The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing by Writer's Digest Editors;

Author:Writer's Digest Editors;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: F&W Media, Incorporated
Published: 2017-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

Generation Ships

You’ve decided you don’t want to use hyperspace, either because it strikes you as nonsense science or because you don’t want all that coming and going on your new planet. Another alternative is to send a ship at sub-lightspeed and let the voyage take as long as it takes.

Without getting into the science of it (primarily because I don’t understand it in any kind of detail myself), the problem with sub-light voyages is that they take a long time. And you have to carry all your fuel with you. The good news is that you can coast most of the way—there’s little friction in space, and once you reach a certain speed, you should continue traveling at that speed in the same direction until something happens to turn you or slow you down. So most of the voyage needs no fuel at all.

The bad news is that your fuel is part of the mass that your fuel has to lift. There comes a point when the fuel needed to further accelerate any more will add enough weight that you either can’t lift it or can’t design a sturdy enough ship to hold it. Furthermore, because it takes just as much fuel to slow you down at the end of your voyage, you have to save exactly half your fuel for the slowdown, plus any fuel required for maneuvering into orbit. That means that the fuel must be able to accelerate more than twice its own mass. Worse yet, if there isn’t any more fuel at your destination, you’re either not coming home again or you’re going to have to carry more than four times the fuel needed to accelerate you to your traveling speed.

So that you don’t waste fuel trying to lift a huge ship out of the gravity well of a planet like Earth, such ships are usually assumed to have been built out in space and launched from a point as far as possible from the Sun. Thus, when they arrive at the new world, they put their huge ship into orbit and use landing vehicles or launches or (nowadays) shuttles to get down to the planet’s surface.

Using the technology I’ve just described, you’ll be lucky to get to 10 percent of lightspeed. That’s pretty fast—about sixty-seven million miles an hour—but at that rate, it will take your ship more than three hundred years to get to a star system thirty light-years away. And that doesn’t even allow for acceleration time!

That’s why such ships are called “generation ships.” Assuming that the ship is a completely self-contained environment, with plants to constantly refresh the atmosphere and grow food, a whole human society lives aboard the ship. People are born, grow old, and die, and the elements of their bodies are processed and returned to the ecosystem within the ship. This idea has been well explored in many stories—particularly stories about ships where the people have forgotten their origin, forgotten even that the ship is a ship—but it has a lot of life left in it.

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