The other challenges of space

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

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,

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.

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,

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.

the population was steadily growing and a second city had been founded to better access natural resources.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...