Transhuman Space/Avatar

[Cyclone]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I wouldn't. There's just much in the books for _everything_ to have caught somebody's attention in the years since this forum was established.

"Alien world with actual life on it that people are visiting in setting" is not something that people would just skip over like "another asteroid colony with funny people on it."

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Your "probe" (assuming you mean something beyond Starstream swarms) timeline may have problems. The highest amount of Delta-V i can recall in the setting was a very specialized courier with a bit over 100 miles per second. Spaceships gives a figure of 4000 mps for a 400 hundred year voyage to Alpha C at 0.01 c. Your timeline requires even more Delta-V than that.

Use of the phrase "Moonshot!" doesn't necessarily cover the problem. The ramp up from a V-2 to a Saturn-5 required a little less than a 6x increase in Delta-V most of which came from building _much_ bigger. You need an ikncrease of Delta-V more than 10x that.

I don't mean something beyond Starswarm and the like. I mean something like a small drone with laser beams fired at its light sails, like Breakthrough Starshot. The 2080 date would be a first look with whatever can get there the absolute fastest. The "modern era" expeditions would be the ones with some kind of actual "manned" vessel, though presumably something extremely specialized and expensive, basically designed for exactly one trip. Probably not even a return trip, since the setting has lots of "expendable" sapients and infomorphs.