The other challenges of space
 

For a while now I've been dreaming up a space exploration setting that can be loosely described Enterprise if it were re-invented the same way the new battlestar galactica was. Basically the setting assumes minimal technology over TL8 with a little super science. There is space travel (obviously) but guns fire bullets rather than lasers, injuries require surgery that takes considerable time to recover from, and so forth. The premise is that humanity had to evacuate earth in the wake of a viral outbreak similar to the rage virus (o.k, not as hard science but zombies are cool) and did so in huge cryogenic ships each preserving 10,000 people. An unknown time later (one of the recurring themes of the setting is that it's not known how long its been since humanity left each) one of the ships came into orbit of a life bearing planet, the people inside were reawakened and colonisation began. The colony suffered at first, with many people dying, then in the year 15 (0 being colonisation) another cryo ship arrived. Increase in people power and working technology kick started the colony and by year 30 it was thriving, the economy had begun to harvest spaced based resources, the population was steadily growing and a second city had been founded to better access natural resources. It's not the year 275 and the colony has reached a golden age. Political reforms have achieved a stable democracy, resource efficiency have prevented environmental problems and the colony was even blessed with the arrival of a fourth cryo ship 3 years before. The colony has decided that it's time to explore the universe and has assembled a fleet of space vassals to boldly go where no man (from the colony) has gone before, which is where the players come in, functioning as the crew.

Taking ideas from the new BattleStar and also a bit from Stargate Universe (which let’s face it is star gate trying to be the new battle star) many of the problems faced by the crew/party will be drawn from general problems of being in space for that long, things like running out of water or fuel, or people going space crazy and psychotic, I'm trying to think of what other problems like that would be.

Also I am trying to flesh out the setting a little more, I've decide that when the players encounter new species they will be evolved humans rather than life evolved among the furthest stars. This plays into a possible subplot about the "seeders" since all the planet the colony is on shows obvious signs of being terraformed from earth life a very long time ago, and also there is the strange problem of why four cryo ships have found their way to a planet given the exceedingly small odds of a second finding its way there. At the onset of the campaign the colony knows of humans living out in space called Skellions who often raid colonial mining ships and even the colony itself early on. Skellions typically live in giant space stations made of stolen ships, they are very distrustful of people who colonise worlds (some theorise that the Skellions were colonists of other worlds forced to flee for some reason). Outside of raiding they do mine spaced based resources and grow food in artificial green houses, though they are closer to space rednecks than a functional space civilisation.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

Sounds like fun.This is troublesome without some additional handwaving. I have a hard time imagining an automated cryogenic system that doesn't track time somehow. Does the method of space propulsion itself disconnect ship time from universe time?

Re: The other challenges of space
 

Even if it did there would be some astronomical way to measure elapsed time. Proper motions of nearby stars, relative positions of global clusters around the galactic nucleus, etc. Whatever the time scale there will be some way to measure it at least roughly.

Cryogenic STL sleeper ships just aren't going to take you that far anyway. Anywhere you could get in one would be relatively well known from astronomical observations. We're probably "only" 10 or 20 years from being able to detect really Earth-like planets around nearby stars as a routine thing.

Have the colonists invented FTL (or immortality) since landing? If not, what are they going to get out of sending out more STL ships?

Someone looking for a campaign in the mode of BSG or Stargate Universe (which is admittedly not me) can't be that concerned about science or logic but you might want to consider introducing some superscience like a semi-random jump drive or largely non-understood network of wormholes to make the whole proposition more reasonable.

Nobody is going to launch any sort of "Enterprise boldly going" mission at STL speeds to check out the local neighborhood.

Also, please _please_ do not use the "spaceship running out of water" thing. It makes my head hurt every time I see it. Nobody who can build there own interstellar spaceship is going to be unable to recycle their own wastewater and keep their environmental systems going as a closed loop. If they aren't it's going to kill them in about 3 days and good riddance.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

Also- they should know roughly how fast they were going and just be able to extrapolate the time; doubly so since a second ship showed up- they should have a relatively good number if computer moddeling still exists, or a general number if it does not and they have to rely on traditional astonomy.

IE- we were traveling at .02c, based on visible star patterns this location is 400 light years away: it has been ~20,000 years since we departed.

Second problem; even assuming a massive population boom for 14 generations, assuming everyone started breading at ~20 years of age, and then proceeded to have 5 children a piece and no one dies, ever, your population is:
20,000 *5, *14= 1,400,000

And that assumes you have some bicentennials hanging around through super-science medicine. In a more practical hard times, death by 60, not everyone has 5 children, stillbirths, crime, death by accidents, etc- you have less then 200,000 people.

They don't have time to head to stars, there are too few of them to risk to space travel unless there is a very good reason to go (the planet is missing a key element that they need for there technology; like say lithium, gallium, or uranium; but then it becomes a space mining game, not an exploration game). There is so much work to be done on planet to continue to make it fit for human population that they can't spare the effort to make an interstellar ship either- unless you want to say that the planet is unnaturally abundant in easily accessible resources AND the humans have access to robots which handle all domestic tasks, but if they have that, why not just send the robots to space stay home and create art or whatever else you do in the robot labor utopia.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

I don't see anything wrong with this plot so long as it is done in the right way- like how battle-star galactica handled it: IE- your ship with crew 300 is 99.5% efficient at recycling water, you could go essentially go forever with just a twenty thousand liter spare tank to handle ship showers and the slow loss due to that 99.5% efficiency, and the like (the shower water will be recycled eventually, but not fast enough to actually fuel other showers since most people shower in the morning or evening). Since each crew member needs about 4 liters of water a day (we'll assume excess over that like shower reclamation or post work out drinking is easy to reclaim is essentially 100% efficient) you only loose 6 liters a day out of your twenty thousand liter spare tank, so you can operate for 3333 days with no refill <and you can claim casual refill every time you pass a comet or other ice-ball>. Something bad happens and you loose ALL your water. You fix the tank, juice down some non-essentials <house plants, luxury greenery>, you reduce the amount of salt in all of the mess food and mannage to scrape together 100 liters, nobody can take a shower, and basically every day that 100 liters is reducing by 6 liters- you have 17 days to find water before drastic measure must be taken; The nearest comet might be more then 17 days away, and even if it's not, it might only be enough water to get you 25-50 more days- worse, the system may have been 99.5% efficient when it was put together, in drydock, and every weld was X-ray measured; with your fix it might be less efficent now, leaking tiny amounts of water into space through poor welds or leaving more water in the final waste due to whatever compromised your water in the first place.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

Ah, high tech, low pop. Love the concept, and always have trouble justifying it. Also, feels a bit like Original War in space to me - but without the war, that is.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

This could make sense if you mean hand-weapons, but if you've got starflight tech, STL or FTL either one, then heavier weaponized lasers (or something equivalent) probably will exist. They aren't superscience, they're on the horizon for us now, and any starflight technology will have the energy sources to power them.

Why did they bother? With ~20,000 people, any habitable world would have all the resources they would likely need to sustain them and even a luxurious life-style (assuming they had sufficient automation to maintain a luxurious life-style with 20,000-30,000 people, not all of them working age). If your automation is that good, you've got a small paradisiacal town, if it's not that good, life is still a struggle to get by and space flight is a dream for your descendants to worry with.

This is just way too fast to be believable, for the technology setting you've been describing.

It would be far, far more believable if you moved the year to say...Arrival
+2750 years, assumed that technology had retrogressed during that period and been redeveloped to the level you want, and that there had been some warfare, chaos, and the other nastiness of human nature along the way before the utopian civilization rose. That would give your population the time to grow to something substantial and some reason to look beyond the planet for resources or knowledge.

Depends on how realistic you want to be. BSG II and SGU are not realistic at all, so maybe it doesn't matter. If it does, though, keep in mind that any technology that can build a starship can construct reasonably self-contained water recycling systems. They might malfunction or be damanged, or itr might be overstrained, but as a general rule starships won't run out of water unless they have some other problem to cause it.

If they don't have recycling technology that good, then they won't be launching starships for exploration, they won't even be doing very much at an interplanetary level in the first place.

Food is more complicated, it's easier to believe in running out of food than water, but still, there are non-superscience ways to recycle food, too, and any technology capable of starflight would almost surely know about them (if they don't, that's a story in itself!). They might not be as efficient as with water, but they work or as far as we can tell should work.

(It might be plausible that the life support system can recycle some nutrients but not all, so stores could be an issue there. Likewise, food recycling might be inherently less efficient than water in such a small closed system, so maybe raw materials would have to be carried in greater supply, too.)

Space craziness is a question mark. We don't have much real data on this subject except from long ocean voyages and remote outposts and the like. It probably can happen...but if the people picking the crews are even modestly competent, it probably shouldn't happen often. I could easily imagine, for ex, that one of the training stages for the crews for these ships would be living in an enclosed environment with other potential recruits for a year, or something of the sort to weed out unsuitable personalities.

Now, it might turn out that there's something totally unknown about interstellar space that messes with the human mind, or some human minds, over long periods...that could even be true in the real world for all we know. Astra incognita and all that...or maybe the FTL drive has some such effect.

Well, evolution takes time. On a human scale it takes a lot of time for it to turn humans into something reasonably classifiable as 'not human'. Even with the new selective pressures and high birth and death rates in the colonies, even with higher exposure to mutagens, it takes a long time.

So either (as you imply) somebody else messed with the genes, or...as others have noted on-thread, it's just not plausible that the cryoships would not have some way to know how long they'd been in flight from Earth. In fact, they would be expected to have lots of ways to know that. Redundant timers, clocks, radioactive-decay clocks, astronomical observations, scientists could make an approximate guesstimate from the condition of the ship itself at arrival.

So...suppose the cryoships that arrived on the colony passed through some kind of time anomaly, or were held in flight by these 'Seeders', while the other colonies evolved and changed. Maybe everybody else arrived on their target worlds 50 million years ago...

Re: The other challenges of space
 

Given sufficient automation, it's plausible, especially in 'matural colonial' environments.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

I don't think so. 30,000 people are not going to be building a space program. Even if you have contragravity, ship building is going to require an industrial infrastructure that simply won't exist.
So do they have faster than light drive?


Running out of water or fuel isn't especially likely given the setup. Stuff like that happens on Stargate Universe because they are on an incredibly old ship that is breaking down and is mostly out of their control. It happens on Battlestar Galactica because they are a rag tag fleet overloaded with refugees who left with about an hour to plan their departure. A actual planned expedition doesn't run into that kind of problem unless it was put together by some kind of fly by night scam artist or massively corrupt government. Hardly a golden age.

Now what could happen is that after the ship is a long way out, it gets into a battle and has to limp home, wrestling with resource problems and failing systems...but unlike Enterprise any sane commander would do exactly that if he got into a battle. Limp home and wait for the ship yard to fix his ship up.



AThe odds wouldn't be small at all. People actually set courses you know, and there aren't all that many stars near Sol that are particularly good candidates for Earthlike life.

They make war, mine, grow food and maintain advanced technology. What more would they need to be functional?

Re: The other challenges of space
 

Maybe the ships had a year 100,000 problem. ;)

Also, if the ships were shut down completely in interstellar space and reactivated when there was enough light energy available, chronometers would be off. The cryo could be passive, only becoming active when the ship thaws out near a star.

I see a bigger problem with the evolved humans 'messing' with the colonists. If the Evo's had FTL and "preseeded" the planets and then redirected the cryo ships toward them... why? Social experiment? Reality show? Didn't want the lowly humans lowering property values in their parsec? Only good reasons I can think of is that unevolved humans are better at surviving in the rough. The Evo's need them to make the planet's Evo friendly (cell phone networks and cable tv yo!). Once the regular humans advance enough. POW! repo!

Re: The other challenges of space
 

A lot of this depends on the level of technology and expertise they brought with them, and that in turn depends on the details of the exodus. If the governments built ten ships to save the best of humanity, then the people would generally be of high competency and the equipment would be of high quality and quantity. Conversely, if hundreds or thousands of "lifeboats" were built then the people on board would probably be of a more average demographic and the equipment would be spread thin. Consider also the time between the exodus decision and the actual departure - was there time for real planning and testing, and to appropriately man each expedition, or are the ships manned by whoever showed up, built with whatever equipment was on hand?

A few other notes:

Again, see my earlier post - a ship would be a complex system, and it is not outside the realm of possibility that a hastily built system could maintain a daily schedule yet fail to accurately track the date.

All of this depends on these ships having (1) people who understand all of this and make the calculations, (2) a reliable method measuring the position and velocities of the ships in flight (probably a stretch for a novice interstellatr culture), (3) tools for making measurements and calculations (did they bring astronomical telescopes?), and (4) databases of all the appropriate references needed. It is entirely possible that some ships would know exactly what date is was, some might not have any idea, and several others might disagree.

No. Your velocity on an STL starship is highly variable, as is your acceleration, plus it is all path dependent. Consider this: if your ship has mass M0 at launch and you consume mass F of fuel every T seconds, then the mass M of your ship at any time t is M0 - Ft/T ... assuming you neither jetisson any waste nor accumulate any additional mass (like dust, collided objects, etc.). Assuming your propulsion system has a perfectly uniform thrust Thr, then your acceleration is Thr/M = Thr / (M0 - Ft/T), and your velocity V is the integral of this with respect to time V = -(T*Thr/F)ln(M0T/F - t), and the position X along your path is the integral of that. How many people on your ship are up for that?

Again, no. Assuming 20,000 people initially, a 20-year generation, and every person producing an average 2.5 children per generation (momentarily ignoring the longevity issue), then 14 generations would be 20000*2.5^(t/20) = 5.9 billion people after 275 years. Going by more modest assumptions, a 1% growth rate (current world) would give a population of 300,000, while a 3% growth rate common to much of the third world would give a population of ~68 million.

They may exist, but did they necessarily make it onto the ships? If all the engineering talent was working on the drives and cryosystems, who would be working on lasers? And who would bring them on board?

Re: The other challenges of space
 

Makes Space Rednecks into a civilization of their own, eh? ;)

Re: The other challenges of space
 

That's not low-pop. That's high-pop, with a large percentage of that population being robots (SAI/LAI/NAI/Expert System is another matter, though).

Re: The other challenges of space
 

Who said anything about building a space program? They did come in on spaceships, you know. It isn't out of the realm of possibility that they left those ships up there, or they had parasite ships attached to the motherships.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

I was actually watching a episode of Myth Busters last night about Cabin Fever (probably a re-run). Two people were each locked in a cabin on their own and wouldn't leave for several days, during a snow-storm in Alaska. They were only there for three or four days before they started showing signs of Cabin Fever, nothing too drastic.

• They were lazy, constantly napping, not doing much of anything after the first day.
• they were forgetful, sometimes forgetting to take the mental acuity tests that were the whole point of the process.
• they became very irritable and one of them was very nervous and didn't sleep well.

Their conclusion was that it was caused by the lack of toys and luxury-type stuff, like coffee and computers & stuff. Cause they'd taken away their phones and watches and everything before putting them in there, so they didn't have anything to do at all.

Something like this might occur in space, during emergencies and stuff. In an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation the ship was damaged in such a way that various parts of it were blocked off from one another, and parts of the ship were without power. Captain Picard was stuck with a group of five year olds (a fate worse then death. "Disaster").

Re: The other challenges of space
 

Well, I don’t have sufficient scientific credentials to join in shooting holes in your background, so I’ll just try to answer your original post (imagine!). Just a few ideas:

The Skellions are obviously going to cause a lot of trouble for your colonists. I’m thinking one of the first things they’ll try to do is infiltrate the groundside installations to learn more about their rivals or sabotage their works. And it doesn’t sound like the Skels are above kidnapping colonials for use as slaves and…well, “breedin’ stock.” Are all the Skellions hostile? What happens when one of their factions decided to treat with the colonists? What will the others do? And is that faction actually as friendly as they seem? (At this point, the obligatory “Romeo & Juliet” scenario rears its pretty little head.)

Speaking of breeding stock, cross-breeding colonial animals with the native animals could still be a problem. What if the Seeders made some subtle little change in the animals they imported from Earth? Would cross-breeding colonial critters solve husbandry and food problems, or create microbiological and genetic horrors that the colonists will have to contend with? Not just the animals; what about plant cross-pollination? And insect activity?

The planet itself could be a very dangerous adversary. Aside from the usual meteorological/geological problems, what if some subtle threat were to manifest itself, say every few thousand years, the local wildlife goes through a period of mutation of some sort that renders them incompatible (say, koalas become ferocious, or the rabbits are no longer edible). And if it’s a planet anywhere near the size of Earth, there are going to be vast tracts yet unexplored even after nearly 300 years. You could put anything in your outback, from unmapped swamps to man-eating plants.

Four cryo ships showing up at this one lonely planet is way against the odds. What if the planet is not only attracting Earth ships, but there are…others…on the way as well. Presumably, the colonists will intercept these newcomers while still in space. What to do about them? Let them land? Send them back whence they came? Vie with the Skels for them?

What if the planet is attracting more than just ships? What if something about its orbit or gravity makes it Asteroid Central? The colonists will have their hands full fighting off Skellions while trying to get asteroid monitoring stations up and running. And what if the computer linking all those posts either crashes or decides it’s not going to work for puny humans anymore?

What happens when someone in one of the cities starts thinking that a new outbreak of something (chickenpox? Flu?) is actually a new version of the Rage Virus? Worse, what if someone’s family actually smuggled out a vial of that horrible disease when they left Earth -- maybe for originally benign purposes -- but the latest descendant has recently become psychotic and remembers the Vial?

Last, we humans tend to be a fractious lot. Human history suggests that all won’t be all harmony and kumbaya. What happens when the vegetarians decide that the planet’s fauna is off limits and take up arms, or the miners decide that strip-mining is the more efficient way to go, or Joe’s Coffee decides that only his coffee should be served in Equator City and all rivals must be burned, or (dare I open this can of worms) the Christians, the Muslims, and the Jews decide to pick up their strife where they left off? (Conversely as to this last, what if you take a page from The Book of Eli and have a group dedicated to restoring religion to an atheistic/agnostic society?)

Hope these help.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

I've got a similar background for my own space opera game, maybe you can find some useful ideas in this...


Humans discover FTL by accident (obliterating a chunk of New Jersey, but nobody missed that) in the mid-21st century and begin to explore the solar system in earnest (FTL is still fairly slow and untested over long distances at this point...interstellar probes are being sent, but there's no manned interstellar flight yet).

From my 'history file':


Some key points:

1.) Ark ships hold a quarter million people plus supplies each, and are launched in groups. This is far more likely to create a viable population at the new colony than just 20k.
2.) Arks are designed to be converted into colonial infrastructure, both orbital and on the ground.
3.) The Exodus event scatters humanity pretty widely, breaking off contact between the colony fleets. Some are blown many hundreds of LY off course and still remain lost in the game period, 500 years after the Exodus. One is only rediscovered (in the form of a small, self-sufficient colony) 20 years before the game era.
4.) Earth being entirely gone, plus the lack of contact with other fleets, forces colonies to become self-sufficient very, very quickly.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

A properly-designed time-keeping system could be made to work with trivial power, or even to self-supply power from radioactive decay.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

On the other hand if we are using a prototype FTL system in a one way trip, then the time you arrive in could be any time in the past or the future. Of course if they know where they are going they'd still be able to figure out when they arrived unless we erase their computers so they can't figure out how much the stars have moved. Or send them some place completely different from the course they set. That requires outside intervention.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

Or for their FTL navigation to still be in its infancy stage. The ship could jump around to random star systems until it finds a habitable planet, for example.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

I like this idea a lot! How about this: Something goes wrong in hyperspace and when the colonists wake up the computer tells them where their target was supposed to be was empty space. So it made some observations and took them to a different new home. The colonists try to use stellar drift to figure out the time but nothing is right! It has been so long* or they have come so far that old starmaps are useless!

*I don't actually know that modern or near future drift predictions don't run past the heat death of the universe.

Edit: I suppose dark matter could do something unexpected and keep the universe livable for longer then expected. Or maybe the ships are in a new universe!

Re: The other challenges of space
 

If the computer became completely corrupted and did a hard-reboot from backup, anyone checking it would only be able to tell how long it had been since reboot. They basically woke up and all the clocks were blinking 12:00.

Okay, probably still unrealistic, but it certainly isn't the biggest handwave in the background. My disbelief suspenders would accept it if you did something good with it.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

A more realistic reason for them not knowing how long they've been in cryosleep would be random relativistic time dilation effects during FTL that they can't account for. Sure, the ship would have a clock and be able to say how long it's been in flight subjectively, but it wouldn't be able to accurately predict how long it's been in flight objectively, especially if they're far enough away from known pulsars that they can't use them to figure out where they are or what year it is, objectively.

In order to get that far they'll probably have to be in a different galaxy or something, though. Either that, or be around a hundred million years into the future, when all the known pulsars will have stopped pulsing.

Re: The other challenges of space
 

It doesn't make any difference.

Even if the laser-weapon tech was left behind on Earth, if you've got starflight you've got the tech to weaponize lasers (at least). So if the colony-world has built itself up to the point that it can be launching exploratory vessels over interstellar distances, than they're going to have the potential to create serious high-energy laser weapons.

Lasers, especially high-frequency lasers, are too potentially useful as weapons (and for other things too!) in space for them not to be under development in such a society, it would be really weird if it was not so.