The Campaign Builder's Guild

I'm making a thread for the brainstorming of tech in my setting. No particular order, rhyme, or reason to this. Just posting my ideas.

To start with, I think I'm going to detail the seed ships. Big ringlike things that use a charged superconductor ring to generate an EM field that functions as a plasma sail. Cool because it allows me to integrate the cryogenics into the propulsion system, as metal needs to be kept pretty cool in order to function as a superconductor.

For info on superconductors and what I'm talking about, look here and here.

Out of curiosity, is anyone here familiar with mini-magnetospheric plasma propulsion?

I think I got the basic idea behind it.  At first I didn't quite understand, but the brief feeling of ftw?! has passed.

M2P2 look's interesting, managing to provide thrust for you seed ships, and protect the fragile life inside from them there deadly interstellar rays.  How would the ships be set up around that though?  Will the ship itself be a long doughnut shaped thing, with the mag-coils on the inside of it, or will you go for a more decentralized method, with 2 or 3 different, smaller sets of magnets traveling as a group, so that if something large and solid hit them, it'd only kill a 1/3 of the colonists?

Well, my original idea was simply to have a single continuous ring of chilled metal as the ship's core. This would act as a superconductor, so that a small charge would move continuously through it (zero electrical resistance and all). This would generate a magnetic field that could work similarly to M2P2. Anyway, I just thought it would be cool to work the cryogenics and propulsion into the same system.

In both cases (M2P2 and superconductor ring plasma sails) the propulsion method seems unsuitable for interstellar travel. Both require a solar wind, a planet's magnetosphere, or something equivalent to gain thrust. M2P2 has the advantage of not losing thrust as one leaves solar space. Then again, with zero resistance, the ship would have a tendency to keep going once it got going.

In any case, while it would maintain its temperature and velocity indefinitely, a seed ship would require navigation and steering capacity. Any information we currently have on the universe is billions of years old, and we can't leave finding a habitable world to chance. I guess we can't make the trip on zero enegry, but the getting the initial push right might reduce the overall costs.

In any case, the superconductor ring would look like a giant ring floating through space. Not sidelong, like a frisbee... more like... a smoke ring being blown? If possible, it would be prudent to have vital systems suspended in the center of the magnetic field, so as not to warm things up too much. In the case of M2P2, I would imagine a more traditional ship style with an impossibly large engine/exhaust/"cone" out the back. M2P2 seems a bad idea for its tendency to "leak" though.

As for damage sustained to the ships... that's complicated. Firstly, they travel in twos. Secondly, they are designed to fragment on entry into a planetary atmosphere. You can't have something the size of Australia (maybe bigger) enter the atmosphere in one piece. On this count, it was Ask (which touched down on the third moon in one piece) that failed and not Embla (Embla fell on both the first and second moon). It's a mirical the third moon wasn't wasted (with humanity, now that I think of it) in the process.

EDIT: Geeky enough yet?

Not quite geeky enough...

Ships traveling in pairs works for the redundancy department, and if you used the M2P2 like device for producing thrust and as some nice sunscreen then you save youself alot of trouble.  The only other ways to keep out the hard radiation that you'd find in space is water or lead, both of which are pretty heavy.  Also, with a ship the size of Australia, you'd have a lot of inertia, meaning that the solar sail's would have to be used for deceleration as well.

You would need thrusters, if only as a further method of redundancy, and possibly a small crew of mechanics/pilots with a small room that can be pressurized and brought to tempature at a moments notice, but for the general flying and repairs a shipboard AI/small fixer bots would likely be fine.

For the navigation department, what would have to get done would be we point ourselves in a direction that looks promising, and have the shipboard AI home in on 1 star, and as the position of the star changes, you'd fire the thrusters a little bit to reallign yourself.  Because you'd be traveling to the star, it'd move in the sky faster than it would've otherwise, thus granting us an accelerated view of astronomy.

Real quick cross-section drawing of what I've been picturing so far for a ship should be attached.

Nice. That drawing is pretty much exactly how it'll look. Mind you, not cylindrical... so the M2P2 backup is probably in the center, where the superconductor filament that produces the main field would probably go in that outer ring.

The central hub may or may not be physically attatched to the rest of the ship. If possible, it might be suspended magnetically. If that's possible, I'm pretty sure all the equipment is there.

Thrusters and (probably quantum) AI are a must, but I hadn't thought yet of backup human crew. It's a good idea.

And in terms of radiation shielding, the ship will probably be carrying alot of water to begin with. It's pretty rare to find a planet in the "sweet spot" as far as climate for life already. We certainly can't take our chances on water.

Also, the directional thrusters might be placed on the central hub, if accelerating the hub wouldn't cause a break with the ring. Firstly, it would lower the risk of increasing the ring's temperature (it would be hard to lower that again, and a few degrees too high disables the main sail). Secondly, the gas used for the M2P2 gradually leaks. Over billions of years this is problematic. Rather than waste it, the ship would probably take the helium back in for use in the ion engines.

As for deceleration, both of these sails can use a planetary magnetosphere for propulsion, in addition to solar winds... so we're doing pretty good on that one.

One thought for water: ice could easily be transported and then used. There could also be some kind of condenser technology that recycles liquid waste for that purpose too.

Water would probably be kept as ice in that frigid outer ring, yes. Most things would probably be kept frozen. I was kind of hoping there wouldn't be any liquid waste to begin with, though... maybe I should read more into cryogenics too...

No, no liquid waste from the cyrogenics, suspends all bodily functions, which is why it's "used" for long trips such as this, though depending on the onboard powerplants,  and the thrusters you *might* have a small amount of liquid waste.  But, there still would probably be some sort of recycler for both liquids and air on the ship, in case repeated wake-ups of the crew and/or a single long problem arises.