Generation Ships

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Lamech

Spaceships disagrees with you. You can make a generation ship starting at... TL 7. That said spaceships is horribly optimistic about everything. However nothing really prevents a generation ship at TL 7 according to spaceships.

The sheer amount of machinery you'd need even to process all the needed crops (even if you can grow all the crops) would be large.

Unless you're going to pack a century or two of toilet paper you need a paper mill. Potentially a totally different mill for fibers for cloth. Then some sort of oil plant for feedstock for even the simplest utilitarian plastics. Rubber-production too. Even some wood for replacement furniture and small items. After that you can work on food crops.

All of this would be very hard on any ship you could even build in orbit at TL7. We're starting to talk about the industiral capacity of at least a small nation-state rather than just a city. Especially when you talk about the machinery to re-manufacture your other machinery after it wears out in 50 years.

You're going to need higher TLs for the miniaturization.

Also, I'm not going until they can do vatflesh to provide some meat. I don't want chicken and tuna either. :)

I'm saying TL10.

This leads me to say that genetic engineers need to be common enough in your crew that all of the children you produce will be maximized TL10 upgrades. It'd actually be a significant incentive for going.

Give everyone all the HT-based traits you can do at TL10 (including Alcohol Tolerance and No Hangover), +2 IQ and Common Sense as well. That ought to reduce your social problems.

Eidetic Memory and +4 Mathematical Ability would change your edcuational needs (and I do assume for the better). You can even add in Musical Talent, Intuition and Versatile too.