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Life on a Generational Starship...How do you see it working?
hawkwing43
Member Posts: 1,701 Arc User
Lets say for whatever reason, five generational starships are sent from Earth to the closest star system. One that has an Earth like world.
Each ship would have 100,000 people to start the trip.
So...........
IMO how can you make this work?
Life on these ships from start to finish, what do you see happening?
Each ship would have 100,000 people to start the trip.
So...........
IMO how can you make this work?
Life on these ships from start to finish, what do you see happening?
Post edited by hawkwing43 on
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Harlan Ellison's original concept for The Starlost
If a ship actually makes it to a destination with any survivors on board the 'civilisation' which started on the ship will certainly not be the one which arrives.
Still waiting to be able to use forum titles
One of my favourites by Heinlein
In that take on the situation an aristocratic scenario played out. Those with certain specific skills leveraged them to become a wealthy ruling class living a life of luxury in the ships upper decks, while the less well educated became a lower labor class toiling in the bowels of the ship to keep it running.
The upper class handled bridge duties, security, and scientific research. The lower class handled sanitation, mechanical maintenance, an farming/ranching to keep everyone fed. To help keep up morale there are elections to select a governing council, but bribery and corruption are rampant.
Due to the confined space an enforced population limit was in place, with birth control implants placed into everyone. People were only allowed to have children once somebody died, with the lucky couple being chosen by lottery. Of course this rule doesn't always work, as people find ways to bypass the system. In those cases the children are treated as pariahs and doomed to a life of toil in the lower decks.
Ships morale is a huge concern as those born during the voyage eventually sink into depression as they realize the ship is all they will ever know and that they ultimately have no control over there lives.
At one extreme, we have the civilian ships of the RTFF in BSG; where most people seemed to spend all the time doing drudge work in cramped and dirty industrial looking areas.
At the other we have the New Macross class colony ships from Macross 7 and Macross Frontier; which were just flying habitation domes containing rather pleasant cities (often with parks, lakes, and agricultural areas thrown in).
Environment is important for a lot of reasons; morale being among them.
Plus the fact you could have some form of trade between the ships, as long as they stayed close enough to shuttle between them.
1 and 2 hold most of the science and R and D type stuff so the people here will be the thinkers
3 and 4 are main animals and farms some the people here will be the worker types
5 is mainly engineering and military so the people here are mainly trained to fight and build.
So they all would maintain close relationship to each other, but at the same time can be independent from each other. Over time few hundred years, what type of changes would happened between these ships, and would they still keep the close connection between each?
I see insanity, chaos, power grabbing, death. All on board 1 tin can.
There would be no outside entity, no higher echelon to call for help. They would be completely on their own with no support. It would be a disaster.
In that specific situation, ships 3 and 4 would likely end up competing for control of the fleet; since they are the ones with the food. They would each try and get ship 5 on their side, for the muscle and the engineers.
Ships 1 and 2 would most likely be invaded and taken over by an alliance of ships 3+5 or 4+5; due to a belief that the 'thinkers' are just living an easy life at everyone else's expense.
On arrival at their destination the farmers of ship 3 or 4 would leverage their alliance with the military guys to try and assume control of landing and settlement rights; using their expertise at food production to justify their actions (and using threats to withhold the food itself to bring anyone who rejects the idea into line).
A brief period of a semi-feudal system with land barons calling all the shots; followed by a war that would probably wreck whatever planetary engineering had occurred up until that point. The survivors live underground and are no better off than they were on the ships.
Well... that'd be my guess anyway. For what it's worth.
---EDIT---
I should add that I would expect the first generation to be all optimistic and starry eyed; but later generations (never having lived on a planet) would only know that their lives are hard. The second generation would still have the first as a stabilizing influence (though discontent could certainly start fomenting at some level); so things probably wouldn't get out of hand until the 3rd or 4th generations.
Don't forget the 6th ship, which has marketing consultants, reality TV stars, and telephone sanitizers...
"he's as dangerous as a ferret with a chainsaw."
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
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'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Ah, okay. Given the similarity of your scenario, I was beginning to wonder if you were drawing inspiration from this. *Sigh* I really miss that game. I'd had hopes for a sequel out of Star Citizen, but not so sure now.
And you just know which of those 6 ships would survive. :rolleyes:
No offense, but this scenario seems a recipe for disaster. It is pretty much the old "eggs in one basket" scenario. Were one of those ships to fail, the odds of the whole expedition surviving would plummet. IMHO, better to take a homogeneous approach, and build ships capable of holding a balance of each of those types. That way, should even 4 ships fail, you still have all the makings of a colony on the 5th ship.
Diane Duane addressed something like this in The Romulan Way, when she told her version of the Romulans journey from Vulcan. Romulans lack the telepathic gene because they threw every last one of their telepaths into a fight with an enemy during the long voyage. All eggs in one basket. Though they pulled through, that part of their culture and genetics was lost to them.
Very Carefully.
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colored text = mod mode
Story is; Earth is dying slowly due to human activity, and part of the population secretly heads out to Alpha Centari, to start New Earth.
The people left behind get organized to follow them. But it takes them time.
Basically, they'll only get there 100 or so years after the first group arrived.
How will the 2nd group be treated when they finally get there ? The first group had different ideas about how society should run (part of the reason they left in secret).
Will they be met with hostilities ?
Or welcomed "Home".
Will their technology have changed vastly ? ie new weapon systems, and scientific advancements.
Most of the book deals with the travel aspect, and how they get organized to follow though.
Never read Heinlein, will have to give that a shot @jon
Edit: scratch that, i've read starship troopers lol just google'd the name.
Although it wasn't a REAL generation ship the people inside thought it was.
And yeah.... chaos eventually happened. People only got along because they had to, and sometimes not even then.
My character Tsin'xing
BTW loved that trailer, I never played that game, yes I missed out, but hey maybe a new version will get made.
On a generation ship resources are going to be a major issue. You have to pack everything you are ever going to use, which includes fuel for the mission. The crew isn't going to be able to stop off to get more fuel along the way. Having shuttles constantly zipping back and forth just isn't something that would work, it would put to much strain on the limited resources of the fleet.
If you want to have some manner of trade between ships then the only feasible solution would be the way the Star Wars expanded universe handled the Outbound Flight project. In that book the colony ship consisted of multiple Dreadnought class ships connected to a central storage pod. While on their way to their destination the ships would all be docked to that central pod, but once they arrived they would separate from one another.
My character Tsin'xing