Gearhead Challenge!

[mike wightman]

By the way, once the route has been mapped on the way out, the trip back should be faster.

Future missions could then build on the data to further reduce travel times. 50 years out, 50 years back.

I wonder what the Imperium did with the Ancients jump gate network that was discovered all those years ago... (T4 advenures Long Way Home and Gateway) ...shame that building something like that would be TL21+

 

[TheDS]

Sigg, Earth is a BIG place. New oxygen is stored in rocks and stuff to replace what bleeds off into space, nutrients evaporate into the atmosphere and rain down, mountains get heaved up and rain washes away old soil, eventually falling into the trenches in the ocean; it's a big, complicated system, mostly powered by the Earth's core, but there are losses into space. And life here gets most of its energy input from the sun.

You simply cannot store a planet's worth of nutrients for your soil, and your losses to space are going to be a lot more extreme than those a planet loses. Ships can leak with a lot less effort than can a planet. It all adds up to you needing a non-trivial system to replace your non-trivial operating losses.

 

[mike wightman]

My point is that in a closed spaceship environment, unless you thow it out of an airlock then it can be recycled.
Provided you have the energy to do so.

And Traveller provides all the energy you need in the form of fusion rectors

 

[mike wightman]

I don't think a coherent superdense hull is going to let much leak though
Any gases that are lost would be easily replaceable by the refining of jump fuel from gas giant atmospheric gases.

Make sure you take along one or two of those Darrian minifacs that GT kindly introduced into Traveller canon and spare parts aren't a problem.

The same article explains that TL16+ ships must have significant self repair capability...

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Related to the original "reason" for this discussion is this article:
Outcast Star Zooms Out of Milky Way Galaxy
The yahoo illustration shows an awfully large star, though, and it is long gone from the galaxy.
The speed at which it is departing works out to .002c.

 

[far-trader]

Maybe somebody in the core just declared war on another galaxy and this is the first shot

 

[TheDS]

You might be surprised.

But I think overall we agree: the mission will require manufacturing capability, though the amount needed is up for debate.

 

[whartung]

Manufacturing capability and redundancy. You can't just have one fleet machine shop, misjump that and the fleet is doomed to a slow death.

Simply put, the fleet is going to need to be able to rebuild itself over at least once. It should have the ability to mine asteroids and refine raw materials into compounds useable by the fleet. In fact, it should be possible for the fleet to build a shipyard from in system resources so that it can do major repairs.

So this means you need refining ships for raw materials, electronics manufacture, facilities for making hydrocarbons, "green" space for plant matter, etc.

The larger ships should have the ability to repair and replace the smaller, more at risk ships. It certainly slows down the trip, but otherwise you simply end up losing the mission.

Lose the tanker, fleet dies. Lose the shop ship, fleet dies. You also need the capability to create any and all food stuffs and pharmaceuticals for the population. The fleet should not bring anything they can't recreate from materials expected in most any system they encounter.

And they should be able to do this after they lose some important ship in the fleet. It's not a short trip, and things simply break or have bad things happen to them. I don't know if hulls are considered to actually "wear out" over time or not (through micro-meteorites and other ablative space dust stuff). If hulls DO where down, they need to be able to manufacture and repair the hull plating materials.

I would in fact build 80% of the fleet, and then let the fleet build its other 20% to ensure they have the expertise and skill necessary to do it in deep space, this lets you test the project in friendly waters before you commit it to the void.

Much of the materials can certainly be prefabbed and stored on the ship themselves, but that will just speed early repairs but not necessarily mitigate the need to manufacture from raw materials. You can always repair with stores and then remanufacture to replenish stores.

Finally, the fleet needs to be diverse and reasonably scattered to prevent some plague from wiping the mission out vs a monolithic single ship.