Generation Starships

[mindstalk]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Well, within the context of THS, the big question is 'why would anyone do this?'. Sending out communities instead of AIs and genetic material is a huge additional expense for, well, nothing.

If your goal is a head of state who wants to spam the universe with Earth-descended mindlife, it's a huge additional expense. If you're some bioconservative (para)humans who want to (a) see other stars or (b) escape the coming Singularity, then it's the only way to go.

If your biolongevity is good enough then it's not so much a generation ship as a very long cruise. 4% c gives you 109 years to Alpha Centauri.

The THS core spaceship design has 360 km/s as the highest impulse drive available, which is 0.12% of light speed, and a travel time of 3600 years to Alpha Centauri. Whether that's a realistic maximum by that point, I don't know. Seems like nuclear drives should be capable of more. OTOH a habitat ship will have lots of overhead, including radiation shielding; to get high speed your initial fuel load will be huge. Unless you can use a beam or fuel-projected system, but that's more speculative tech.

Not sure what you're looking for. With a large budget to spend, I'd make sure I had multiple full-spectrum robofacs, a bunch of spare parts, redundancy in all systems, lots of assistant AIs for rare skills. And then, whee! To the stars! Slowly.