Chapter 5 - A World in a Bottle in a Ship - Part 1/4
Sunset could not help but grin in mischievous glee as she looked back at the gathered group of now human shaped ponies… and one changeling.
That was an oddity she would need to investigate later.
Each were stumbling forward, a little shaky on their two long legs, not unlike freshly born fawns. That was kind of amusing by itself, however what Sunset truly relished was their faces; each looked up and around with disbelieving but wondrous stares at a sight they couldn’t quite make sense of.
Sunset herself couldn’t help but lose herself in the view for a few minutes too. How vast empty meadows filled with wild flowers, rolling hills, scenic sparkling rivers and lakes of perfectly blue water, distant mountain like formations all blended together occasionally intersecting with roads, regularly dotted with villages or individual homes and a few scattered patches of farmland. And then it just all curved up. The horizon never visible as the land gently peeled upwards until it was directly overhead and then started to curve back down again towards you from the other side. But what was more, it wasn’t some product of universal laws and nature’s slow work, it was made, crafted by thinking and relatively mortal minds.
Again she looked back to her new companions. Their faces mixed with barely believing fascination, wonder and just a touch of fear - not to mention a little vertigo – as they looked up into the sky and at the ground above them, eyes falling around in circles as they surveyed the lush cylindrical vista before them.
“That look’s never going to get old,” she murmured to herself, empathetically basking in their sense of awe, remembering all too well when she first emerged out of the underworks and service tunnels below, into the light of the habitat.
The break in the silence, however small, seemed to break the spell the sight wove over Cadance’s faculties. Her now muzzle-less head turning slowly to look at the grinning woman, she struggled to articulate her thoughts.
“Sunset… how… what is this?” Cadance stumbled out her question uneasily.
Everyone began looking to Sunset to answer the question Cadance had so helpfully voiced for them, as vague as it is.
Sunset merely shrugged, grin growing cocky and gestured to the view before them. “Told you. This, is the colony ship Star Strider. Flagship of the forty ninth galactic colonisation fleet; Endless Venture. Locally? Cylinder A, section two, generally known as Catalonia District. That little city over there? Great Sticks. Don’t ask me where the name comes from, believe me, I tried pretty damn hard to find out and came up empty anyway,” she explained, as one thumb stuck out pointing out across the glimmering lake at the small city with its shining spires beyond. Dropping her arm she turned back to look around for herself once more, before adding her own thoughts more wistfully. “Quite the view isn’t it? Been living here years and… and I could still just… stand here for hours looking at it.”
“We’re on a ship? Just… how?! And the sky, or the ground, how can it just… wrap around like that?! Without falling… at least the water should be,” Shining sputtered out in turn, mind reeling as it struggled to comprehend the seemingly impossible sight.
“And just how big is this ship? How could anyone possibly build something this big?! And this is only one section you said? Only one ship in a fleet?!” Sunburst – uneasily stumbling up next to Shining and decked out in a more human fitting variant of his usual star spangled robes – asked far more excitedly and looking very interested in the answers to all their questions.
With a continuously excitedly smug grin answered simply, “Approximately thirty seven kilometres long, a bit over five wide and three tall. As for the how of,” she paused to gesture all around her at the scenery that curved up and over them, “that takes a little explaining.”
“C-c-c-can we m-maybe start w-with why the sky, uh, the ground? The…. why isn’t it falling on us?!” a young mare - presumably an accountant of some sort going by her scales and coins cutie-mark embroidered on her rather official looking blazer - stuttered out while staring up with visible agitation and fear behind her eyes.
Sunset could not quite hold back the giggle that worked its way out from her lips. The chastising glance from Cadance certainly helped her cut it off though.
“Don’t worry! The whole place has been like this since long before I got here and I’ve been living on Star Strider a good twenty years. The ground isn’t going to fall down on us or anything,” Sunset loudly and confidently clarified, using her dismissiveness over the issue to help put everything to rest. It didn’t seem to work too well but she continued anyway with a shrug. “Now as to why, gravity doesn’t exist out in space. Sorta. The details get complicated. Point is, normally you need a planet like ours for that, but great big balls of rock and dirt are expensive and super slow to move. So instead you have to get creative and, well, create it. Imagine! You got a bucket full of water on the end of a rope. You swing that bucket around in a circle and it creates a constant force on the water inside so whichever way the bucket swings, it stays inside, pinned to the bottom. Now instead of a bucket, imagine you have a giant cylinder. You spin that cylinder at a nice constant speed and everything sticks to the insides like it was the ground. That’s… well that’s what you’re looking at right now!” she explained with somewhat staged excitement and more than a few wild gestures.
It was all old news to her, but she recalled just how mind bending it was the first time it had been explained to her. Sunset could even imagine she had a similarly half disbelieving look of astonishment back then the same way her audience did.
“This… this is amazing!” Sunburst cried out as his sense of wonder won out over his trepidation and he stumbled forward as if trying to get a closer look at it all. “It’s absolutely immense! And all…. Artificial? These Earthlings created all of this? Even the gravity! Ha ha! Just think about it, using centrifugal force for something so mundane, that we simply take for granted from birth. And on such a scale… though I suppose it would have to be if they didn’t want the tangential force from the rotation to be noticeable. I wonder how long it took to build.”
“Sure did. They don’t think small, and not just because some of them are twenty or so metres long whales. Colonisation is a big task. They’re building a whole civilisation from scratch every handful of decades. This isn’t even the only ship, there’s a small fleet of them travelling alongside the Star Strider. Fortunately for us, that means there’s plenty of cracks for us to fall into and hide. Plenty of scraps left over for us to build ourselves up with.”
“And that’s what you’ve been doing, haven’t you? All these years, learning from these people…” Cadance said as realisation dawned on her, and she looked back over the room with a smidge of amusement. “It’s no wonder you’ve built yourself a laboratory here.”
“And where you’ve been able to build your army in secret,” Sombra added sharply, a small grin breaking out when his words caused no small number of eyes to look between Sunset and him uneasily. “Though I fail to see where exactly that promised force is now.”
Sunset did not like the negative attention, but she had been expecting this. And desperately held back her grin as she feigned confusion at his comment. After all, where was the fun in setting someone up for a fall, if you couldn’t toy with them a little first?
“Army? Whatever army are you talking about? Oh, you don’t mean… surely you aren’t talking about my little bluff?” she admitted as she finally let her lips peel back into a mocking smile.
The growl that overtook Sombra - as stilted as it sounded with human vocal cords - caused the vast majority of the gathered former ponies to edge backwards. He strode towards sunset, fingers curled into claws and teeth barred, using his physical stature to tower over the woman in an attempt to intimidate. Sombra had taken care of his physical body in life unlike some warlocks, so it was reflected in both his magically reconstructed body and his new human form here, leaving him with substantial muscle mass, though not too much. Sunset had to admit he made for an extremely attractive man in the traditional tall dark and handsome sense.
However Sombra’s posture didn’t phase Sunset in the slightest, she confidently soaked up the attention the confrontation gained them. It helped that she felt his outburst was likely artificial, something to help publicly smear her image and authority with.
“You mean to tell me, that you are merely some posturing coward?! That you cannot bring to bear the force you promised?” he questioned pointedly, confirming her suspicions before his tirade even reached its conclusion. “How, perchance, are we to trust you can deliver on any of your promises? Your word is clearly a flimsy facade, you only hold a shallow mirage of the ocean you promised us.”
“I hardly lied. Not to the Princess and not to her ponies anyway,” Sunset said, brushing off his claims, with the flick of the wrist. “Atlas is a nice proof of concept, a prototype we can easily build on once everyone is up to speed.”
“We need an army!” he roared in her face, continuing his power play. “Thousands, hundreds of thousands! Not what pitiful mob we can cobble together in our sparse free time from working to survive this new… place.”
Sunset scoffed and rolled her eyes. “You’re thinking too small, not that I expected you to do otherwise. We don’t build the robot soldiers, we build the robots that build the robot soldiers. A constant tierless workforce creating weapon after weapon until we have the numbers we need.”
“A very pretty picture you paint,” Sombra admitted sarcastically - though the sharp eyed easily caught the look of genuine intrigue that passed over his face for a moment. “However, any plan needs competent execution. Something you have shown no ability to deliver on. And if you cannot deliver your promised victory, I would propose new leadership is required. Leadership that has actual experience fighting a war and managing an army.”
In a move to begin his little planned coup, Sombra raised his right arm in an instinctual gesture of power, focused a nasty grin on Sunset and reached for his magic… only to find nothing at all.
“Wh-what?!” he sputtered out, confusion taking over as his features as he oscillated between fearful confusion and anger. “What did you do to my magic?!”
Sunset’s smirk twisted into a snarl as in less than the blink of an eye she dropped forward into a fighting stance, lunged forward and lashed out with her hand, holding it straight and driving it finger first like a spear right into the man’s solar plexus.
Sombra, taken unawares by a weak spot he did not know he possessed, cried out weakly as the wind was knocked out of him and he doubled over in pain.
The crowd gasped in shock at the sudden and vicious attack, but no real pity was spared for the former king as the initial shock wore off. Many of the guards shared a small, less than friendly laugh at Sombra’s expense and a few of the watching children even cried out in excitement, cheering on Sunset for laying low their collective boogeyman. That attention was enough to distract Sunset for a moment, long enough for her to flash the kids a charming grin and mischievous wink.
Sombra however needed far more than a moment to recover so had no opportunity to strike back before Sunset was once more in his face, leaning over him to glare at him straight in the eyes.
“Listen here you sorry excuse for a Sauron knock off,” she demanded of him harshly. “First off, I’m not in charge here and you sure as hell aren’t either. That honour belongs to the Princess and her arm candy over there. Secondly, I hold all the fucking cards right now. Your magic - don’t worry, it’s not gone for good - is nicely locked away by this transformation, but all of my many non-magical tricks and weapons are plenty effective. So, don’t think you’ll get away with using violence to take over or even intimidate anyone - and I mean anyone, I’ll damn well find out if you do - into playing your games. You’re going to behave, learn to play nice and you might even earn a few privileges. And if you don’t like it…” Sunset’s stern look turned into a nasty grin, “well, the portal should still be open for a bit longer, I can offer the same alternative choices you gave all your former subjects here; a slow cold death, or gambling on the mercy of the invaders.”
With that all said she stood and stepped back, regarding Sombra with a sneer even as he glared daggers at her.
Abruptly she turned to face the stunned crowd, especially focusing on Cadance and her entourage and gave them a cheerful smile, mood having flipped from vicious to friendly in the blink of an eye. “Well! Now that that’s dealt with, why don’t I get a head count? Boys, girls and children separately. Then I’ll see about ordering us all some pizza!”
Stats
Page generated in 0.024 seconds
Total duration
1,032 users online
1,629,639 hits today, 2,244,100 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Yessss an update!!!! Thanks
For what it was, this was a good chapter, and I see you decided to throw in the towel on the ship design after our earlier conversation. While that irritates my engineering side, I understand why you did it from a narrative perspective and assume you won't bother handwaving any more of the design than you absolutely have to.
A new chapter!?!
Anyho, me personally I love long chapters. So you got one vote for more long chapters
11657996
And thank you too for reading!
11658051
Yes and no. I always had a pretty solid designe layout for the colony ships in mind - the main big ones anyway - and was looking for the best way to make them fezzable. As it stands? It's a bit beyond what some believe is safely posiable for the maximum scale of an O'neil cilinder with our curent engineering knoledge. The actual cylinder habitat is 2K in diameter with a smaller internal diameter of 1.5k to 1.8k, haven't entierly decided yet but the space between is ocupied by life suport machineery, small local or specialist manufacturing and mass storage of water and gasses. It's length is devided into three sections by thick bulkhead segments that themselves contain most of the hydroponics and othe mass farming facilities on decks leading all the way to the center line of the cylinder so it's not entierly one big long empty space. There is two of these cylinder conected in paralele each counter-spinning the other while the larger and much emptier space frame sits around them. That suports the engine block at the rear, the armoured nose cone, a thinner armoured skin while the gaps around and between the habitat cyliners is filled with lager manufacturing facilities, cargo and enclosed docking for smaller craft, plus a few short term habitates wheels of much small scale (and probably lower G) for on dutey technicians and supervisors manning and maintining the ship and those systems. With a few short term observation rooms dotted around the exterior for fun and science as well. Oh! Plus siloes filled with some sort of missile for intercepting and diverting larger space debries. Beyond that? There's a large, thin ring tethered around the middle of the craft that suports long range sensors and lasers for getting rid of smaller space debries. This part is ideally enterly unmanned while underway being a higher risk area. There would also be a substantial cluster of radiators around the engin block plus a few smaller ones along the length for regulating temerature and for aditional auxillery reactors.
I supose I'm helping justify the length through future unknown nano engineering, alowing for perfectly harmoginous or otherwise aranged molecular structures for increaced strength. That said, it also ocoured to me that carbon nanotubes could still be of use, at least within the cylinder. Given they are more effective under tenssion (if I remeber and understand corectly) they could be used to help hold the cylinder together, firstly if they were woven into a circle around the cylinders outer structure and across it's diameter. that way, as the cylinder spins they would help hold it together via tensile strength, not entierly unlike how a suspenssion bridge works. Though perhaps a barrel's hoops might be a better comparison?
Barring that however I might have to delve into active suport systems to explain things.
Also apologies for leaving you hanging. I kinda recall not feeling too good at the time and kinda burnt out so not in the mood to discus technical details. I know I was keen on the premis of quantem entanglment working as I want an information economy between Earth and it's ships. They provide Earth with scientific deta and so forth regarding new worlds and Earth passes along the results of an established scientific and R&D industry that can't be halled across the galaxy with them. It would also make comunication interesting as the colony ship could only comunicate with Earth and the string of colonies it founded. That said, it wouldn't be hard to pull something similart off with wormholes instead. Fitting even given... ah, well, spoilers~
And going back to the whole cryo or generation ships thing... well I have a soloution for that too but that's a little spoilery as well. Kinda like how I wanted to keep the scale of Starstrider under wraps until the big reveal.
Anyway, thanks again for the review and taking the time to read.
11658690
Sadly it seems people prefer regular updates... so I guess I'll just have to try for both!
11658700
That's an engineering nightmare. Narratively and visually interesting, but not something anyone would build regardless of tech. There are way too many unnecessary moving parts to make any sense, and that's before you get into the previously discussed issues with having a serious environment inside.
An actual O'Neil cylinder ship would be a boring log that rotates as an entire unit. It'll be about a kilometer in diameter and 2-3 kilometers long with the only "features" being a 45 degree taper down to the engine at the back for structural reasons and a hangar opening at the front. Things like engines, fuel, and other support systems will run along the center of the cylinder where there's basically no gravity, and the ship will be increasingly occupied as you work your way out until you get to the crew quarters at the outer edge. I probably wouldn't arm it at all since it's trivially easy to spot and avoid hazards in space, even with the minimal propulsion system it'll have, and if I did arm it I would definitely stick with lasers instead of large, easily shot down, and functionally irreplaceable missiles. Yes the barrel-style nanotube construction you describe might give better performance than steel, but at the end of the day, weight is the killer in space so you'd actually use it to improve performance on the basic design, and if you need more volume, building longer generally makes more sense than building wider. No open environments, no major rotational points, just a boring, efficient log.
For the rest, no worries about the delay, I obviously can't comment on the spoiler stuff, and a small wormhole is exactly my preferred solution to FTL communication so we're on the same page there. Shooting a laser through a millimeter-sized wormhole isn't too far off a modern fiber optic system, making implementation trivial (besides the actual wormhole), and you could probably also do something with sending data through fluctuation in the wormhole itself if you want to get a little more exotic. Also, one common FTL limitation you may want to consider if you're using wormholes is forcing the ships to cruise way out in a solar system conventionally to get away from the star's gravity before making a big wormhole to jump to another system. That makes it trivially easy to justify spending months or years flying around instead of the generations needed for slow-boat transit or the hours/days of pulp franchises, and that in turn justifies the choice of an O'Neil cylinder over a sleeper ship or zero-G short-term occupancy vessel.
Whatever chapter length works best for you.
"Imagine"
"Thousands"
"Sauron", I assume.
11665813
...woops.
I would say I'm surprised you found any mistakes given how many times I combe through these before release but honestly I'm surprised you didn't find more. You can probably tell I don't have a dedicated editor/proof reader.
Anyway, thanks for the saves. Should all be fixed now.
11666079
Yeah, mistypes are basically inevitable. Even, like, important academic volumes with small armies of editors have them quite often. No need to actually worry about them too much, really.
11659371
Egads! Such scathing criticism!
To be honest I know where you're coming from, and you're absolutely correct for what might be humanity's first interstellar voyages. But as this isn't their first I have to disagree. These ships are intended to travel to a new system, set up a colony and then do it again, repeatedly, many times in a row. And for that, I feel convenience a stationary outer structure would be near essential to play the part of a systems wide manufacturing hub for the decades it would spend in system setting things up. It would also make things way more convenient when it comes to manoeuvring, rather than trying to coordinate thrusters across a rotating hull.
Similarly having a wide open living area feels necessary for the more long term living going on. I guess you could say that these ships are colony ships in the sense they are themselves as much a colony as the ones they found.
As for cargo, air, fuel and water, I genuinely think they would be stored externally as they would then provide an extra layer of insulation against radiation. They are also some of the last things you would ever want to run out of so you're going to bring substantial reserves of it one way or another, and store it compartmentally anyway, whether this is expensive in mass or not.
The engines likely shouldn't be near the centerline either, given they're likely a huge source of excess heat, and while maybe some of that could be used the last thing you want to do is cook everyone aboard alive. For safety reasons alone it shouldn't be too close to any long term habitation areas, and somewhere cooling systems have easy access to the exterior of the ship where radiators can be mounted.
On the note of safety, I honestly believe the outermost layer is not where the crew/colonists/passengers should be, given the more direct danger of living there. Near to it of course, as is the point of the cylinder but there really needs to be a solid barrier or several between them and open space. Making that layer out of cargo and more temporarily inhabited facilities just makes sense to me.
As for collision defence I'm thinking about how it manages after gradually accelerating up to some significant percentage of light speed. At that point manoeuvring becomes trickier. Probably still the easiest option in most cases but there's stuff that's too small to be worth the effort or too fast or just not caught in time. Missiles would probably be overkill but I think of it more as one of those better safe than sorry kind or precautions. Though, if they were feeling ambitious I suppose they could use drones instead to snag a small early windfall in resources, though likely not once they’re really up to speed.
I have a lot of fun reasons for wanting all this just so… but also some practical ones. Almost always when I see interstellar colonisation in media, it strikes me as far too small in scale. Sure, when Earth is an easy jump away it might not be this big an endeavour, but even then you’re not going to be able to import everything and in this case nothing except maybe information. You’re going to need to bring the tools to make everything you need and you’re going to need to bring everything you need to extract the resources to make all of that and you’re going to need to bring everything needed to keep everyone alive, healthy and happy one way or another and any children they might have along the way and you’re going to need enough people in the first place for a viable population and to run all the industry you’re bringing with you to keep up all those needs and everything necessery to keep all that safe… it’s go big or stay home. This ain’t no pansy little wagon on the Origon trail, sorry (not sorry) space western fans.
11666893
Ok, now that I've gotten time to chew through this, there's a lot to say.
First up, that concept is completely unworkable for one simple reason. People. Those people on the ships want to be colonists, not idle on ships, so they're all going to get off at the first opportunity regardless of numbers. After all, a planet's a big place and there's no upper limit to the number of people who can be part of an initial colony, so even if you can carry millions at a time you're going to drop them all on the first planet and go back for another load. If you want to rapidly colonize many worlds, you're going to make many ships or groups which each fly directly to one world, drop everyone off, and then go home to repeat the process, not pile all your ships into a massive flotilla as you seem to be implying. The only other possible interpretation is that the colony somehow generates enough new people to push some offworld again, but there's no sane way to make the numbers work for that when you consider how many people a planet can hold.
As for getting things to the ground, there are two halves of that. First, for heavy equipment like tooling for factories, you're better off storing it in a separate cargo ship where it can be safely stored safe from accidental damage until it's time to drop it (probably along with the ship that carried it). Second, for the people, they're really not all that substantial even with their personal belongings so it's not hard to get them offloaded through an axial shuttle bay in a reasonable amount of time (a few days is perfectly acceptable for this), although there's nothing stopping you from spinning the ship down or installing drop pods if you want to offload the colonists faster for some reason.
Also, coordinating thrusters across a rotating hull is trivial for a computer. It's hard to express how simple those calculations in comparison to the computation power of modern systems because of how absurd the difference is.
Moving on, I really can't comment on your living thoughts without numbers. You've given me absolutely nothing on transit time beyond the "no FTL" comment I blew out of the water earlier, and I'm struggling to see how you're justifying this when we know people can live in a submarine or tiny space stations for months at a time without serious issue. I'm just not seeing how you'd get to the point where you need more than a bit of a park without the transit time making the trip infeasible. Ultimately, the underlying problem is that the O'Neil cylinder was designed to be an orbital settlement, not a ship, so its design is based on the assumption that it has to offer a good enough standard of living for people to chose to live their instead of on Earth. That means it makes massive concessions to habitability and gives absolutely no consideration to things like propulsion since it's not supposed to move, so you can't turn it into a ship without massive changes.
As for arrangement and cargo, most of what you list isn't actually cargo. The ship must be a closed cycle when it comes to air and water, so you won't need reserves (and absolutely can't afford the weight). Food could go either way depending on flight time, but if you do produce it, it'll be done in the less useful low G areas of the ship to reduce the structural impact of its weight (the further out mass it, the greater the centrifugal force it experiences and the heavier the structure supporting it has to be, so keeping things towards the center is critical). Furthermore, you have radiation 100% backwards because the primary source is the reactor, especially in interstellar space, so propellant/fuel used as radiation shielding will be near the reactor, not in the outer surface. What the outer layer actually needs to deal with is hypervelocity gas and the possible micrometeor impact (lasers are the primary defense, but you have to do some contingency planning here), so you'll have two gas-resistant (likely ceramic) layers separated by either a vacuum gap or a layer of aerogel so the outer layer can act as a Whipple shield in an impact.
Structurally, the engine MUST be on the centerline. The net thrust vector must pass through the ship's center of mass or it'll impose a torque. Furthermore, the thrust loading on any ship like this will be enormous and reactors are heavy, expensive things, so trying to scatter engines around the edges is idiotic. The only major alternative, a tractor configuration, is impossible for an O'Neil cylinder due to the issues with spinning the cable system, so the ship has to be stacked on top of the engine. Structural efficiency is going to force the ship to taper out to the diameter of the cylinder, so there's plenty of length in that uninhabited conical section for radiators and other support systems.
Finally, your closing paragraph is too vague and generalized to effectively respond to. How colonization plays out is going to be heavily dependent on how the setting is put together, so while a single family in Star Trek can easily grab a shuttle with a replicator and live comfortably on an otherwise uninhabited world thanks to their technology, colonization in Warhammer 40,000 is going to be a massive endeavor with hundreds of thousands of people and massive amounts of cargo to set up the necessary infrastructure. I can easily construct settings on either extreme even within the bounds of hard sci fi, so this honestly just sounds like you want to be different from Star Wars to me.