This is for a story that I am trying to write.
The basic assumption is that technology is so advanced that we can make organs tissues and whole animals with the same ease we can make cars hammers and flashlights.
Seed ships are a sci-fi concept that extrapolates from the futurology idea that, space is big, and you do not live long enough to make the journey to colonize another star system. There are generation ships but that is not the story I want to write.
There is also hibernation, the idea that you freeze a person and they "sleep" on the way to the star system and wake up when they are there.
The problem with that is that an average human is 75kg. There is a limit to how few people you need to have the genetic diversity to support a population.
Let for the sake of simplicity say that number is 150 individuals. or 75 breeding pairs.
So you need 11 250kg of people on your ship to have that number.
But an embryo is less than a gram, so you need 150g of embryos to have the same population. You can have ten kilograms of embryos and you can get 10000 people as the base of your new colony. In the story, I am going for 600 000 embryos.
So a seed ship gives you more people, at the cost of having to grow, raise, and educate them over 18 years to get productive colonists.
That is the basic concept oversimplified. This is what my story will have in it.
So now I like to ask you for help, ideas, and/or feedback.
First off the ship is fully automated. There will be some focus on Human AI interaction but the core of the story is not about that.
The seed ship is launched and it has in it all the industrial capabilities a civilization requires to function on it, resource extraction and food production included. But it only has so much on board, it needs additional resources and energy to support itself and the people.
So the plan for the ship is.
Travel to a star system, approach some resource-rich area, Something like a planetary system of Saturn or Jupiter. But not for the gas giants but for the moons and moonlets and other matter orbiting it are the target.
Delta-V and the rocket equation apply to the setting. A large moon is more expensive to mine than a small rock. Titan has 0,138g of surface gravity. But tiny Anthe has only 0,00012m/s2. But Anthe is only 1,8km big and it is not that resource-rich because its density is only 0,5g/cm3(half the density of water), earth is ten times as dense at 5,514g/cm3.
So a good medium in between a large rock moon and a snowball moonlet will likely be the best idea.
The ship will use the resources it will find to construct an orbital station. It will be a ring station using centrifugal forces to simulate gravity and over time be expanded into a full-length O'Neill cylinder.
This will be where the embryos will be brought to term, raised, and educated.
The ship will use the remaining resources, to expand its resource gathering operation, expand its production capabilities, and with that expand the orbital living area.
Solar power will be the main power source.
Because of the low sunlight for every 1km2 of solar panels there would need to be about 20-50km of mirrors to direct the sunlight to the panels
So the first generation that came from the embryos will be born in space, it will be the second generation that will start colonizing a planet.
To simplify. The goal is to build the space industry and population first and then do a planetfall and start building roads and houses.
I intend to make the story as hard sci-fi as possible. The only handwavium are the fusion-powered rockets, and the ability to 3D print living organisms.
The basic assumption is that technology is so advanced that we can make organs tissues and whole animals with the same ease we can make cars hammers and flashlights.
Seed ships are a sci-fi concept that extrapolates from the futurology idea that, space is big, and you do not live long enough to make the journey to colonize another star system. There are generation ships but that is not the story I want to write.
There is also hibernation, the idea that you freeze a person and they "sleep" on the way to the star system and wake up when they are there.
The problem with that is that an average human is 75kg. There is a limit to how few people you need to have the genetic diversity to support a population.
Let for the sake of simplicity say that number is 150 individuals. or 75 breeding pairs.
So you need 11 250kg of people on your ship to have that number.
But an embryo is less than a gram, so you need 150g of embryos to have the same population. You can have ten kilograms of embryos and you can get 10000 people as the base of your new colony. In the story, I am going for 600 000 embryos.
So a seed ship gives you more people, at the cost of having to grow, raise, and educate them over 18 years to get productive colonists.
That is the basic concept oversimplified. This is what my story will have in it.
So now I like to ask you for help, ideas, and/or feedback.
First off the ship is fully automated. There will be some focus on Human AI interaction but the core of the story is not about that.
The seed ship is launched and it has in it all the industrial capabilities a civilization requires to function on it, resource extraction and food production included. But it only has so much on board, it needs additional resources and energy to support itself and the people.
So the plan for the ship is.
Travel to a star system, approach some resource-rich area, Something like a planetary system of Saturn or Jupiter. But not for the gas giants but for the moons and moonlets and other matter orbiting it are the target.
Delta-V and the rocket equation apply to the setting. A large moon is more expensive to mine than a small rock. Titan has 0,138g of surface gravity. But tiny Anthe has only 0,00012m/s2. But Anthe is only 1,8km big and it is not that resource-rich because its density is only 0,5g/cm3(half the density of water), earth is ten times as dense at 5,514g/cm3.
So a good medium in between a large rock moon and a snowball moonlet will likely be the best idea.
The ship will use the resources it will find to construct an orbital station. It will be a ring station using centrifugal forces to simulate gravity and over time be expanded into a full-length O'Neill cylinder.
This will be where the embryos will be brought to term, raised, and educated.
The ship will use the remaining resources, to expand its resource gathering operation, expand its production capabilities, and with that expand the orbital living area.
Solar power will be the main power source.
Because of the low sunlight for every 1km2 of solar panels there would need to be about 20-50km of mirrors to direct the sunlight to the panels
So the first generation that came from the embryos will be born in space, it will be the second generation that will start colonizing a planet.
To simplify. The goal is to build the space industry and population first and then do a planetfall and start building roads and houses.
I intend to make the story as hard sci-fi as possible. The only handwavium are the fusion-powered rockets, and the ability to 3D print living organisms.