactic civil war era.

Warhammer 40K goes really far towards starships operating like slave galleys. Onboard conditions make Nelson's navy look like a pleasure cruise. It's not incongruous to have the upper classes on the Titanic dressed up fancy and dining in luxury while, decks below, black gangs are shoveling coal into the furnace. Warhammer goes nuts with this and I end up just not buying the idea of flying space cathedrals. Never really liked the Imperial ship designs.

So there's a few choices to explain the city onboard. Choice A: they're along for the ride. The ship is either largely or entirely self-operating with little need for oversight, like the Lexx. The population essentially becomes a weird mix of camp followers, boxcar hoboes and squatters. Choice B: it's a low automation setting and much of the work on the ship needs done by hand. Think the image of Lister in a spacesuit outside the Red Dwarf, painting the hull. Choice C: The parts of the ship that make it go are fairly blackbox, self-maintaining, but the parts that make the ship human-habitable are kind of bolted on. So while there's no black gangs shoveling antimatter into the annihilation furnace, you've got much of the population directly involved in or supporting life support efforts, sky-farming.

I'll say right now that the concept here is high on style, not hard SF plausibility. I would compare it to deepwater oil drilling. If you talked to a 19th century science romance writer about the idea, his head would be filled with the idea of giant floating cities on the high seas, connected by tubes to the domed city below on the ocean floor, teams of drillers and miners going down to do battle with the elements and giant squid (can't forget the giant squid) to get at the oil. You would of course have drinking halls, gambling houses, a sheriff coming along to clean up the town. It's romantic as hell. You tell him what it's really like with what, a dozen men operating up top, much of the diving work taken care of by ROV, what diving there is happening with two-man crews, no battles with squid or other beasts of the deep, that writer is going to chuck his underwood across the room and swear off the future.

2. I could only buy the premise of a "wild jungle" being onboard if, for instance, the ship basically uses systems that most or all of its crew aren't totally in the know about - they know that there's this section of the ship that houses a "biomass generator" but don't go there because of the hazards it contains, and simply accept that it provides what the crew and passengers need, and leave well enough alone.

Agreed. Leave well enough alone would be the best way to describe it. Same sort of thing happens on our own planet. We think we know enough to manage an ecosystem and we find out that it was doing better on its own than after we took a hand in fixing things. I'm imagining that the upper classes know a little bit more about the ship's history, design and so forth but the lower classes are operating off of myth and rumor.

Of course, the question of media is a big one. It's easy for real events to fall into rumor and legend when all you have to go by are oral retellings from those who lived it, then later nothing but words on paper. How many of us would really buy the stories about WWII without actually seeing the archival footage and other primary sources? That's one of the screw-ups with the Star Wars premise. I can buy Han Solo dismissing the Jedi if they died out a long time ago but they were only killed off about twenty years ago! Even if he doesn't buy the idea of the Force affecting fate, don't tell me there's not video of lightsaber combat out there on the holonet. To keep the ship's history mysterious to the lower classes, I'd probably have to amp up the sort of trends that make creationism and holocaust denial work in our world, the sort of mix of credulity and ill-informed skepticism that makes people deny something as well-documented as the moon landings. Holocaust deniers are still in the minority. Creationists are distressingly numerous.

3. You couldn't have too low of a lower class, if they're the ones expected to keep the ship running. It could be a matter of how crowded or limited one's personal quarters are vs what is necessary - the lowest class would live in communal/dorm style housing, where lavatories are shared and everyone has a roommate or spouse/family, while the higher class would have private quarters with things like baths and be permitted to cook with open flames or even smoke. It could also be a matter of knowledge about the ship vs being assigned tasks - like a low level person goes around and just swap worn out modules or affects "crude repairs" - like just welding a plate over a panel that is showing signs of failure. A higher class person might actually oversee the design and construction of those modules, as well as supervise and prioritize workflow; This could be a point of friction, as maybe the higher ups delay the repair of one section's bathing facilities because some influential individual demands that their spa-house get fixed first.

I've been playing around with what the living conditions would look like. I want the ship to feel suitably enormous. You take a look at a show like Babylon 5, the budget didn't really allow for them to show off the interior of the habitat that much. Most scenes were on conventional sound stages that you could just as easily imagine being stuck onboard the Enterprise. You only occasionally got a nice shot showing what it looks like to be inside a giant, spinning O'Neill habitat. One idea I had was like the Kowloon Walled City, rather than building up, building down. So from the perspective of someone standing in the jungle, there's these canyons going down people are living in. This would provide decent airflow from the habitat area. If haven't calculated out all the dimensions but I think these canyons could be a mile deep and run like three-dimensional warrens through a portion of the habitat. I had an idea of there being anywhere from a constant trickle of water in some areas to minor waterfalls in others. The water would all eventually flow back to shallow lakes in the middle of the habitat and move by convection back to the ends.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -City.html

4. Since the travel times are relatively long, there needs to be a truly meaningful reason why items need to be transported such large distances - the only thing I can think of to support this would be if either the means to produce certain high end goods is very closely guarded, if certain substances simply exist in only a very few select places, or the ones who are paying for these goods in the first place benefit from the "effective immortality" you mentioned - meaning that the 10 or so years it would take to get from one place to another isn't as big of an issue.

Yeah. Cargo is the worst sticking point for many space settings. There really shouldn't be any requirement for trade over interstellar distances. Any elemental material you need should be present within a solar system or else colonists would have settled elsewhere. Trading in straight information can be done via radio. In relatively hard SF settings, people and the skills in their skulls are the best cargo to move. Colonization efforts are going to effectively be one-way missions that can't pay for themselves. You might get Pilgrims self-funding a colony, you might even get businesses built around selling picks and shovels to the gold miners, or in this case starships to colonists, but there's not going to be any meaningful trade to capitalize on for a business to be interested in investing in a colony for future returns. I could see a religion doing it, the Catholics sending out colonization fleets.

I was toying with the idea of the cargo being important, none of the lower classes knowing what it is, maybe even a few of the uppers knowing, and none of us ever finding out. But that sort of mystery makes me feel like JJ Abrams and ashamed.

The best I can come up with are stable transuranic elements that cannot be synthesized without machines that are astronomic in scale, like a particle accelerator ring wrapped around Jupiter. But this is just spitballing. It's sort of the explanation I'd come up with for Avatar and unobtanium. I'd thought it was going to be a stable transuranic element created by a post-singularity civilization to use as part of the planetary consciousness on Panodra. And there would be some tie-in with Earth to explain why the blue cat people are tetrapods while everything else on the planet is clearly hexapodal. Unobtanium would literally be unobtainable anywhere else in the known universe. As it turns out, the fluff says it's just the standard elements we know of that got arranged a special way due to the high magnetic fields of Pandora and the gas giant it orbits. I don't like this explanation because there's no obvious reason why we couldn't synthesize it back home. Oh, well. Still enjoyed the film.

TL;DR I'm still not sure what the cargo is but I think leaving it a mystery is a cop-out.

5. How capable are average citizens on this ship of producing their own goods? It might be interesting if the ship's course frequently involves scooping up asteroids or simply gathering space dust, as a source of raw materials, which is also automatically separates/sorts. In addition to any sort of energy units or food the crew get, they get a share of the materials gathered by these harvesting endeavors, which turns into a sort of commodities market on board. Maybe each person pays a "tax" of these materials to account for the air, water, and other stuff they use up, then get credits for their job and so on. People might then barter with units of iron, carbon, oxygen, etc.

That's very open for debate. I'm still not entirely sure. I've got this idea of things being kind of schizo-tech. I've not entirely worked it out. A comparison coming to mind is Battle Angel Alita where you've got automated factories on the ground shipping all these wonder-goods up to the floating city and godtech garbage dropping down on the citizens below. I'm not wanting to steal that setting because, hell, it already exists but it's a comparison. I'm thinking that the upper classes might have access to some fairly advanced automated manufacturing while the lower classes are working with castoffs and doing bits by hand because they don't have any better way. It's like tying a knife with a monomolecular blade to the end of a stick to make a fishing spear. You've got a farmer hauling his produce to the market with his donkey cart while banking on his smartphone.

6. How common are other ships in this setting? With as large as this vessel is, would visiting merchants or tourists be a factor? Perhaps there are many smaller ships which are much faster, but the sheer size of this vessel makes it a point of interest, and perhaps the "economy of scale" come into play with respect to transporting goods. If you need something sent somewhere ASAP, perhaps you send it via some sort of priority courier, whose ships are rather small, (think semi-truck size), but also much more expensive.

I was thinking of this ship traveling in a convoy of similar ships, something akin to the fabled value of the Spanish treasure fleet. I'm not sure how raiding would work but the thought that there are things these ships should fear is desirable.

7. Pertaining to the reaction engine thing - perhaps the vesssel started out as something else, and was repurposed a long time ago - like maybe it was a space station turned space ship, so a lot of the external appearance of the ship is due to all the bracing and superstructure to attach the main and maneuvering engines.

Possible, possible. I'm going from the starting position of a mood, a style, and then I'm trying to back into an explanation that fits. If the ships in the fleet are all unique, that could explain this one and each other one has a different story, a different look, different everything inside.

[Zixinus]

You are essentially describing the Rama spaceships as written by Arthur C. Clarke. These are massive rotating cylindrical worlds that house complete ecosystem for entire sentient species, with everything they need provided for by super-aliens. You can have several sentient species if you can make them to live in peace with each other.

I'm imagining something like a nightmare swamp with strange fungi, creeping vines, and all kinds of dangerous critters.

Not a bad idea. You want something that is very, very dense in terms of biomass and produces as little of unrecyclable and unusable material (such as inedible stuff like nails, chitin, bones, feathers, etc) as possible. The only reason to keep animals like chickens and cows would be stuff like milk and eggs (maybe wool). Meat from them would be rare ,from useless overburden of male animals and from old animals no longer producing stuff. Pets would be limited to small and be herbivore (although, kibble is made out of plants) like guinea-pigs or parrots if not robots.

So it wouldn't be a swamp like on Earth, or any other biome. Think controlled rooms filled with plants and insects living incredibly densely, all genetically-engineered, the air constantly moved through other controlled environments. The air might be even toxic to a human in most of these rooms. Or a series of rooms, each doing a different role of an ecological niché. Here is a compost, here is plants using the compost to make edible food, etc). No woody plants because it is difficult to brake wood down and you don't need or want to burn it on a spaceship (at best, compo stable building or luxory material).

Having a water-based ecosystem might help increase density. The insects would be there to eat weeds and there would be animals eating an overburden of plant-eaters. These might be crustaceans with softened chitin, over-sized soft insects or slugs (you only need to be as fast as your prey and even then you don't always need to chase). An eco-system genetically engineered masterfully to be mostly self-regulating and requiring little to no supervision. Inbreeding is the norm as long as no bad genes appear.

The thing about ecosystems, and this is something that ecology has learned not so long ago, is that there is no "balance of nature". Ecosystems always change and grow, which is a problem agriculturally. Agriculture is best with monoculture, with one type of plants living in incredibly large quantities. This is going to be a constant problem.

4) Society heavily stratified, not much mixing, lower classes keep things running, upper classes doing their own thing but remain hidden, mysterious and terrifying to the lower classes

Why? I have to echo biostem and say that you can't have too many clueless, poor people. Some people are going to be richer than others, but not by an incredible massive margin as Victorians would be. A spaceship is a closed environment, with people close together and constantly in contact (the Victorians had to build buildings split into two parts of servants and residents). Keeping a spaceship operational also requires all hands and skilled people moving about.

Unless they somehow force a class structure somehow (again, like the Victorians, where even the middle-class kept servants) it is not going to be a permanent thing or as naturally-occuring thing. Unless there are deliberate breaks in automation and technology just to fill with people. It was industrial machines that broke and replaced slavery after all. Why bother with slaves when a machine will do it more cheaply and efficiently (and without the moral problems therein).

A good reason from the top of my head to justify a class system, is sudden major damage on the journey. Automotive machines are destroyed and the tools and skills needed to replace them is few (or are still making them from simpler tools). So fertility/population control measures is slightly lifted to have more hands do gruntwork that would be otherwise done by robots or machines. Stuff that keeps the spaceship running takes priority over systems that increase overall comfort level (maintenance bots are more important than elderly-tending or household robots for example), so lower-class people see little benefit from ongoing work. Computer networks and skill-pool is also damaged, so people in control cling to their position by authority and sheds of secondary or trinary skill-sets that are suddenly very relevant (like vets or biologists suddenly having to become human-medics because all the real doctors died of a plague or fire). All computers are required to maintain automatic machines, so most people get their information on printed plastic and a handful of cheaply-made, low-end computers or even analog devices. The tiny spaceship-intranet is heavily censured and controlled by incompetent/lazy security, only giving propaganda and need-to-know information.

The upper classes kind of have a phobia about eating food that looks much like things that used to be alive, animal or otherwise.

This is a phobia to most people living in cities or just any part of the world where the food is mostly store-brought (I own rabbits and would be sick to think of eating one). There is also no reason why they might need to see whole animals on their plate, butchers and cooks have the job of working the animal into presentable food. But most food would be vegetarian as that would be more efficient to produce and feed people, with protein from select plants and perhaps stuff like eggs or insects. Meat would be rare.

TL;DR I'm still not sure what the cargo is but I think leaving it a mystery is a cop-out.

It could be antimatter, just to throw a wild idea.

No, I'm not joking. There is even a natural source for antimatter: gas giants with rings (described here and the book that described the idea). Antimatter would require massive infrastructure to create but would be a renewable resource. A possible explanation would be that the antimatter would be there for the new colony that cannot produce it itself (perhaps at all: they might not have a suitable gas giant in their system). It might be required for a war or for sending out a new wave of exploration starships that require anti-matter.

If you are using reaction-drives you want as high energy density as possible and anti-matter is hard to beat. You might want to store it on the outer hull, naturally.

It would also be a good point of conflict between the ignorant, neglected grunts and engineers overseeing the cargo. The grunts refuse to believe that it is dangerous antimatter that should not be poked, but horded storehouses of luxury food or gadgets.

[Elheru Aran]

Read Neal Stephenson's Anathem. His 'Daban Urnud' is pretty much what you're talking about.

It's a round geometrical shape (a icosahedron?), several miles in diameter. The outer shell is gravel and rock held between layers of chicken-wire. It uses an Orion type engine for propulsion. Living and storage are massive spheres within the shell, stacked around a central core. There are 4 groups upon the starship, each slightly different from each other and having to live upon their own food and drink, so they use their different spheres to hold water and grow produce.

Pretty good depiction of a massive generation starship, I thought.

[jollyreaper]

You are essentially describing the Rama spaceships as written by Arthur C. Clarke. These are massive rotating cylindrical worlds that house complete ecosystem for entire sentient species, with everything they need provided for by super-aliens. You can have several sentient species if you can make them to live in peace with each other.

I know. That's what I wrote in the OP.

"The idea i'm thinking of is staring from a modified Rama, the Arthur C. Clarke variety. Rama is 12 miles across, 34 miles long, a giant cylinder spinning on the long axis for gravity. It uses a reactionless drive but otherwise obeys what we understand the laws of physics to be, orbital mechanics and the like."

I don't want the humans to be passive passengers, or at least not all the humans.

Not a bad idea. You want something that is very, very dense in terms of biomass and produces as little of unrecyclable and unusable material (such as inedible stuff like nails, chitin, bones, feathers, etc) as possible. The only reason to keep animals like chickens and cows would be stuff like milk and eggs (maybe wool). Meat from them would be rare ,from useless overburden of male animals and from old animals no longer producing stuff. Pets would be limited to small and be herbivore (although, kibble is made out of plants) like guinea-pigs or parrots if not robots.

There could also be the matter of introducing new critters to the mix as time goes on, sort of the way Polynesians and later Europeans modified the mix of plants and animals on various islands. I figure most of the experimentation would have been in the distant past and now there's far more reticence to mess with something that seems to be working.

So it wouldn't be a swamp like on Earth, or any other biome. Think controlled rooms filled with plants and insects living incredibly densely, all genetically-engineered, the air constantly moved through other controlled environments. The air might be even toxic to a human in most of these rooms. Or a series of rooms, each doing a different role of an ecological niché. Here is a compost, here is plants using the compost to make edible food, etc). No woody plants because it is difficult to brake wood down and you don't need or want to burn it on a spaceship (at best, compo stable building or luxory material).

Controlled rooms would work for smaller ships and smaller efforts. I'm thinking mind-numbing scale. Think of it this way: if you have this setting and start with telling a simple story with the sheriff investigating a murder, you'll not be immediately clued in that this is a ship in the first place. the upward curving horizon, it might not even be clear in the jungle unless you mange to climb to the top of something sturdy, poke above the canopy.

In the interests of creating a terrifying environment, it might not be a bad idea to have the fungal spores be quite dangerous for human lungs so portions of the jungle are dangerous just to breathe near. It might be interesting to have other areas that are also deadly for humans. If there are really big social insect hives, they could well be large enough for people to enter, it might even be necessary for harvesting some honey analogue, but the interior environment could well be incompatible with human survival.

Having a water-based ecosystem might help increase density. The insects would be there to eat weeds and there would be animals eating an overburden of plant-eaters. These might be crustaceans with softened chitin, over-sized soft insects or slugs (you only need to be as fast as your prey and even then you don't always need to chase). An eco-system genetically engineered masterfully to be mostly self-regulating and requiring little to no supervision. Inbreeding is the norm as long as no bad genes appear.

The low-maintenance would be important. A big part of the setting is people surviving and getting by in an environment where they really don't understand the big picture. It's like a wine or cheesemaker doing their thing without even beginning to understand what's happening at the microscopic level, where it's unclear how much of what they do is a vital part of the process versus empty ritual. Purify the vessel with God's holy fire to remove demons? Eh, no, you're killing bacterial contaminants. Ok, fine, we'll let you call them microdemons. You exposed your wort to the open air so that the gods might see your efforts and decide whether to bless them with intoxicating essences? No, you're actually introducing wild yeasts. You don't know what yeasts are. Deep sigh. They're microangels who make your beer happy.

The thing about ecosystems, and this is something that ecology has learned not so long ago, is that there is no "balance of nature". Ecosystems always change and grow, which is a problem agriculturally. Agriculture is best with monoculture, with one type of plants living in incredibly large quantities. This is going to be a constant problem.

True. The question of just how much regulation the system requires to stay viable depends on how well the people managing it should understand it in the first place. If they're supposed to be at a low level of understanding and it remains productive for thousands of years, then that probably calls for a serious case of intelligent design. It calls to mind the sort of scenario where a space colony has lost the advanced technology that got them there and gave them genetically-engineered livestock but they have a good understanding of the genetics involved and can use conventional breeding to try and preserve those vital modifications. This is the goat milk that comes with anti-aging drugs. It's recessive so we have to be careful but it's worth the effort since it'll add another 100 good years to your life.

Why? I have to echo biostem and say that you can't have too many clueless, poor people. Some people are going to be richer than others

It's more of a vibe I have for the ship than anything else. You look at a really big engineering project, I'd wager a good portion of the workers only understand their little piece of the project and can only describe the rest of it in sweeping generalizations. The foreman would know a little bit more, the senior engineers would be more clued in. But if you're basing your understanding of the project solely on conversations with the unskilled workers while having beers at the end of the day, you might not have a solid understanding of what's going on. Some mega-project like the Three Gorges Dam, that's simple enough to describe: hydroelectric power. But if there's any sort of desire for keeping secrets, even if it doesn't make any sense, then rumors will expand geometrically. The Manhattan Project did quite a bit of compartmentalization and very intelligent people would do quite a bit of demanding work while still not understanding what it was actually for.

Keeping secrets is a poor way of running a show and strong class structures don't really foster a sense of community but I'm not proscribing an ideal way of doing things, just imagining a setting, the same way GRR Martin might describe Westeros without advocating we run our own society like anything depicted there.

but not by an incredible massive margin as Victorians would be. A spaceship is a closed environment, with people close together and constantly in contact (the Victorians had to build buildings split into two parts of servants and residents). Keeping a spaceship operational also requires all hands and skilled people moving about.

See prior comment about how I'm not sure just how much direct human labor would be required.

Unless they somehow force a class structure somehow (again, like the Victorians, where even the middle-class kept servants) it is not going to be a permanent thing or as naturally-occuring thing. Unless there are deliberate breaks in automation and technology just to fill with people. It was industrial machines that broke and replaced slavery after all. Why bother with slaves when a machine will do it more cheaply and efficiently (and without the moral problems therein).

Agreed. The problem you run into with scifi is that humans aren't involved in a great many situations. We're doing a pretty handy job of exploring the outer solar system without a human presence. But it's hard to write exciting space opera about mars rovers, even if they're doing good science. A really good general AI would remove the need for crew on Federation starships, wouldn't it? Or at the very least you'd just need a handful, not hundreds. But stories without humans in them are hard for us to relate to.

A good reason from the top of my head to justify a class system, is sudden major damage on the journey. Automotive machines are destroyed and the tools and skills needed to replace them is few (or are still making them from simpler tools). So fertility/population control measures is slightly lifted to have more hands do gruntwork that would be otherwise done by robots or machines. Stuff that keeps the spaceship running takes priority over systems that increase overall comfort level (maintenance bots are more important than elderly-tending or household robots for example), so lower-class people see little benefit from ongoing work. Computer networks and skill-pool is also damaged, so people in control cling to their position by authority and sheds of secondary or trinary skill-sets that are suddenly very relevant (like vets or biologists suddenly having to become human-medics because all the real doctors died of a plague or fire). All computers are required to maintain automatic machines, so most people get their information on printed plastic and a handful of cheaply-made, low-end computers or even analog devices. The tiny spaceship-intranet is heavily censured and controlled by incompetent/lazy security, only giving propaganda and need-to-know information.

This would also bring up the question of how much contact each ship has with a parent culture. The closest experimental models we have on Earth are colonies sent out by parent nations. We can see just how divergent the Anglosphere has become, from the former colonies to the members of the British Commonwealth. We can see just how different American Indian populations became even though they all came from essentially the same stock that crossed the Bering, plus whatever mixing may have occurred with the handful of pre-columbian trade voyages.

It could be antimatter, just to throw a wild idea.

No, I'm not joking. There is even a natural source for antimatter: gas giants with rings (described here and the book that described the idea). Antimatter would require massive infrastructure to create but would be a renewable resource. A possible explanation would be that the antimatter would be there for the new colony that cannot produce it itself (perhaps at all: they might not have a suitable gas giant in their system). It might be required for a war or for sending out a new wave of exploration starships that require anti-matter.

According to our best guesses, wouldn't antimatter's best use be as rocket fuel? Close to a primary you can directly use solar power; in the other system you either have to have far bigger solar concentrators or you need to put something close to the primary to beam power out. Our outer system solar probes all had to be nuclear-powered because solar cells couldn't cut the mustard. Some of our later cells are supposed to be able to allow for solar power, at least around Jupiter.

As far as the Avatar starship scenario, which is fairly hard SF, antimatter is only needed arriving at and departing from Pandora. Earth has big ol' lasers and use that for boost and decelleration of all interstellar vehicles. Uses a big sail to catch all the rays. If they built a laser launcher in the Pandora system, then the ship could theoretically operate entirely on beamed power, would be almost like an electric trolley in the sense that the powerplant is entirely outside the vehicle.

If you are using reaction-drives you want as high energy density as possible and anti-matter is hard to beat. You might want to store it on the outer hull, naturally.

It would also be a good point of conflict between the ignorant, neglected grunts and engineers overseeing the cargo. The grunts refuse to believe that it is dangerous antimatter that should not be poked, but horded storehouses of luxury food or gadgets.

Antimatter would make for a good prize for space pirates, very high price for the mass. That's why thieves would sooner steal a million dollars worth of diamonds than a million dollars worth of lead. It'd be pretty crazy if a "vikings raiding the English coastline" situation might work here. If these ships are so stupendously huge, the raiders could well and on the external structure and extract antimatter, assuming the defensive guns have been blown. This is less like capturing a sailing ship with a boarding action, more like landing on Iwo Jima. The raiders don't want to take over the ship, just control a local area until they've got their fill and leave.

[jollyreaper]

Read Neal Stephenson's Anathem. His 'Daban Urnud' is pretty much what you're talking about.

Wow. Well, it's not the first time I've reinvented the wheel. Pretty much all I know about Anathem comes from the XKCD comic and other readers saying it wasn't sufficient reward for the effort.
https://xkcd.com/483/

It's a round geometrical shape (a icosahedron?), several miles in diameter. The outer shell is gravel and rock held between layers of chicken-wire. It uses an Orion type engine for propulsion. Living and storage are massive spheres within the shell, stacked around a central core. There are 4 groups upon the starship, each slightly different from each other and having to live upon their own food and drink, so they use their different spheres to hold water and grow produce.

Just read the wiki. It actually reminded me of the Carrier from the Authority which I'm thinking is bearing a passing resemblance to my ship, mainly on account of being so goddamn big. But it's still a human construct, no alien tech, no timey-wimey stuff, not self-aware, no sentience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carrier

Pretty good depiction of a massive generation starship, I thought.

Thanks.

[biostem]

I was doing a little more thought on the subject, and got to thinking about the huge cruise ship that they have, where people own apartments on the ship, and t just travels around the world. What if the ship didn't have a specific purpose to its existence, other than being a colony that can travel around under its own power. It would have a degree of stratification based upon, perhaps, the fact that decades or centuries ago, some of the inhabitants' ancestors were the wealthy elite, and now it's kinda degraded into those being social classes. There could be things like universities and trade schools, with a merit-based system in place to make sure that those that are truly capable aren't wasted. A mandatory work program could be the default state of affairs, and thus a certain amount of jobs are created, so that none, (or very few) are unemployed. This could cause a rift, where some people actively shirk their responsibilities, and find formerly unknown niches within this tremendous ship, to live how they want to.

Heck - you could even go as far as to have it where all children are given a treatment when born, which makes them sterile, (this process can be reversed should they qualify to have children). Maybe that underground movement has discovered a way to undo the process, but it is expensive and/or risky. Similarly, most luxury goods are highly sought after, as they tend to be wasteful in terms of material and energy costs - things like real meat, alcohol or even candy vs synthesized food bars or such. I could also see common forms of entertainment being VR/holodeck style rooms, where people can experience what a real beach or forest feels like, or devices that one can wear, which simulates the feel of being drunk or high, (can be deactivated in an instant if desired).

Lastly, if a certain subset of the ship's populace has access to "virtual immortality treatments", then their line of thinking could be worlds apart from the common people - setting up schemes that take decades to come to fruition, exploiting entire lineages of common folk for their own gains, etc. Imagine if you were some random sewer worker, whose great great grandfather promised to pay some high noble a certain amount each month in order to live where you, their descendant, now resides, 100 years later... never to actually pay off that debt.

Heck - you could have people who make a living solely by venturing into the forgotten or forbidden areas of the ship, looking for items of value.

There are lots of potential ways the base concept can work.

[jollyreaper]

I was doing a little more thought on the subject, and got to thinking about the huge cruise ship that they have, where people own apartments on the ship, and t just travels around the world.

I'd heard about something like that years back when that one was proposed but was it ever actually built? It was supposed to be a permanent residence, possibly even some kind of libertarian portable state.

What's in existence right now is pretty ridiculous. Allure of the Seas is both gargantuan and claustrophobic.

http://www.ibtimes.com/worlds-largest-c ... tos-709417

What if the ship didn't have a specific purpose to its existence, other than being a colony that can travel around under its own power.

That's one answer to the unfriendly universe problem. Planets are pretty vulnerable things. If it just so happens that there's only so many types of environments that naturally evolve and many of them are happily M-class, that's free territory for people to live on. the appeal is understandable. Maybe modest terraforming is still worth the effort. But there's still the immense vulnerability to any kind of attack. There's been plenty of debate concerning relativistic kill vehicles on this site and some aren't convinced that they're unstoppable weapons. But regardless of the weapon, planets remain vulnerable, just like cities in our nuclear-armed world. For people not willing to take the chance of getting caught with their pants down, worldships cruising between the stars seem like a pretty good solution. You don't even need your entire population on those ships, either; you just need enough to present a credible revenge threat in case anyone decides to get cute with your planets. Sort of the same argument used with the nuclear triad during the Cold War. SLBM's weren't supposed to have that great of accuracy, not good enough for hitting hardened targets, but they were perfectly fine for hitting squishy targets like cities. You take out our ICBM's, you take out our bombers, you blow up every single military base, even just one boomer can rip the guts out of your heartland. And you know we have more than one.

I'm not sure what the rest of the universe here would be like. I had the sense that this is meant to be a trade ship and therefore heading into danger as a cost of doing business. If it were an actual state entity, it would be acting more like a boomer, hiding. That's good national policy but makes for boring storytelling.

It would have a degree of stratification based upon, perhaps, the fact that decades or centuries ago, some of the inhabitants' ancestors were the wealthy elite, and now it's kinda degraded into those being social classes. There could be things like universities and trade schools, with a merit-based system in place to make sure that those that are truly capable aren't wasted. A mandatory work program could be the default state of affairs, and thus a certain amount of jobs are created, so that none, (or very few) are unemployed. This could cause a rift, where some people actively shirk their responsibilities, and find formerly unknown niches within this tremendous ship, to live how they want to.

I'm still flipping back and forth on how I want the workload to be. I'm gravitating towards the 90/10 split. In classic societies, 90% of the population was involved directly in agriculture and nobles, clergy, craftsmen and merchants came from the remaining 10%. Most of the population is directly involved with putting food on the table. That's as opposed to where we are at today, something like less than 1% in agriculture. So the ship itself was designed to be self-maintaining with a minimal amount of human oversight and that it does. But having a city onboard was not quite in the original specs and so ends up being more hands-on. By way of comparison, hunter-gatherers may feel that they're putting in quite a lot of work going about their lives but they're not responsible for the sun, the seasons, the berries growing, the game making itself available for hunting, etc.

Something that comes to mind is if the Greek city-states were also city-ships. You have all kinds of people necessary to keep the city going. Trying to translate that sort of social system into sci-fi gets troublesome, of course. You don't need galley slaves to propel a starship, automation improvements makes a post-scarcity economy likely.

Heck - you could even go as far as to have it where all children are given a treatment when born, which makes them sterile, (this process can be reversed should they qualify to have children). Maybe that underground movement has discovered a way to undo the process, but it is expensive and/or risky. Similarly, most luxury goods are highly sought after, as they tend to be wasteful in terms of material and energy costs - things like real meat, alcohol or even candy vs synthesized food bars or such. I could also see common forms of entertainment being VR/holodeck style rooms, where people can experience what a real beach or forest feels like, or devices that one can wear, which simulates the feel of being drunk or high, (can be deactivated in an instant if desired).

I'm not entirely sure how much access to high technology people will have, or whether certain types have been proscribed. I think the feel for the society should be like something out of the west's fantastic orientalist imaginings, where an imperfect understanding of a culture allows a fevered imagination to fill in the gaps with lurid fabrications. So there's unimaginable riches and deprivation, nobles and serfs, harems and horrors.

What got me started on this line of thinking was imagining pilot duty as seeming like a corn king situation. In ancient cultures, you'd pick one of your best youths to be made a noble and treated like a king for the entire year. When the year is up, you sacrifice him to the gods to ensure a good harvest. Now these pilots aren't obligate sacrifices, they aren't absolutely required to die, but the duty is hazardous and a long life expectancy isn't one of the perks. I'm imagining that the pilot duty is split between directly guarding the ship and scouting out safe passages through hyperspace, flying as outriders if you will. But that's dangerous work, much like clearing a minefield without a metal detector. BOOM! "Found one!" So the pilots spend their off-hours in what could easily be described as a pleasure dome worthy of Kublai Khan. Feasts, a harem, many intoxicants, treated like kings by the rest of the population, but still facing death every time they go out. And if they refuse to go, they are executed.

Lastly, if a certain subset of the ship's populace has access to "virtual immortality treatments", then their line of thinking could be worlds apart from the common people - setting up schemes that take decades to come to fruition, exploiting entire lineages of common folk for their own gains, etc. Imagine if you were some random sewer worker, whose great great grandfather promised to pay some high noble a certain amount each month in order to live where you, their descendant, now resides, 100 years later... never to actually pay off that debt.

Right. Those low-born folks are in a game they don't even realize they're playing with rules they'll never get to read, against people who have every advantage. But it all comes back to just what the poorest of the poor are needed for. Even in Victorian times, you can't get much lower than the person emptying chamber pots but they're necessary; the pots won't empty themselves! Indoor plumbing changed a lot of things.

If you ask the question of what a functional vampire society would look like, Daybreakers doesn't fit the bill. 95% are bloodsuckers? Unsustainable. Humans remain completely necessary for two reasons: 1) food and 2) new recruits.

If the immortality treatment causes sterility, then we might essentially have that same sort of vampire dynamic. And if the nobles feud a lot, there's always going to be a need for new recruits. It could also be a feature of the social structure at the high end, similar to the way Stalin organized things: if his top lieutenants are all scheming against each other, that prevents them from getting friendly and scheming against him. And it creates an interesting dynamic where you need the assistance of people you don't like or trust. The leader needs someone to run the secret police, his first job will be killing his predecessor, and he's somehow convinced himself the same thing will not happen to him in a few years.

Of course, it could also be a cultural tradition that the elites don't have children, not through any sterility but because of tradition. Maybe they have the belief that children more often regress to the mean than exceed their parents and so it's better to recruit from the best example of the common population. Bloodline sentimentality could be seen as declasse. Crazier things have happened in actual history. The Chinese and their eunuchs, as if emasculation is going to make someone more trustworthy. They thought that a man who couldn't have children of his own couldn't be corrupted by sentiment and would offer more loyal service. Ha!

Heck - you could have people who make a living solely by venturing into the forgotten or forbidden areas of the ship, looking for items of value.

I mean for the jungle area to be fairly massive. Just like slaves could run away and live in the swamps, people dissatisfied with living in the civilized areas can try to carve out a living there. I'm imagining the jungle's landscaping as done by Junji Ito. The man is a master of visual horror.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junji_Ito

There are lots of potential ways the base concept can work.

Yes, indeed. I think I need to put some more thought into the exact flavor of the society, also the flavor of the technology. I saw some videos of swarming robots building structures based on simple instructions, just like social insects. it got me to thinking of what sort of self-maintenance systems could keep a ship like this running without resorting to having a godlike AI running everything. I don't want the ship to go down the route of bio-wank with the ship being organic but i do like the idea of bio-mimicry.

In this link, silk worms were placed on a scaffold to sew a dome, "using living organisms to generate
man-made designs."

http://blog.biocision.com/7775/silk-worms-spin-dome

[Simon_Jester]

So the pilots spend their off-hours in what could easily be described as a pleasure dome worthy of Kublai Khan. Feasts, a harem, many intoxicants, treated like kings by the rest of the population, but still facing death every time they go out. And if they refuse to go, they are executed.

It may actually be possible to last long enough to 'retire' from a tour of duty as a pilot; that would make a good safety valve because it gives the pilots something to aim for. It also means you have someone around to train the next generation of pilots properly.

If the immortality treatment causes sterility, then we might essentially have that same sort of vampire dynamic. And if the nobles feud a lot, there's always going to be a need for new recruits. It could also be a feature of the social structure at the high end, similar to the way Stalin organized things: if his top lieutenants are all scheming against each other, that prevents them from getting friendly and scheming against him. And it creates an interesting dynamic where you need the assistance of people you don't like or trust. The leader needs someone to run the secret police, his first job will be killing his predecessor, and he's somehow convinced himself the same thing will not happen to him in a few years.

This is interesting.

Honestly I like a lot of this stuff because of its potential for sheer weirdness and exoticism. Something that's missing from a lot of modern SF.

[Zixinus]

I know. That's what I wrote in the OP.

*Facepalm*

Of course, sorry. I only skimmed that part.

I don't want the humans to be passive passengers, or at least not all the humans.

Yes, but once the ship is launched and drifting through interstellar space, most of the work is keeping things in balance.
In Rama, once they get over what Rama is, its about how things go wrong from one norm to another. Or how that balance is put out of whack by a insane traditionalist criminal-mastermind hellbent on conquest.

There could also be the matter of introducing new critters to the mix as time goes on, sort of the way Polynesians and later Europeans modified the mix of plants and animals on various islands. I figure most of the experimentation would have been in the distant past and now there's far more reticence to mess with something that seems to be working.

Constant experimentation is the true source of agriculture. When I read about hunter-gatherers I sometimes read about how they are constantly experimenting, trying new things and trying to solve their existing problems (like, stone axes get used out and I keep an eye out for rocks that can be made to be axes or other stuff). Hunter-gatherers and substance agriculture remain at that level because their environment simply does not offer anything they can use to advance.

And yes, this would doubly apply to such a situation. The main issue is the resources available to do these. If the population is currently starved in terms of scientific skills, they would try to stick to tried and reliable stuff. They would only deviate if that tried and reliable stuff doesn't work and even then they would try to establish back to something baseline.

You might have a situation where there is a taboo on experimentation because a previous attempt ruined something seen as stable and reliable. Only to take a deeper look and see that the thing was actually held together by metaphorical duct-tape, spit and common self-delusion (think Chernobly where a ill-conceived safety test broke the whole thing). Lack of skill, knowledge and willingness to do things thoroughly can create leaders who obsessively want to do the same thing because they cannot re-build a new thing to stability.

I get the impression that such a situation is more distressingly common than I'd like to think.

Controlled rooms would work for smaller ships and smaller efforts. I'm thinking mind-numbing scale.

A minor, nitpicking bit but all the rooms would be controlled. Most people would just not think about them because their automation is taken care of it. Until everybody forgets how things work within in, but not quite then because things mostly work somehow. Then something finally brakes and nobody can on-hand figure out how to fix it or even whether it is fixable at all. Making things big or ridiculously big just makes bigger margins of error.

But I get where you are going and I think that you can use two ideas to have massive, wild and dangerous environments on your ship:

The first is that these are environments selected to seed and spread on the new colony/planet. Because there is too much biodiversity and need for large genetic pools, they can't just take DNA and then artificially fertilize everything at the target. The only way to bring everything is to bring everything. Hence, entire biospheres are preserved by keeping them alive. It might make a worthwhile cargo.

The second is a bit the spice farming environment, one that I cannot immedeatly find a reference for and I am unsure of whether it actually exists (all I can find about spice farming is tourist locations and organic-farming blurbs). The idea is that farming spices isn't just planting the seed, keep the right soil, air and light and then hope for the plant to bare fruit. You need the entire ecosystem for the spices to grow properly. If the plants produce something more important than just replaceable food, it might even justify the interstellar journey. Think Dune spices where you have to bring live Sandworm colonies for them to be cultivatable.
The ecosystem to just make, say, honey and spices is so vast that a few people can still live off of it like parasites.

In the interests of creating a terrifying environment, it might not be a bad idea to have the fungal spores be quite dangerous for human lungs so portions of the jungle are dangerous just to breathe near.

I bring up gas-masks because I have one and I can imagine how terrifying a life-or-death use of it is. You need only a small, fingernail-thin brake in a flexible rubber seal away from death in a toxic-enough environment. It becomes your most vurnerable point on your body and after a while you just want to take it off because you need to put extra work in your breathing.

I also want to make a note regarding such wild environments: the most dangerous things are usually things you cannot see at all from a distance. This is true for regular, old Earth biomes and jungles. Avoiding the lion is usually fairly easy (just make a campfire at night and stay near it), its the mosquitoes you should be afraid of. Or the snakes, scorpions or things like overheating, no drinkable water, pitfalls, quicksand etc.

I wish a board biologist or biologist-inclined would check my thinking but: I was thinking of plant-rooms filled with CO2 or CO. Plants feed off it no? So why waste putting or recycling oxygen for plants who don't use it and instead concentrate carbon-dioxide. They eat it and maybe with much, much more of it in their air they might grow faster. Genetically-engineer things to adopt to it and you might get better production for minor gain.

The low-maintenance would be important.

The thing about automation is that it only works as long as the people who know how it works and have the resources to keep it working are there. Without those people, their skill and tools the automation is just doomed to fail. It might happen slowly and inperceptively in decades or dramatically in hours.
Just because some are estimated or even guaranteed to last a hundred years doesn't mean it actually will. There is no perfectly-designed system. Unless there is an AI with equivalent level of skill ,either pre-programmed or independently problem-solve to the correct solution, able to do repairs then all machines will brake down. The more actively used the sooner.

A big part of the setting is people surviving and getting by in an environment where they really don't understand the big picture. It's like a wine or cheesemaker doing their thing without even beginning to understand what's happening at the microscopic level, where it's unclear how much of what they do is a vital part of the process versus empty ritual. Purify the vessel with God's holy fire to remove demons? Eh, no, you're killing bacterial contaminants. Ok, fine, we'll let you call them microdemons.

Just a small, rational-historian nitpick: people often stumble upon something that works for reasons they don't understand at the time. They will try to make theories as to why what they do work. They might be wrong, sometimes terribly wrong, but as the flaws are revealed they keep trying until they become least wrong.
And it can be hard to prove better theories without the tools. If you do not have a microscope or something similar, how can you prove yeast or bacteria exists?

In retrospective and armed with various scientific tools like microscopes, old theories often seem mad or just insane superstition. Some people still stupidly cling to them out of tradition, familiarity, wishful thinking or plain guillibility. This does not mean that the people making the theories in their time were necessarily stupid or superstitious (even when their thinking would be considered so in our time).

For a theory to be successful it doesn't have to rise to a modern scientific standard. It just has to work just enough to be better than the previous theory or a stupider one (say, the idea that you live off chi that is reprehensible by food and thus you must eat food otherwise you'll won't have chi to live). It can be enough if following it does what you want it to do. If you do not find or see a case where the theory doesn't work, even learned people might not question it (and devote their mental resources to other matters).

So people in such a situation may not entirely embrace superstition and wishful thinking. In fact smarter people will still recognize those as that and try to make better theories. They will try to work out what they are doing and why it works. They can easily make brilliant, complex and consistent theories that are nonetheless utterly wrong. This has happened in history, multiple times, about important things (George Washington died of bloodletting before his influenza).

It's more of a vibe I have for the ship than anything else. You look at a really big engineering project, I'd wager a good portion of the workers only understand their little piece of the project and can only describe the rest of it in sweeping generalizations. The foreman would know a little bit more, the senior engineers would be more clued in. But if you're basing your understanding of the project solely on conversations with the unskilled workers while having beers at the end of the day, you might not have a solid understanding of what's going on. Some mega-project like the Three Gorges Dam, that's simple enough to describe: hydroelectric power. But if there's any sort of desire for keeping secrets, even if it doesn't make any sense, then rumors will expand geometrically.

But such an aura of secrecy either invites itself to be broken (as did the Manhattan project that leaked many secrets) or asks itself to make things unreliable.

It is essential that both the lower-level workers rely on the higher-level workers and vice versa. The higher engineers who see the big picture must make sure that the lower-level ones don't deviate from it. The lower-level ones keep everything to given specification in trust that the higher-levels worked out the details of what they are doing. When there is something that brakes this, like an unexpected situation or unforeseen engineering problem, you need all involved parties invoked to work together. Both must share all information to properly evaluate the problem. Otherwise things will fail.

For example, imagine a steel bridge. The plans call for certain parts of the structure to flex slightly under load. However, the welders tasked with making the connection structure see that the welding they are told to do is weak and unstable. The welders only ever made repairs and welding on fix structures and materials and thus no previous experience with such work. So they do the welding slightly differently so that the connections don't flex and weaken, but remain rigid, solid and strong. They do this out of trying to do the best job they can and think this is necessary as well as part of the job.
Now imagine that the two sides don't communicate and just assume that the others knows what they are doing (say, the welders assume the architects are all-knowing tech geniuses that know everything and watch their underlings constantly).

When the bridge collapses, the high engineers will blame the welders for poor work and the welders blame the high engineers for making a poor plans. The real problem of the type of welding is only discovered later by a thorough investigation. It might even be discovered that both sides were right (the imagined welding type might not have worked) but neither refuse to believe it because they're humans wanting to blame people rather than problems.

I'm sure that many engineers here can give better examples of how stuff like this can happen in just everyday life.

Keeping secrets is a poor way of running a show and strong class structures don't really foster a sense of community but I'm not proscribing an ideal way of doing things, just imagining a setting, the same way GRR Martin might describe Westeros without advocating we run our own society like anything depicted there.

I'm not saying that you should run a liberal socialist democracy. I'm just saying that making a rigid and strict class structure might not work in what is eventually closed, finite environment. You will need authority and enforce order by force even in ideal situations but you will also need people wanting to go along how things work.

But using authority, keeping obedience and big secrecy will only go so far when the machines ensuring your life need to be kept working properly. You can try but you will run into big problems. You will need to accept talented poor people interested in how poop makes plants grow into the educated elite sooner or later. You cannot accept an idiot to pilot your spaceship just because his daddy was also a pilot and he thinks he's well-suited for the task. You are on that spaceship and you do not want an idiot to pilot it.

You cannot have an atmosphere technician, whose job is to move about atmosphere through appropriate filters and rooms, fill an anti-matter storage unit with excess CO2 because he doesn't know what antimatter is (because he didn't strictly need to know).

Rebellion and security is also going to be a problem. A genuinely big, somewhat organized popular uprising has much more chance of success than on Earth. You are more limited in military superiority, your army cannot use tanks and artillery. Also, rebels can hold key facilities hostage. This of course can backfire with terrorists.

Of course if you can satisfy those organizational needs and ensure their cohesion, that's a different story. The poor, clueless underclass doesn't have to be oppressed to live in poverty. They do not need to be kept in the dark to be in the dark. Even educated people can have difficulty accepting a complex situation and complex problem. People can cling to grudges and appealing stupid ideas for generations and can even make them grow. And sometimes hard technical limits have to be demonstrated to be believed.

Agreed. The problem you run into with scifi is that humans aren't involved in a great many situations.

I disagree. Humans aren't gods, they are actually surprisingly good in many situations. We have learned to adapt where animals failed to evolve adaption. We have solved problems that evolution and animals never could. That we do not act according to our own high standards is a note of our standards, not our evolution.

We're doing a pretty handy job of exploring the outer solar system without a human presence. But it's hard to write exciting space opera about mars rovers, even if they're doing good science. A really good general AI would remove the need for crew on Federation starships, wouldn't it? Or at the very least you'd just need a handful, not hundreds. But stories without humans in them are hard for us to relate to.

You are making the common mistake of confusing necessity with practicality.

We are exploring Mars and the edges of the solar system with remote probes because that's literary the only way we can. At least, the only way space agencies can.

Politicians do not want to give space agencies enough money and time to make technologies and infrastructure for human exploration. It would cost too much, take too long and be too high a gamble with our current tech. Investing in making new techs is even riskier gamble (think of the protesters for a nuclear rocket engine). So the space agencies have to use pre-programmed robots with the most remote connections ever attempted because that's all they can use.

However, with Star Trek era tech, it is a different story. Sure, it might be more economical to make a whole automated spaceship with just an AI onboard. But it isn't really actually more practical. It makes sense to have many skilled human-level problem solvers than just one. It makes more sense to have hundreds of scientists to make complete exploration of a new solar system and new planets than a single mind of limited agency.

Consider that you have FTL here. You leave Earth, leave Sol, do comfortable insterallar travel, enter new solar system, land on new planet and do the reverse in less than a few years. You can find a large number of scientists willing to do that in such a timeframe and in such conditions. Conditions that include decent apartment with good living standards, full medical so you don't need to be especially healthy, plenty of entertainment and even instant communications to back home. Star Trek tech is practically made to make trips to distant stars not much worse than trips across the Earth is for us today.

Now consider the situation without FTL anything. You need behemoth ships with behemoth engines to get up to speed, drift for years at near-lightspeed and then get down to speed. Any scientist you take will now have to devote themselves entirely for years, if not their entire life, to just make that trip. You have to pick people that can make the trip and be useful colonists. Suddenly the number of people you can pick and recruit suddenly strinks. Add more limitations, need for training and the pool of people shrinks.

This would also bring up the question of how much contact each ship has with a parent culture.

A bigger question is how much authority does a parent culture will have over the colony. How will a civilization tens of lightyears apart enforce human rights? How will they make the colonists follow the parent culture? Will the colonists want to?

According to our best guesses, wouldn't antimatter's best use be as rocket fuel?

Yes, see my paragraph below.

Close to a primary you can directly use solar power; in the other system you either have to have far bigger solar concentrators or you need to put something close to the primary to beam power out.

If you tap the atmosphere for rocket-propellant light gases (hydrogen mostly), you might also get stuff like deuterium and helium-3. Good fuels for fusion power.

But yes, having a massive anti-matter collector is going to be very expensive. Probably a comparable or even bigger thing than keeping Holland afloat or running CERN. However anti-matter is comparable to nothing else, except perhaps fissile materials.

As far as the Avatar starship scenario, which is fairly hard SF, antimatter is only needed arriving at and departing from Pandora.

Yes, because there is not enough power infrastructure at Pandora. There the ships had to rely on their own power.

Your spaceship does not have to be the first colony ship. It could be a follow-up ship bringing stuff needed only later. The anti-matter might be there for other, probe interstellar ships starting out from a far colony. The colonists built everything they could and thus still saved the cost of sending out the same ship from Earth.

Antimatter would make for a good prize for space pirates, very high price for the mass. That's why thieves would sooner steal a million dollars worth of diamonds than a million dollars worth of lead. It'd be pretty crazy if a "vikings raiding the English coastline" situation might work here. If these ships are so stupendously huge, the raiders could well and on the external structure and extract antimatter, assuming the defensive guns have been blown. This is less like capturing a sailing ship with a boarding action, more like landing on Iwo Jima. The raiders don't want to take over the ship, just control a local area until they've got their fill and leave.

I'd recommend that you try out Orbiter and try a docking sequence. I think it is one of the pre-prepared scenarios. It will give you an idea why space piracy just isn't going to work, not without game-changing technologies.

The reason why naval piracy is possible is that it isn't complicated for one ship to catch another. It's only a matter of speed. Once you catch up and have the means to board the ship, a small band of well-armed men can demand much from a larger group of barely-armed men. Historically, that was often the case with pirates: they hunted for unarmed or under-armed merchant vessels and threatened to kill the crew either by their hand or cannons. The merchant ship then had no other choice but to either hand over the cargo or die trying to defend it. Consider also that if a merchant vessel manages to fend off pirates, it is still is doomed if it is underhanded when too many sailors died in defense.

With spaceships, you need the active cooperation of the other craft to safely dock. It wouldn't landing on Iwo Jima, it would be like trying to hijack an Apollo mission from the outside! They can deny forced docking just by ever-so-slightly changing your course. Defense with guns won't be even necessary for the same reason a 747 doesn't have machine-gun pits to fend off air-pirates. It takes immense resources to match the vector of a spaceship and then overtake it.
To catch a giant interstellar spacecraft using gigantic nuclear engines (which also might make a great weapons) you will need a giant interstellar spaceship on a similar scale. Then ask yourself, don't I already have a magnificent weapon in the form of engines ejecting controlled amounts of anti-matter?

Then there is also the fact that you can remotely blow up your stolen antimatter containers. You just have to slightly sabotage the containment system. What will then the pirates do after they robbed you and blew up?

And unlike air-pirates once you committed the piracy, where will you go? Everyone can see everyone in space, unless you assume FTL and safe ports of harbor for pirates to sell their loot. Pirates need supplies too and they have to buy that somewhere. Real piracy was actually dealt a serious defeat when such free harbors were conquered or destroyed.

[jollyreaper]

Yes, but once the ship is launched and drifting through interstellar space, most of the work is keeping things in balance.
In Rama, once they get over what Rama is, its about how things go wrong from one norm to another. Or how that balance is put out of whack by a insane traditionalist criminal-mastermind hellbent on conquest.

Yup. But that's a story that's been done before, not what I'm thinking of exploring here.

You know what I was talking about, hazardous harvesting in the jungle? This is something from real life that fits that concept.

http://io9.com/stunning-photos-show-the ... 1538049319

Dudes are harvesting honey with rope ladders, big sticks and tremendous balls.

Constant experimentation is the true source of agriculture. When I read about hunter-gatherers I sometimes read about how they are constantly experimenting, trying new things and trying to solve their existing problems (like, stone axes get used out and I keep an eye out for rocks that can be made to be axes or other stuff). Hunter-gatherers and substance agriculture remain at that level because their environment simply does not offer anything they can use to advance.

That gets into the whole Guns, Germs and Steel argument. On this ship, cultural stasis will come from 1) things going horribly wrong in the past 2) current system working well enough 3) lack of advanced understanding of how everything works which makes tinkering more problematic 4) powers that be are happy with the status quo.

And yes, this would doubly apply to such a situation. The main issue is the resources available to do these. If the population is currently starved in terms of scientific skills, they would try to stick to tried and reliable stuff. They would only deviate if that tried and reliable stuff doesn't work and even then they would try to establish back to something baseline.

Right. That ties back into what I suggested a few posts back about losing the ability to genetically engineer critters but having the genes still around in the current livestock so carefully managing the breeding to keep the genes around. If you lose those animals, you're not getting those genes back.

But this also brings up the question of what tech is like in the rest of the galaxy. If this is a strict generation ship, civilization is hundreds of years away and may as well not exist. If there's a dark age of technology, then the ship is one big artifact, everything about it a lost secret. If there's routine contact with the rest of the galaxy during each stop, it might still prove difficult to obtain replacements in the field. The travel situation would be less like modern shipping where coming all the way from China takes about a month and a ship can rely on well-equipped ports at either end. This is more like back in the age of sail where you had to be a lot more self-reliant. So you might get basic feedstock from your destination but it's guesswork as to supplying genetics that would work with your biosphere.

You might have a situation where there is a taboo on experimentation because a previous attempt ruined something seen as stable and reliable. Only to take a deeper look and see that the thing was actually held together by metaphorical duct-tape, spit and common self-delusion (think Chernobly where a ill-conceived safety test broke the whole thing). Lack of skill, knowledge and willingness to do things thoroughly can create leaders who obsessively want to do the same thing because they cannot re-build a new thing to stability.

I get the impression that such a situation is more distressingly common than I'd like to think.

So many businesses operate in this sort of fashion. No one person has everything in his head but lots of people have parts and pieces as responsibilities have grown and split over time, staff comes, staff goes. And somehow the business remains in operation.

When I was younger I used to think I was poor at reading code and that better programmers could read it like a book. It took me a while to realize that code is confusing to anyone and can take some time to master, even if it's well-documented. And if it isn't, and especially if a programmer tried to get cute, it's a nightmare. "It works but I don't know why. Ok, I made this change for you and it seems to have not broken anything but don't ask me what this other chunk is doing." It's like non-coding DNA. You think it might be junk but have a suspicion it might still be doing something important, best not to mess with it.

A minor, nitpicking bit but all the rooms would be controlled. Most people would just not think about them because their automation is taken care of it. Until everybody forgets how things work within in, but not quite then because things mostly work somehow. Then something finally brakes and nobody can on-hand figure out how to fix it or even whether it is fixable at all. Making things big or ridiculously big just makes bigger margins of error.

Understood. Rama was sectioned off as well but those sections were so large, even using a word like enclosure would seem to do a disservice to the scale of the ship.

But I get where you are going and I think that you can use two ideas to have massive, wild and dangerous environments on your ship:

The first is that these are environments selected to seed and spread on the new colony/planet. Because there is too much biodiversity and need for large genetic pools, they can't just take DNA and then artificially fertilize everything at the target. The only way to bring everything is to bring everything. Hence, entire biospheres are preserved by keeping them alive. It might make a worthwhile cargo.

Now that's an interesting thought. Noah's Ark vs. sperm bank. I think the sperm bank issue would be the same problem mentioned with cloning dinosaurs -- even if we could resurrect them from DNA in amber (which we can't), we'd be missing all of the microflora and fauna necessary for survival. Human babies are born with clean guts but pick up what they need from the environment. Anything a dinosaur picks up will be at minimum 65 million years divergent from them and there's no telling what problems that could cause.

The second is a bit the spice farming environment, one that I cannot immedeatly find a reference for and I am unsure of whether it actually exists (all I can find about spice farming is tourist locations and organic-farming blurbs). The idea is that farming spices isn't just planting the seed, keep the right soil, air and light and then hope for the plant to bare fruit. You need the entire ecosystem for the spices to grow properly. If the plants produce something more important than just replaceable food, it might even justify the interstellar journey. Think Dune spices where you have to bring live Sandworm colonies for them to be cultivatable.
The ecosystem to just make, say, honey and spices is so vast that a few people can still live off of it like parasites.

Well, much of that would depend on the planet the ecosystem is being transported to. A planet without phosphate would not be very accommodating for earth-type ecologies.

I bring up gas-masks because I have one and I can imagine how terrifying a life-or-death use of it is. You need only a small, fingernail-thin brake in a flexible rubber seal away from death in a toxic-enough environment. It becomes your most vurnerable point on your body and after a while you just want to take it off because you need to put extra work in your breathing.

The worst thing I can imagine is hazmat diving.

I also want to make a note regarding such wild environments: the most dangerous things are usually things you cannot see at all from a distance. This is true for regular, old Earth biomes and jungles. Avoiding the lion is usually fairly easy (just make a campfire at night and stay near it), its the mosquitoes you should be afraid of. Or the snakes, scorpions or things like overheating, no drinkable water, pitfalls, quicksand etc.

Agreed. And jungle environments are conducive to all manner of things that will love to make you a home or a meal. Botflies, malaria, cholera, yech. Still, swarming things that will eat you to the bone can really get your attention. Piranha. Army ants. WWII accounts of cleaning up the bodies in the jungle would mention how a dead, bloated body would have moving shapes beneath the taut uniforms. Move the body and rats come boiling out, gorged and angry.

I wish a board biologist or biologist-inclined would check my thinking but: I was thinking of plant-rooms filled with CO2 or CO. Plants feed off it no? So why waste putting or recycling oxygen for plants who don't use it and instead concentrate carbon-dioxide. They eat it and maybe with much, much more of it in their air they might grow faster. Genetically-engineer things to adopt to it and you might get better production for minor gain.

Or maybe there's a heavier-than-air gas that gets emitted by some of the fungi, the sort that accumulates in depressions. I see hydrogen sulfide can result from organic processes, it is heavier than air, very poisonous, corrosive, flammable and explosive. So imagine worrying about causing explosions whenever you are in a depression in the jungle. It could be a real fire swamp and where we have fire swamps we have lightning sand and rodents of unusual size.

The thing about automation is that it only works as long as the people who know how it works and have the resources to keep it working are there. Without those people, their skill and tools the automation is just doomed to fail. It might happen slowly and inperceptively in decades or dramatically in hours.
Just because some are estimated or even guaranteed to last a hundred years doesn't mean it actually will. There is no perfectly-designed system. Unless there is an AI with equivalent level of skill ,either pre-programmed or independently problem-solve to the correct solution, able to do repairs then all machines will brake down. The more actively used the sooner.

This would be a feature for the setting.

Just a small, rational-historian nitpick: people often stumble upon something that works for reasons they don't understand at the time. They will try to make theories as to why what they do work. They might be wrong, sometimes terribly wrong, but as the flaws are revealed they keep trying until they become least wrong.
And it can be hard to prove better theories without the tools. If you do not have a microscope or something similar, how can you prove yeast or bacteria exists?

That's my entire point. After the scientific method is developed, along with the proper tools, we can properly describe what was once mysterious. Rainbows are refracted light. Fermentation is caused by yeast. We have the germ theory of disease. But before the scientific method, before those tools, you could be skeptical about someone's claims but still lack any means to disprove him.

In retrospective and armed with various scientific tools like microscopes, old theories often seem mad or just insane superstition. Some people still stupidly cling to them out of tradition, familiarity, wishful thinking or plain guillibility. This does not mean that the people making the theories in their time were necessarily stupid or superstitious (even when their thinking would be considered so in our time).

Right. They are working with the best tools they have. And that's the situation I'm imagining onboard this ship. People are working with the tools at hand. And if someone comes onboard the ship with a bit more knowledge, a bit more scientific grounding, he's going to face a lot of pushback. It's like British doctors trying to tell Indians to change their burial practices to contain a cholera outbreak. I don't care how good your science is, you're messing with someone's religion. You'll lose out to that.

For a theory to be successful it doesn't have to rise to a modern scientific standard. It just has to work just enough to be better than the previous theory or a stupider one (say, the idea that you live off chi that is reprehensible by food and thus you must eat food otherwise you'll won't have chi to live). It can be enough if following it does what you want it to do. If you do not find or see a case where the theory doesn't work, even learned people might not question it (and devote their mental resources to other matters).

Agreed. There would be a mix of sophistication, ignorance, and inventive compromise on this ship.

So people in such a situation may not entirely embrace superstition and wishful thinking. In fact smarter people will still recognize those as that and try to make better theories. They will try to work out what they are doing and why it works. They can easily make brilliant, complex and consistent theories that are nonetheless utterly wrong. This has happened in history, multiple times, about important things (George Washington died of bloodletting before his influenza).

And Isaac Newton considered his life's work to be in alchemy, not physics. Galileo refused to accept Kepler's elliptical orbits, preferring circular ones.

But such an aura of secrecy either invites itself to be broken (as did the Manhattan project that leaked many secrets) or asks itself to make things unreliable.

It is essential that both the lower-level workers rely on the higher-level workers and vice versa. The higher engineers who see the big picture must make sure that the lower-level ones don't deviate from it. The lower-level ones keep everything to given specification in trust that the higher-levels worked out the details of what they are doing. When there is something that brakes this, like an unexpected situation or unforeseen engineering problem, you need all involved parties invoked to work together. Both must share all information to properly evaluate the problem. Otherwise things will fail.

I hear what you're saying. It's a matter of striking a plausible balance. Consider you and twenty companions are plunked down in a random wilderness and told to live off the land for a month. If you are given a field guide you at least know where you are, what sorts of critters can be found, your usual threats. It might get scary at night but you have at least a book understanding of what's really out there. If you're given cameras and night vision goggles then the dark holds no mystery. Now if you're plunked down with no guide, no real equipment, your ignorance becomes quite terrifying. Then on top of this we add in the social side. Is this a group that can work together, muddle along at a survivable level of dysfunction or is everyone going to be at each other's throats by the end of the week?

Human societies seem to be able to muddle along at surprisingly high levels of dysfunction. The more fragile the society, the less dysfunction it can handle. Even one as poorly managed as North Korea hasn't collapsed as completely as, say, Somalia.

I'm sure that many engineers here can give better examples of how stuff like this can happen in just everyday life.

I get what you're saying. There is a minimal level of functionality that must be maintained or the whole ship will fail. And seeing as the ship has been around for a very long time, the system must be stable even if it might not be optimal and efficient.

I'm not saying that you should run a liberal socialist democracy. I'm just saying that making a rigid and strict class structure might not work in what is eventually closed, finite environment. You will need authority and enforce order by force even in ideal situations but you will also need people wanting to go along how things work.

But using authority, keeping obedience and big secrecy will only go so far when the machines ensuring your life need to be kept working properly. You can try but you will run into big problems. You will need to accept talented poor people interested in how poop makes plants grow into the educated elite sooner or later. You cannot accept an idiot to pilot your spaceship just because his daddy was also a pilot and he thinks he's well-suited for the task. You are on that spaceship and you do not want an idiot to pilot it.

This could fit with the meritocracy approach. You prove yourself on the low end, you are welcomed to the aristocracy. And because the price of failure is so immediate on a vessel like this, nepotism would be an unforgivable sin.

You cannot have an atmosphere technician, whose job is to move about atmosphere through appropriate filters and rooms, fill an anti-matter storage unit with excess CO2 because he doesn't know what antimatter is (because he didn't strictly need to know).

By the same token, I've known people who are very accomplished at high levels in demanding fields who can be shockingly ignorant about things outside the field. And if the shipboard culture encouraged that sort of thinking...

Rebellion and security is also going to be a problem. A genuinely big, somewhat organized popular uprising has much more chance of success than on Earth. You are more limited in military superiority, your army cannot use tanks and artillery. Also, rebels can hold key facilities hostage. This of course can backfire with terrorists.

True, but a big ship like this is a perfect place for a hydraulic empire. You can easily cut off the water and food shipments. On most conventional scifi ships cutting the air would be the first choice but I don' think that would be possible with how I'm imagining the habitat section, at least for anything on the surface.

Of course if you can satisfy those organizational needs and ensure their cohesion, that's a different story. The poor, clueless underclass doesn't have to be oppressed to live in poverty. They do not need to be kept in the dark to be in the dark. Even educated people can have difficulty accepting a complex situation and complex problem. People can cling to grudges and appealing stupid ideas for generations and can even make them grow. And sometimes hard technical limits have to be demonstrated to be believed.

I'm not thinking ignorance like peasants rooting around in the muck, more like Joe Six-Pack who can't see beyond his immediate environment.

We're doing a pretty handy job of exploring the outer solar system without a human presence. But it's hard to write exciting space opera about mars rovers, even if they're doing good science. A really good general AI would remove the need for crew on Federation starships, wouldn't it? Or at the very least you'd just need a handful, not hundreds. But stories without humans in them are hard for us to relate to.

You are making the common mistake of confusing necessity with practicality.

I get what you're saying but those might not be the best two words. I think you mean necessity vs. ideal. I forget who said it but the argument goes that one trained geologist in a spacesuit with a rock hammer could do more science on Mars in an afternoon than a rover could in a season. So ideally you'd want a human. But just try running the numbers on a robotic mission vs. a manned one. Robot goes one-way, doesn't require life support, etc. We started sending robots because we couldn't afford to send humans. But I think at this point that humans probably couldn't earn their keep. If a robotic mission costs a billion and a manned mission costs $100 billion, then a whole load of robotic missions funded at the $100 billion level would still get more science done.

However, with Star Trek era tech, it is a different story. Sure, it might be more economical to make a whole automated spaceship with just an AI onboard. But it isn't really actually more practical. It makes sense to have many skilled human-level problem solvers than just one. It makes more sense to have hundreds of scientists to make complete exploration of a new solar system and new planets than a single mind of limited agency.

It depends on how smart the AI is. If it's just an expert system then fine, you need people. But if the AI is something like a Culture Mind, then baseline humans have been surpassed.

The problem I'm getting at here is the speed of thought. What's the brightest brain possible in the setting? If the human mind represents a thermodynamic maximum, then AI's could be as smart as a human but not smarter. This means humans are still relevant. If AI's can be smarter than baseline humans, if there's no upper limit, humans become obsolete in terms of storytelling. Again, like with the Culture. Humans are essentially pets.

A bigger question is how much authority does a parent culture will have over the colony. How will a civilization tens of lightyears apart enforce human rights? How will they make the colonists follow the parent culture? Will the colonists want to?

Much of this will depend on how "big" the universe is. In a Star Wars setting, travel times are so short hopping to the next star system is like catching a jet flight. The planets are very close together, interstellar trade has a huge economic impact, the dynamics are very much like globalized Earth. Go back a few hundred years to the age of sail, colonies were still quite economically justifiable even with the expense of shipping goods. Of course, the colonies all ended up breaking away from the mother country at one time or another. That's just the pattern of colonies.

If the universe is big and the colonies widely distributed and years apart, then the purpose of founding them might not be economic but as a means of preserving the culture. It could also be a means for immortals to secure their own power base. If there's not a lot of mortality happening at the top, and I would presume mortals would be vulnerable to accidents and murder, humanity will have to keep expanding the number of colonies to provide new territories for new nobles to lord over. This was the economic model expressed in Stross' Neptune's Brood.

I'd recommend that you try out Orbiter and try a docking sequence. I think it is one of the pre-prepared scenarios. It will give you an idea why space piracy just isn't going to work, not without game-changing technologies.

Well, I mention piracy simply because I want there to be a credible threat out there that would require the use of the fighters. It's color and flavoring. I just need to see if it can be justified in the setting.

With spaceships, you need the active cooperation of the other craft to safely dock. It wouldn't landing on Iwo Jima, it would be like trying to hijack an Apollo mission from the outside! They can deny forced docking just by ever-so-slightly changing your course.

For vessels of equivalent size, yes. But the big ship I'm talking about would not be conducting evasive maneuvers, it's simply too vast.

I think the better argument against piracy in a realistic SF setting is that there's no stealth in space and the defender can see the attacker coming from a long way away. Weapons can be used at great ranges and are quite destructive. You just don't get the same tactical situations as with the age of sail where a boarding action could settle the engagement.

The reason why I picked the island example is because this ship is immense, not very maneuverable, and only has so many weapons. If you can blast the turrets off a given spot, if you can hold back the defending fighters, once you settle down onto the hull you're a harder target to pick off.

If you consider the delta-v of ships in a hard SF setting, they are pretty much on rails, though. Half the fuel to get up to speed, half the fuel to stop, a small margin in reserve for course correction. Within those parameters, you may as well be a train. If the pirates are using a realistic ship as well, that makes shaping an intercept that much harder since the pirates would have to reach the target, either launching from the same origin or coming at them from a different place, match velocities at intercept, then have enough delta-v left to evade any authorities who might care about the crime. Tough.

This is why I want to keep the space physics side of this a little more cinematic. Newton's still in charge of the physics but Heinlein's in charge of the engines.

Defense with guns won't be even necessary for the same reason a 747 doesn't have machine-gun pits to fend off air-pirates. It takes immense resources to match the vector of a spaceship and then overtake it.

Right. It's easier to steal that cargo when it's on the ground. But just think, if you can get people over the hurdle of disbelief, you get your Air Pirates you get Crimson Skies.

To catch a giant interstellar spacecraft using gigantic nuclear engines (which also might make a great weapons) you will need a giant interstellar spaceship on a similar scale. Then ask yourself, don't I already have a magnificent weapon in the form of engines ejecting controlled amounts of anti-matter?

Agreed, especially if we stick completely with a STL setting. But I want FTL. Therefore, how FTL works might provide opportunities. I'm thinking they'll have a hyperspace to traverse through. Due to the nature of hyperspace, there will be safe and dangerous areas and thus certain hyperspace lanes that are well-traveled. Since hyperspace is a handwave to begin with, what if the combination of relative speeds, detection ranges and obvious chokepoints means that the variables are a lot closer to what pirates operated with? You jump a ship in hyperspace, force it back to realspace, you and he are now right next to each other at spitting range.

And unlike air-pirates once you committed the piracy, where will you go? Everyone can see everyone in space, unless you assume FTL and safe ports of harbor for pirates to sell their loot. Pirates need supplies too and they have to buy that somewhere. Real piracy was actually dealt a serious defeat when such free harbors were conquered or destroyed.

Agreed. That's why the economics for successful piracy would have to be baked into the setting. I think any setting with cinematic space combat and interstellar warfare is resorting to special pleading because the most realistic extrapolations based on what we know wouldn't allow for it. It's the same reason why we can plausibly have mercenary infantry in the real world and at times we had mercenary pilots but we just don't see anyone these days operating mercenary fighter squadrons, even though as a story premise that would be awesome. Unless there's a really good reason, people tend to kill each other with the cheapest and most practical weapons. You get a first world power fighting a third world power, they're not going to be coming to the fight with tanks and jets unless they are getting backing from a powerful third party. That's why the US squared off against MiG's in Korea and Vietnam but Iraq didn't offer more than a token resistance at the very start of both wars.

Like I said in an earlier post, I know what I want to have in this setting, I just have to make sure I'm coming up with reasonable explanations as to how things are so. And if it really requires some special pleading, I'll have to earn that suspension of disbelief!

[Zixinus]

Well, much of that would depend on the planet the ecosystem is being transported to. A planet without phosphate would not be very accommodating for earth-type ecologies.

It might also be a infrastructure thing for new colonies. The first wave of colonists are self-sufficient but limited in ability to create life adapted to their new planet.

But back at Sol there are massive labs that can program life to that in an artificial simulation. Though then you have the question of which one is easier to bring, especially on your gargantuan starship: the lab and all of its people, the product or both?

Still, swarming things that will eat you to the bone can really get your attention. Piranha. Army ants.

Perhaps a minor note on horror: the scariest thing might not be something that immediately is harmful. It might be something that gives you a sting or rash, or do something similarly not-very-harmful.
But if you don't know the stuff how do you know if its not harmless? Imagine a sting that uses slow-working poison or something that will give you hallucinations. Something that messes with your brain, even if rather harmlessly, can be more lethal than actual poison.

True, but a big ship like this is a perfect place for a hydraulic empire. You can easily cut off the water and food shipments. On most conventional scifi ships cutting the air would be the first choice but I don' think that would be possible with how I'm imagining the habitat section, at least for anything on the surface.

I have a dead man's switch suicide bomb near an anti-matter container, or an waste-water junction or near one of the generator-facilities. I insist that my demands are to be met within 24 hours and the engineers cannot just work-around the thing I'm threatening. What are you going to do? Can you really afford to ignore me?

Holding the stuff hostage obviously won't work for long, but the people responsible may not want to lose some things I have. Even if they are replaceable. Of course having a gargantuan ship may make selecting a critical target much more difficult. Everything has space to expand so you aren't forced to put several (and even different) important things next to each other.

I get what you're saying but those might not be the best two words. I think you mean necessity vs. ideal.

No. Not at all, I chose my words carefully.

Necessity is inarguable and made strictly to fit the circumstances. It It is making fire with gunpowder and batteries when you have nothing else with you in the middle of winter.

What is practical is relative and fits the people's preference. It is having a gas stove instead of burning wood while camping. Having it is beyond what is necessary, but it is more practical than lugging around firewood and axes. Another person might bring electric clothing and an electric stove instead. Some others don't want to depend on advanced technology that might break and just stick with wood.

You do what is necessary when you don't have options. You do what is practical when you have less-practical alternatives.

I forget who said it but the argument goes that one trained geologist in a spacesuit with a rock hammer could do more science on Mars in an afternoon than a rover could in a season. So ideally you'd want a human. But just try running the numbers on a robotic mission vs. a manned one. Robot goes one-way, doesn't require life support, etc.

Your goal is the exploration of the solar system. It is not as simple goal as survival but it is still wanted.

You are not going to get the budget for manned missions, not in your lifetime. It is too much money invested far too away for presidents who would only care to gain votes during elections. Same reason why education is difficult to fund.

In this situation manned missions are a hypothetical option. Sending robots instead are not. In the range what type of missions you can test, you don't have much choice. You argue for robot missions because nothing else has a change of happening. It is either probes or nothing.

It depends on how smart the AI is. If it's just an expert system then fine, you need people. But if the AI is something like a Culture Mind, then baseline humans have been surpassed.

Humans and people may be necessary even with a high-level AI. For example, when they are the cargo. Or if they part of your essential resources.

The problem I'm getting at here is the speed of thought. What's the brightest brain possible in the setting? If the human mind represents a thermodynamic maximum, then AI's could be as smart as a human but not smarter. This means humans are still relevant. If AI's can be smarter than baseline humans, if there's no upper limit, humans become obsolete in terms of storytelling. Again, like with the Culture. Humans are essentially pets. [/qoute]

I wouldn't say obsolete in terms of storytelling. If anything their storytelling potential remains constant.

I would say rather obsolete in terms of agency. Making a good story where the protagonist has very limited agency can be uncomfortable but not impossible.

[Zixinus]

These are some more things I wanted to comment on. I didn't in my previous post because I was too tired to.

Much of this will depend on how "big" the universe is. In a Star Wars setting, travel times are so short hopping to the next star system is like catching a jet flight. The planets are very close together, interstellar trade has a huge economic impact, the dynamics are very much like globalized Earth. Go back a few hundred years to the age of sail, colonies were still quite economically justifiable even with the expense of shipping goods. Of course, the colonies all ended up breaking away from the mother country at one time or another. That's just the pattern of colonies.

That is because they have immensely powerful FTL technology. Travel to another solar system or planet is fairly trivial because lightyears can be done in days.

When you don't have FTL technology, it will take years just for the colony-parent authority to know that there is something wrong. It will take more to prepare a response and again more years until it arrives.

Well, I mention piracy simply because I want there to be a credible threat out there that would require the use of the fighters. It's color and flavoring. I just need to see if it can be justified in the setting.

I hate to brake it to you, but fighter's do not make sense. Newtonian flight does not allow for dog-fighting and thus there is no real need for human pilots. This is the modern SF equivalent of the idea of flying battleships. Space fighters are a very soft SF idea.

At best, you can have Venture Star or a Delta Gliders. These are rather unique in that they can fly atmospherically and in vacuum. Large space-planes with overpowered rockets (for vaccum flights) carrying a small crew and relatively small amount of cargo. The pilots of these have to know what they are doing and probably highly skilled, as they have to pilot in two different environments. They might be militarizable even, even if with a fairly limited scope.

For vessels of equivalent size, yes. But the big ship I'm talking about would not be conducting evasive maneuvers, it's simply too vast.

Good point. It likely would still have several non-weapon defensive measures, especially its engine.

It could also just detect an unauthorized ship approaching and threw something in its way. Turn that thing into a small, simple rocket and enough of velocity difference will do the job of a warhead.

The reason why I picked the island example is because this ship is immense, not very maneuverable, and only has so many weapons. If you can blast the turrets off a given spot, if you can hold back the defending fighters, once you settle down onto the hull you're a harder target to pick off.

Yes, except islands don't move about at near-c velocity. The outermost hull of the interstellar generation ship is going to be thick, thick armor (that has to be constantly replaced and repaired). Remember that to an object going at relativistic speeds, hitting anything in its way is essentially a small nuclear explosion.

Defensive turrets do not make much sense here. They don't put a lot of turrets on actual ships anymore (I think), nevermind on a spaceship. What you want are missiles.

If your generation ship plans for every possibility and can easily cart around whole ecosystems, a good number of different military missiles make much more sense. You can have nukes next to kinetic-kill missiles. Along with missile-carriers and such.

Then again, you can have lasers meant to vaporize debree in the path of the spaceship. Or powerful communication lasers, or even a laser-based engine. Stuff not meant to be weapons but can still be used as ones.

However, a generation ship wouldn't have guns for the same reason oil tankers don't. They simply do not go to places where they expect danger. If they found themselves in danger, they expect other powers than themselves to protect them.

Within those parameters, you may as well be a train. If the pirates are using a realistic ship as well, that makes shaping an intercept that much harder since the pirates would have to reach the target, either launching from the same origin or coming at them from a different place, match velocities at intercept, then have enough delta-v left to evade any authorities who might care about the crime. Tough.

No, it is rather impossible unless the pirates can match vector and force a dock without the target able to react. Without fancy FTL, it is outright impossible.

For a generation ship, it is out of the question. The velocities you are talking about are near-c, near lightspeed. Nobody that can be described as "pirates" will have the resources to make anything like that. Velocities required to get around the solar system are far from so high. You need massive resources to get a ship to near-c.

The only way to "attack" a generation ship in a setting where reaction drives dominate is before its start or once it completed its journey.

Right. It's easier to steal that cargo when it's on the ground. But just think, if you can get people over the hurdle of disbelief, you get your Air Pirates you get Crimson Skies.

Yes, but in Crimson Skies the central idea is air pirates. It is rather obviously the whole point of it. Here, your central idea is a ridiculously big generation ship that uses God-knows what kind of rocket engine. Then you add space pirates just because. You are mixing how hard your setting in. Space pirates are just a soft SF idea to begin with.

Agreed, especially if we stick completely with a STL setting. But I want FTL.

With an FTL setting, why do you need such a gigantic ship to begin with? If you have handwave FTL, you don't need one big ship with heavy investment behind it. Distances between star systems would be reduced to manageable times (less then the lightyear distances). You don't need generations of people to carry your cargo.