Low Passage

[Laryssa]

What if low berths were the only way to travel to the stars?
Or how about using low berths in other ways than simply low passage?
For example, in my campaign, low berths were used to keep colonists on ice while their planet was being terraformed for them.

The starship arrives from Earth at a hostile planet, the passengers remain frozen after the ship arrives because the planet is not habitable. The planet has been observed from afar by telescope and the conditions on its surface and in its atmosphere were know prior to the colonists departure, so the ship has brought along terraforming equipment and some organisms that will convert the atmosphere into a breathable mixture of gases. When this is done, the colonists are revived from their low berths and set foot on an Earth like world many centuries after they left their home planet. In a universe where their is only slower than light travel and few naturally occuring Earth-like worlds, this may be an attractive option for interstellar space colonization. The journey takes many centuries to get their, whats a few more centuries to convert the planet upon arrival if the colonists remain in the frozen watch?

 

[Ran Targas]

^ Low berth, cold sleep, cryogenic suspension, etc. is a well developed technology IMTU and is routinely used as a low tech solution to long term life support requirements. Long range exploration, colonization, and military applications are common.

 

[jfetters]

Well, this, or generation ships, would be the transit method of choice for any spacefaring culture that has not invented jump drive.

If memory serves, this was how the Islands cluster was settled.

 

[Laryssa]

Low berths allow you to ignore range limits in many cases. You can cross rifts where stars are separated by more than 10 parsecs for instance. Jump Drives are fuel hogs, the amount of fuel you use is proportional to the distance you travel. Not so with slower than light low berth ships, with those you just expend fuel to achieve cruising velocity and you expend some more to slow down again. The Jump Drive is still no good for colonizing other galaxies. Suppose you wanted to create a setting in another Galaxy, say the Andromeda spiral. with reactionless engines you can come pretty close to the speed of light, say 0.8c. The Andromeda Galaxy M31 is 2.2 million light years away, at 0.8c it would take 2.75 million years to get there, so you basically have a setting that is set 2.75 million years in the future, but which could otherwise be very similar to the OTU technology wise. The traveller Jump drive keeps people bottled up in one Galaxy because it depends upon stars being within a certain number of parsecs from each other in order to allow faster than light interstellar travel. If say, a number of sleeper ships were sent to the Andromeda Galaxy in the 21st century prior to the development of the Jump drive, they might all arrive at approximately the same time and the intervening millenia would have little effect on them assuming that Jump-6 was the maximum possible, the people arriving at the Andromeda Galaxy would all be from the 21st century. People would prefer not to travel by low berth if given a choice and those prior to the invention of the Jump Drive had no choice if they wanted to travel to the stars. 0.8c is just as good for intergalactic travel as it is for interstellar.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Jim Fetters:
Well, this, or generation ships, would be the transit method of choice for any spacefaring culture that has not invented jump drive.

If memory serves, this was how the Islands cluster was settled.

Each ship was a combination of 1000 crew who used the generation ship method, with enough space provided for the population to grow tenfold.
100,000 colonists were carried in cold sleep, during the voyage each colonist would be awakened for a five year work period.

Must have been pretty big ships...

anyone ever tried to stat one up?

 

[archhealer]

I statted up a colony ship for T20, wherein about 50,000 colonists could be kept in low berth. The first time I statted it i remember I used standard low berths, but the ship was HUGE and i couldn't make it realistic for the systems that I wanted sending them out. So I switched it to emergency low berths; equally effective, but you will probably have a slightly higher rate of loss on waking.

I'll see if I can't dig around and find those stats...