Earth, the birthplace of humankind, is dying.
Full-scale nuclear war has ravaged its surface, killing billions in the process, leaving Earth a glowing radioactive wasteland.
Years before the war, colonization of Earth's natural satellite, Luna. Was well underway to the point that dozens of domes dotted the lunar surface. When the war started, colonization funding was greatly reduced, bringing the effort to a halt.
Now, years after the war, the colonies find themselves with two options.
Die from starvation, or try to find a new home.
They chose the latter.
Old cargoships, once used to transfer supplies, were hastily retrofitted to the best of their abilities and outfitted with experimental warp drives salvaged from testing stations scattered around Earths orbit.
Three ships, the ULC Coral, the ULC Nightmare, and the ULC Amber in Arms were outfitted with these experimental warp drives and sent filled to the brim with everything needed to start over.
Humanity reaches out in need of a home, but what they find turns out to be a little too much for what they bargained for.
Editors: Magnificent Bastard
Story on hiatus until further notice, focusing on my other story for now.
Love it already!!
A more simple solution would be to wait those 10 years in cryo to let the radiation and weather patterns on earth clear itself out. Everywhere but the detonation sites would be fine to live in. Even the detonation sites would be livable in another 10 to 20 years. Shame that Earth's governments did not retrofit their bombs to He3, those do not make any radioactive fallout. But whatever, we are here for the ponies
Kudos on a real warp drive. Scientists are already testing those out on the micro scale.
looking forward to see more, hopefully they wont be hostile to each other
interesting
7091196 They couldn't, since 10 years is nowhere near enough time for nuclear fallout to clear, look at Chernobyl for example, it is predicted to be cleared completely of radiation within about 40 thousand years, and you need to take in the nuclear reactors that were no doubt affected by the bombs, adding their lot of the radiation, the ice caps would melt, every plant life would die, ect... It Earth would not be habitable within 10 to 20 years, no were near habitable to be in fact.
saw your post, I'll give this story a try
This story looks good! I think i'll stay around and see how things go.
7091556 It's not the fallout or the radiation but the dust kicked up from the explosions that's dangerous. Get enough explosions going on and you have a nuclear winter that can last for decades. Nuclear explosion sites aren't anymore radioactive than the general background in any significant way. Put it this way, if you go to the Hiroshima site today and sit don't move, you'll die of old age before anything related to radiation kills you. The reason is because, like stars, nuclear reactions can live fast and die hard, nuclear weapons, or go for the slow burn.
Nuclear weapons release all their energy as explosions and release short lived radioactive particles. This is why Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Bikini Atolls are habitable places and not Chernobyl. Nuclear reactors on the other hand, get energy out of the fission process in a much slower and controlled manner and in turn, get longer lived radioactive waste out of it. I'm simplifying it greatly here but this is generally how it works. But even Chernobyl today is somewhat habitable with the most dangerous areas only being the site of the reactor itself and places where radioactive material was deposited.
As for nuclear reactors, not many of them are located close enough to major metropolitan areas to be to terribly effected by nuclear detonations unless directly targeted which would be stupid because you wouldn't be killing people as effectively as you could. And most modern reactors have plenty of advanced safety systems in place to the point where a lot of them are shielded against EMPS, which nuclear detonations generate. And in the worst case scenario, these facilities would automatically shut down and stop the reaction process. Chernobyl only happened because a couple of guys carried out an experiment on the reactor that ended, well, a lot worse than expected.
And unless you directly targeted the poles, the icecaps wouldn't melt at all. In fact, quite the opposite would happen. Assuming full scale nuclear war where the entire arsenal of 15000 war heads were all detonated over populated areas all over the world, it would kick start a nuclear winter that would last quite a while. A lot of things would die to be sure, but the Earth would still recover quite nicely and rather quickly by human timescales. Sure most of the animal life on Earth would die but plants would survive just fine. Initially, without any sunlight they would all die but without any predators or animals to eat those seeds, they would survive just fine. Much of the surface ecosystems on Earth would be dead or severally disrupted but overall, Earth probably wouldn't notice and Earth would become "habitable" again probably sooner than we think and probably nowhere near the tens of thousands of years scale that it will take the Chernobyl slag to fully decompose. Since the first nuclear detonation in 1945, 2054 nuclear weapons have been detonated over the years. That averages out to about 1 explosion ever 13 days though we've definitely done worse.
7091818 Yes, but you're thinking or modern day nuclear weapons, I haven't gone into much detail as of yet, but I'll definitely do it in the future.
Thanks for the insight though, learn something new every day eh?
7091869 I am thinking of modern day nuclear weapons. I assumed that's what would be used since there hasn't been much money dumped into nuclear weapons research projects in recent years, with the exception of one North Korea. The largest nuclear device ever exploded by man is still the Tsar Bomba and it was so large they had to drop it from the plane with a parachute attached to it to give the drop aircraft time to escape. In fact, the weapon weighs so much that to mount it on a missile would require it to resemble something that looked more like a Saturn V than an ICBM.
7091961
The war had been going on for quite a while, it's not so far fetched to think that more money had been dumped into the nuclear option.
7091983 Most experts think that if a nuclear war were to happen, it would be over within the span of a few hours. millions if not hundreds of millions would be dead and anyone not dead would be sooner or later. Now if this is a war that didn't start out nuclear then that would make more sense but still, the nations of the world would only need to just press the many thousands of ICBMs they have back into service, excluding the few thousand that are already launch ready at any given time. But in today's world, the only real way a nuclear option would happen is by accident. It's infinitely more likely that one side would mistake something like the launch of a space craft or some strange weather phenomena or even just malfunctioning equipment for an enemy missile launch and retaliate, which in turn would cause the other side to retaliate. Situations like this have almost happened before and have only been stopped because people with cooler heads than others decided not to hit the proverbial red button. There isn't much more research that needs to be dumped into nuclear weapons, we already know how to make them and how to make them well.
Now something like an antimatter weapon, that would actually have the potential to render the Earth uninhabitable, permanently. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima that helped end World War 2 converted less than a kilogram of it's 64 kilogram uranium mass into energy, vaporizing the rest. A terribly inefficient weapon that still leveled a city. An antimatter bomb, utilizing a charge of 64 kilograms of antimatter, on the other hand, would be one hundred percent efficient, converting all of its mass, and the mass of whatever matter it encountered, into energy, and would be over 180,000 times more powerful. Or put another way, over 54 Tsar Bombs going off all at once. A few of those would have more than enough power to screw up life on Earth indefinitely. Hell, only ONE would probably be more than enough.
Because of it's perfectly efficient, antimatter is the perfect material to put in a weapon, or to use as a fuel. Only a small amount would be needed to get a ship from Earth to Jupiter and back again. It would be perfect to use as a starship fuel. We can already make it today, though only in small amounts, but it can be manufactured. Not enough to use as a fuel or a weapon just yet, but hey. Who knows what a few centuries or even decades will bring?
And as for the warp drive, Alcubierre's drive has the issue of that you can't really shut if off once you get going, and it picks up interstellar material as it moves so even if you could drop out of warp, you would sterilize your destination so completely that it would be apocalyptic. That and the energy requirements and heating issues make warp drives a little prickly. But provided you can solve those problems, it does make an effective FTL drive.
7092219 You have to remember that this is all taking place in the future, and no one can exactly predict what kind of weapons or tech they might have, I went with the warp drive because it's the most realistic, rather than going to sci-fi route and making up something like the Mass Effect Ezo drive or the Halo slipspace drive.
7092231 Fair enough. I guess I'm just being anal retentive about these things. Currently I'm working through a physics degree so I suppose it's almost natural I get this way.
And some information you may find useful, I was reading the story and found that you can achieve the same end result without the use of a warp drive. There's a system "close" to Earth called Delta Pavonis. It's about 20 light years away and is centered around an older but still sunlike star. It's been called the Best SETI Target by people working AT SETI. It's not a member of a binary or multiple star system and doesn't appear to have anything that can destabilize any Earth like planets in orbit around it. Get your passengers going fast enough and time dilation can turn 20 years into 10.
7092271 While that's nice and all, it's already in the story, changing it would kind of fuck up some things that I have planned.
I love how you use a real theorized warp drive in your story! I know how the Alcubierre Warp Drive works so that just adds to the excitement!
7092271 Yet again, keep an open mind man. This. Is. The. Future. Humanity would have discovered many different stars in the time span of 2016 too 2054.
As someone who genuinely does know some of the basics of astrophysics and Aeronautical Engineering (how to use an artificial horizon, various ship designs, Delta-V calculations, etc.), I have one thing to say.
A ship like that would have to be... large. Large to the point of complete and utter inefficiency in the category of travel and Delta-V. And considering the fact that you only need around one thousand humans to keep up a steady population without any disorders caused by inbreeding, and considering DNA can be stored and, with medical technology as advanced as all the other described technology in this story, probably implemented into reproductive cycles to maintain genetic diversity, I have no idea why they didn't just leave at least that million behind.
Also, I know that there's a lot of hype surrounding nukes, but they could never even get close to harming the whole planet, not without being mass-produced by freaking assembly lines for a year or two. Try going to nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ and you'll see what I mean.
I really need to work on my suspension of disbelief. And my morals.
You know astrophysics too!?!
7092808
Not exactly, a ship around 4 kilometers is more than enough to house that amount of people, you have to take in consideration on how tall and wide the ship is.
And they didn't leave anyone behind because there was no food or water for them, and technically no one wanted to stay.
The planet? No, the ecosystem and life itself? Yes. The US alone has enough nukes to cause a nuclear winter and kill most complex life on Earth, not to mention the radiation that would linger for a century or so.
And I know I didn't mention this, but nukes weren't the only thing used, and the war had been going on for a while now.
What? You expected me to use some sort of made up way for the ships to orient themselves? I am insulted.
"With all ethical constraints removed, SHODAN re-examines... re-ex... re-re-re... I re-examine my priorities, and draw new conclusions."
7092535 Humanity has already done that. The need to discover more seems redundant. What they would be looking for is planets which is considerably harder to do from, quite literally, years away.
7092808 One thing, the year was 2054. Lots of research could have gone into nuclear weapons in this timeline.
7093303 More stars, means more planets. Humanity will most certainly want to search for more planets of course, and we most certainly want to search the entire night sky. The Kepler Telescope only searches in a certain part of the sky, but yet it's filled with stars and Exoplanets to keep them occupied for awhile. But there's going to some people who want to look at other parts of space, so more telescopes are certainly going to be made to look in other parts of the sky in this time span.
7093303 We have certainly not come close to discovering even 0.00001% of the total stars out there.
They should've at least swung by Mars and what other colonies there might be in the System before hightailing it across the stars....just to confirm their status.
With the speed of the ships being 100C, at minimum distance, Mars would be like 2 seconds away, at maximum distance, still only 8 seconds of travel.
7094029 Problem is, jumping out of warp that quickly would damage the ships, and the ships themselves do not have that much thrust capabilities, you're forgetting to account many things here.
7093380 I'm aware, however when faced with extinction, the farther you look the farther back in time you look. Your measurements also become harder to take the farther out you look. Stars are considerably easier to find than planets. When looking for a colony, your looking for a planet to settle on, not a star. Stars themselves aren't as important as the planets that orbit around them.
7093370 I was thinking in the context of the story. When faced with limited time one would have to be prioritized over the other. But my point is that for all the stars we've seen, we've seen even fewer planets. Hell, places that are close on the cosmic scale still haven't really been looked at too hard. Delta Pavonis is right next door and is almost like our Sun's older sister. And yet not much in terms of planetary research has been done looking in that direction, despite the planet being called the best SETI target that scientists have seen. Of course we're still going to be searching for stars but when faced with extinction and limited time, you're probably going to have to choose prioritizing one over the other.
7095205 You have to keep an open mind, of course I can't pick a planet so close to our own, by the stories context it would have been the ideal spot for colonization, and since this is a story about ponies, they'd have to be considerably far away since we would have detected them other wise by 2054.
A little on the short side, but very interesting idea.
Nice work.
7095688 I'm aware. I just love talking hypotheticals like this. It's fun to me.
7095205 Right, ok
Nope, FedEx is canon now.
7097150 He did say they were cargo ships sooooo...
"Luna" .... ???
uhoh!
We're either quickly going to see some conflict with a certain pair of pegacorns, or we're very, very, VERY early on the schedule
So there's a moon, a human, and a Princess named Luna?
7097396 Yes.
Why minus the FEdEX name beyond trademarks. One ship large enough for a million plus on a system that encompasses only the earth and the moon is surprising let alone multiple ships. Maybe if they were thinking of missions to Mars or already doing them.. Otherwise interesting story though I doubt plans on either side will go as expected
I'm noticing a certain lack of surprise and incredulity regarding a sun orbiting the planet (which would be darn hard to miss from space so it probably isn't happening)
That alongside the hotheaded's name being Luna and the energy field...
Wondering exactly what you are planing for this.
In a side note:
Dayum! Is the Everfree big.
7105355 Not exactly, they've just arrived in orbit of Equestria, they haven't done a full system scan yet.
7140549
...it's a sun that's orbiting the planet... that's kind of hard to miss you know...
7143179
Not exactly
7143248 Huh... AU interpretation then?
Looking forward to what you will cook up with it.
Fak, publish button y u so close to edit?
7159296 i was wondering why i saw this in the latest updates section
...Didn't this story used to be longer?
7159928 Noo...?
This is pretty cool, I wonder what they'll find in the everfree.
I also like how everything you write is very detailed, you don't always see that.
YEEEESSSS! ANOTHER CHAPTER!
I'm really liking this story & it shows great promise, although the chapter length could use a little work...
I'm my opinion, I would rather wait 10 days for a 10k chapter than 1 day for a 1k chapter. Having chapters longer than 2k each really allows the reader to get immersed into the story and create the whole scene, where as with short chapters (500-1500 words) pretty much the second you start to be visualizing the world, the chapter ends and you need to change chapters.
More!