[Spaceships] Getting A Few Thousand Extra MPS

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

And yeah, getting back in a problem. In theory, you can add two more stages, but that brings you up to SM+17 for the initial craft, which is 30 million tons and 1,500 yards long. Better hope you find the secret to FTL travel on the other side of the trip and can retrofit it.

It’s a great plan! I’m proud to be part of it!

Another possibility is that if a similar but smaller project has previously delivered a robotic surveyor with a good science array you might know there is a shirtsleeve-habitable planet at the destination and manage to cram a small colony into a 3,000-ton ship. The First Fleet that established the colony of New South Wales amounted to about 4,000 tons (burthen) of shipping — they weren’t able to survive in Australia, let alone on an alien planet, but that was mostly down to incompetence, not material inadequacy.