"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Technically... The "Solar Pinhole" psycast is FTL. You create a microscopic wormhole into "the core of a nearby star" in under a second. Could be a lore oversight, or maybe FTL is indeed possible on a microscopic scale.
@@awsomebot1 Psycasts are archotech-derived, and they've been shown (like with vanometric cells) to be able to violate the laws of physics, so they probably can achieve at least some level of small-scale FTL. No human-made craft can achieve FTL in Rimworld, though.
@jordancorkery4465 I think vanometrics don't necessarily break the laws of physics, just that humans don't understand it. The lore even implies it's not actually free energy because archotechs avoid using it. I think even archotechs don't do FTL other than being able to "connect" to humans instantly (psylink). You could say that's consciousness woo woo, but Solar Pinhole is distinctly FTL travelling of matter/energy
@@awsomebot1 any skip psycast is FTL, yeah, that's kinda what I was saying. But that doesn't translate to interstellar FTL travel; for all we know, there might be some upper limit to how far or how much matter can be skipped across a distance, the same way there's an upper limit to how much archotechs will scale up vanometrics
Always wanted to see a sleek soft sci-fi ship like Enterprise duking it out with 700+km monstrosity of a hard sci-fi colony ship that might be less advanced in some tech, but was build to far greater degree of reliability and has scale to back it up(phasers are cool until you remember that said "old timer" would have anti-asteroid CIWS flinging enough antimatter canisters to vaporise incoming planetoids).
TBH a lot of hard sci fi warships (or even warships that could be achieved with our current day technology such as the real USAF proposal for an armed Orion nuclear pulse) have a lot of advantages over soft SF spacecraft. A typical Orion spacecraft can accelerate itself to ridiculous speeds, throw a bunch of slugs filled with deuterium and tritium at any soft sci fi fleet, if they have “energy shields” that can be overwhelmed as seen in most soft sci fi that’s how they work, then that should be enough to overwhelm the vast majority of them. At which point your second volley of thousands of tiny tungsten pellets that hit with nuclear warhead level yields will follow your deuterium fusion shield wreckers, leaving your soft sci fi fleet of ocean liners I mean spacecraft as nothing more than an expanding cloud of hot gas. Most hard SF warships are kind of weak TBH. Their accuracy is stupidly low along with the range of their weapons. Maybe some really advanced soft sci fi ships that have magically super strong armor and energy shields that can charge themselves with the impact of those high speed slugs could stand a chance, but your average star destroyer could be obliterated by an Orion nuclear pulse a thousand times smaller
@@ProductivityAccount-wl3ik Star Trek tends to be underestimated since the heroes are always looking for peaceful solutions but those shields tend to outright ignore nukes. Even the original Enterprise could glass a whole planet by itself, and have hulls that can easily with stand fast maneuvers at relativistic speeds. Still it's an interesting concept. An FTL warship having problems with a sublight generation ship just because it's a massive brick the size of Texas designed to eat all the damage the interstellar medium can throw at it without waking up the people sleeping inside.
@@3Rayfire Part of it is soft-sf ships are literally less structurally sound than something we'd have to build IRL, because, setting aside the reactors and disintegrator weapons, force shields reduce the need to spend resources on hull plating and ablative shielding and what not, *and* access to FTL supply lines (usually) means you can risk outfitting your ships with technology that is both less reliable and requires more advanced manufacturing to run and maintain Truthfully though, the biggest threat to an soft-SF ship from an old pre-ftl behemoth is whatever or whoever is inside it
Shout out to the _Marathon,_ which is actually the Martian moon Deimos, repurposed into a colony ship that took 300 years to reach the system of Tau Ceti. The people who were born during this trip were called BOBs, an acronym for Born On Board.
Shout out to David Weber in his Honorverse world building. Not only having cryo ships that don't keep the pasdengers in stasis 100% of the time, time dilation effects, and a plot point of later developed FTL travel beating colonists to their new home (for good and for ill). Also, that B5 episode with the sleeper ship that launched only a couple years before first contact with the Centauri.
Was surprised to see a minecraft animation in this video. Looked it up and... what the hell? >"The Three-Body Problem in Minecraft" is a Chinese network animated series based on the science fiction novels The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin. Initially, the animation was an unofficial machinima doujin work, but from the second season onwards, it became an official adaptation.
Talking of maintaining a colony ship with religious fervour. I remember a friend briefly mentioning in elite dangerous colony ships created before the discovery of FTL are treated like uncontacted tribes. There's just so many different things you can do with that. It may be financially unviable but it would definitely be possible to get the descendants of colonists wherever they were going within their lifespan. But the place they were going to colonise is probably already fully inhabited had a devastating war been reduced to ash and rebuilt.
I really enjoy the near lightspeed travel in Lancer (the ttrpg). While FTL does exist, it's rare, expensive, only connects between specific FTL stations and needs to be set up at both the start and end points, so most interstellar travel is done at nearlight speed instead. A lot of the setting takes into account how a galactic society would be shaped by the fact that going to space for a living basically entirely uncouples you from the regular flow of time. On many of the more remote planets, dedicated space traders are treated almost like mystical fey creatures that show up once every one or two decades and never seem to age
Also worth mentioning that Revelation Space (in particular the book Chasm City) also mentions other interstellar voyages from before the Lighthuggers were built: A generation ship flotilla to 61 Cygni A (went badly), and 4 of the frozen embryo type ships (All 4 failed, and were later recolonised by Lighthugger).
your videos have really helped me efficiently design spacecraft, space warships, space fighters, etc keep up the good work man, I really appreciate the videos.
4:25 please do note that from a physics and medicine perspective; "the ability to 'freeze and thaw a person' dozens, hundreds (if not thousands) of years later all but demands the existence of reviving the dead AND near godlike life extension capacity."
Does it? Age is due to telomeres shortening after attempting mitosis. Therefor, if you stop the bodies functions it doesn't replicate new cells so you don't age... right? Restarting the heart should be possible with implants similar to a pacemaker just a bit stronger. We might need some kind of anti coagulants incase your blood clots. A lot of this would depend on trial and error and what cryogenic even look like. 0:59 Part of why I am simewhat in favour of cloning research used to create brain dead copies so experiments would be somewhat ethical.
@@devonhutchins2176 I can weigh in on part of this. Pacemakers and defibrillators only work on hearts that are beating. The shock doesn't make the heart start, instead it resets the heart rhythm so that the current irregular beats (which would kill you) become a regular rhythm again In the future I imagine they could come up with a more advanced version though
@@rayzerot I am aware and thank you, I should have been more precise with my language. I suggested the idea as if the brain uses electrical impulses to tell the heart when and how to beat it should be possible to replicate such artificially. Hence restarting a stopped heart. There has to be something wrong with my understanding as to why this couldn't be done or it might just be a matter of we haven't bothered building it yet.
@@devonhutchins2176 You can cure age but you gotta find a way to deal with the naturally occuring isotopes in your body dosing you with a lethal level of radiation over centuries and outright killing your cells regardless of stasis or not. Something that's not mentioned at all in this video.
I wanted to write a sci-fi/horror story where the ship was capital-H Haunted because suspended animation is functionally being trapped between life and ☠️ for centuries, but I'm not clever enough. I guess it'll just have to be a background detail.
Glad I came across this video because I definitely plan on writing a few stories in my personal IP about derelict Generation Ships, even though most races have access to FTL (primarily Warp Drives and Wormhole Generators); Superheroes are often dispatched to investigate the derelict vessels to see if the ships themselves can be salvaged or repurposed (which is important, even in a post-scarcity, quasi-Solarpunk society), and more importantly, rescue and recover anyone on board!
I like the sci-fi concept of FTL only being possible outside star systems because interplanetary traversal allows for more dynamic storytelling while interstellar traversal is a whole lot of nothing.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is an excellent look at the problems of realistic interstellar colonization. One of the main characters is the AI overseeing the generation ship and its inhabitants
Jack Mcdivitt did a series where they cover this in great detail throughout the books. They run into one that looks like an astroid but is a generational ship that dips and scoops fuel from planetary atmospheres
Another potential option for shielding is to keep your water at the front end of your ship. A mushroom shaped cap filled with water would shield well against particles and radiation. As for micrometeors, you'd need to armor the cap differently.
Glad that you mentioned Revelation Space here! Reynolds takes things even further with House of Suns, set millions of years in the future in a galaxy fully colonized by humanity, in which the reality that FTL is impossible remains true. The story takes place over hundreds of thousands of years, depending on your reference frame.
I always interpreted that the ISV's from Avatar was a ~14 year round trip from Earth to Pandora. They stayed in orbit long enough to refuel before heading home. Another ship would arrive shortly after the previous ISV departed. The skeleton crew that was conscious during the trip would have experiences less than 7 years of time passing of course due to relativistic effects. If you look at the timeline from Way of Water, it wasn't 14 + 14 years for the fleet of ISV's to return, it like sub 20 years given that that Spider (Miles Quaritch's kid) was a teenager in the movie but was was a Baby when the Venture Star departed. and the eldest of Jake and Neytiri's kids were again no more than teenagers, or the Pandoran equivalent. After Avatar ends the Venture Star returns to earth (along any other ships in mid transit) as there were many other ships in transit in both directions. Then they regroup to re-arm and re-mobilize to build those large prefab base cores that they dropped from orbit at the start of Way of Water. A fleet of a dozen ISV's all depart a few years later. The use of fusion drives to clear a large safety zone to enable them to build a secure beachhead was brutal yet effective.
I believe you are correct. Google says that the venture star has a cruising velocity of 0.7c, with a six-month acceleration/deceleration period on either end of the trip. Rough napkin math tells me that the time dilation for 0.7c would mean the trip took something around 7.5 years to an outside observer.
I thought Sully said he was asleep in transit for 6 years in the first movie. It gave the Avatar clone body time to mature so the travel time was a benefit.
For a really cool look at a galaxy spanning civilization that doesn't have access to FTL (but does have stasis/cryo tech) read House of Suns by Allastair Reynolds
I'd love to see you guys do a breakdown on the Sidonia. I don't know how unrealistic it is, but it's cool as hell and a pleasant surprise for a Netflix original.
Haha, I'm so glad you brought up Revelation Space and the Lighthugger ships. It's my absolute favorite sub-lightspeed sci-fi setting. Time dilation plays such an integral role in those stories. Even if you're a near-immortal augmented Ultranaut, you'll still have to deal with news being several decades or centuries out of date by the time you reach your destination. Just amazingly brain-breaking stuff. It makes FTL seem boring in comparison!
I think it would be interesting to see nonftl travel ships in a world with ftl. Would be interesting to see why someone would choose to use the flow mode. Perhaps religious, or a weird way of vacationing. Or perhaps factory ships that use the travel time to produce goods for the eventual colony world they are going to
1. Have you ever heard of Earth Star Voyager? I don't recommend it, but it had a half measure take on the generation ship with a crew of youths/children/wunderkinds, scheduled to be adults when they reached their destination. 2. Like flying through a particle beam cannon? What if you fired one in front of the ship and fly behind it in the gap it makes? ... I think I just re-invented the deflector dish.
Per Particle beam cannon and a big sail (,,Matter- Sail") accalerate to the Stars ➡️ sail and particle beam is the perfekt shield for Interstellar dust and gas 🤔
Speaking of things you would need to worry about when it comes to a long voyage crews mental health, BORDOM, oh lord bordom, imagine you packed for a week long trip when it comes to fun stuff, and then had only that for entertaiment for DECADES.....
I’m surprised we don’t have a Gundam spin-off set on a generation ship. Or a Eureka Seven pre-sequel, not that I’d trust Bones not to butcher it. Maybe the pachinko guy can do it. “The Sky Prison: Avalon” is ok, though the generation ship aspect is only barely present. “2001 Nights” has some generation/seed ship ideas early on, but they develop FTL later. I’d like to see more Hoshino Yukinobu adaptations.
what the hell was that three body minecraft thing? I'm gonna need an official Spacedock reading/watching list because you seem to find the darndest things
The light huggers from revelation space are some of the best non FTL spaceships I’ve ever read or seen. I highly recommend the series for those who love hard science but still want a futuristic setting.
I've always pictured a sub lightspeed craft utilising a constant string of sling shot manoeuvres and when it gets to a target system it takes a final U-turn slingshot to slow down around the host star.
I've been playing around with a concept for a low(ish)-tonnage, low(ish)-tech interstellar ship. It has a conscious crew at all times, and they have to raise their own replacements, but unlike the typical generation ship design, the crew is small and uses a stockpile of frozen gametes or embryos (collected before launch from a much larger population) to maintain genetic diversity. No need to propel an entire small country up to relativistic speed or conquer the extreme challenge of bringing people back to life after freezing them.
There was an acceptable scifi miniseries called "Ascension" and it deals with a generation crew onboard a STL ship and the internal class system that they made up. Uppers are the upper deckers who are officers and scientists and Lowers who are the engineers and farmers. and the miniseries features the ship in mid voyage.
My first introdction to relativistic space travel is Turn Right At Orion by Mitchell Begelman. It's is truely mind-blown for me that if going fast enough, someone can go thought the space and history of the entire universe within the human life span.
4:53 Mind uploads and artificial human bodies made to mimic the way human bodies function is a big plot point the game _Xenoblade X._ In order to save as many people as possible, human minds were loaded into servers on ships that also carried the genetic profiles and materials required to clone new bodies for the preserved minds. Most of them slept, while some were in the aforementioned robotic artificial bodies in order to crew the ship.
Minor correction: Satellites in very low Earth orbit do experience negative time dilation (their clocks tick slower) relative to ground because of their high speed. However, the higher a satellite's altitude, the slower their orbit and simultaneously the less they experience gravitational time dilation as well because they're not as deep in Earth's gravity well. Above an orbital altitude of approximately 10.000 km, Satellites actually experience a net positive time dilation (their clocks tick faster) relative to ground.
The RPG lancer has a great plot point about sub light ships. A generation ship leaves a dying earth on a journey that will take thousands of years at 50% light speed. Back on earth humans survive the apocholypse rebuild and develop new faster ships and accidently beat the old ship to its destination. Needless to say, when a thousand yeat journey to a new world ends with some other humans sitting on your new Eden, conflict ensues.
If you want to explore this stuff but still want FTL, you can take the approach Alien did, and have reverse time dilation. The journey takes a few objective minutes, hours, days, etc, but the crew experiences years or decades, requiring stasis systems.
The pblem with a generation ships crew treating their mission as a religion was covered by Robert Heinlein in Orphans of the Sky. It's a kids novels. so don't expect too much out of it. But you should give it a read if you can find a copy. Heinlein is also responsible for coining the term Gerneration Ship.
What's funny about the term "slower than light interstellar travel" technically defines most so-called "FTL engines". - The ships in Star Trek don't travel faster-than-light, they stay still within the warp bubble. - The ships in Star Wars enter a hyperspace tunnel, they're not moving any faster within it than they are in normal space. - The ships in Battlestar Galactica don't move at all, they zip to their destination in an instant.
As a bonus, pointy spike ships also looks faster. Pointy ships also have a benefit of being scary. Don't forget to paint it red for maximum speed boost!
Put the money into defensive shields AND anticipate enemy strategies like attacking everything outside the shield, etc. Shields change weapons and escalate countermeasures to prices the enemy may be unwilling to pay, except perhaps due to egotistical spite. Shields can either absorb the incoming gigawatts and/or shunt it into another continuum. Easier said than done, but a strategy matrix worth studying, IMHO.
It's not in the book for long, but I really like the relativistic voyage in Mickey 7(soon to be Mickey 17 in cinema) And they wipe out a planet with a relativistic bullet, which is awesome
1:50 that depends. Yes, the satelites do experience a teeny-tiny bit of time dilation, but we also do, because of Earth's gravity And down here we experience MORE time dilation than the GPS satelites, for example. They have to constantly "rollback" time to keep in sync with us
I'm surprised I didn't hear this unique hazard mentioned. If you're going to rely on intermittent or full stasis of any type for extremely long journeys, the radiation from isotopes naturally in your body would start to cause negative symptoms over hundreds of years where they begin to reach lethal levels given enough time. Any lengthy trip that's not a generation ship has to find a way to mitigate or outright cure this issue, whether that's through improved medical technology or nanites that regenerate you depends on the setting, but IRL it will be a gigantic hurdle for travel times that take thousands of years where the original crew is meant to see the end of their journey.
Something that wasn't considered in the video where generation ships are concerned is this,; how do you convince a crew of people who were born and grew up on a space ship to move down to a planetary body once the trip is over? Especially if it is the third or fourth generation raised in space? The artificial environment is all that they know and is comforting and safe to them. I doubt that the majority of them would want to leave once the ship arrived.
Chad Oliver's short story "The Wind Blows Free" gives an interesting take on what could happen after many generations on a generation ship - what happens if the ship arrives at and lands on a perfectly habitable planet, but they've got used to their life of privilege (the best food, quarters, choice of partners, etc) and control, and don't want to relinquish it, so keep the arrival, landing and habitability as a closely guarded secret from the passengers?
The bit on a years-long shift system reminds me of the Very Normal Spaceship in Derin Edala's 'Time to Orbit: Unknown.' I haven't finished it 'cos it's now been published physically and I caught up with the digital version while it was being posted, and I'd rather get the physical book once delivery to my country is sorted, but I encourage anyone interested in this sort of thing to check out the crack cocaine that is TTO:U
When I wrote my book I struggled so much over the method of FTL; too slow and the story can't be fast paced, too fast and the sense of urgency kinda fades if everyone can zip all over the galaxy like in minutes like in Star Wars. And then I chose not to ignore the effects of gravity and not have artificial gravity which probably increased my book's length by 20% just explaining the work-around.
What was some of the footage for this video of? Also, can you do a video on self-sufficiency of a ship and station, such as hydroponics guardians, life support recyclers, on board manufacturing, etc? Maybe even something like with the Homeworld ship or Eldar Craftworlds where you build fleets and armies all on the ship, as well as presumably all of the civilian stuff.
The trick is this: the ship is the colony. You’ve got some sort of large permanent reasonably self sustaining habitat. Picture Babylon 5. Put engines on one end. Boom: interstellar generation ship. It would matter less to the crew if the voyage takes five years or 500 years be because they are taking their homes and their communities with them. They are not intending to get off the ship at the other end. They are not planning on colonizing a plan or some dumbass thing like that . When they get to the other side, they are going to asteroids and more Babylon 5s, the without engines on them. Humanity is not going to cross interstellar voids just so we can climb back down into the gravity wall of some crappy rock that’s probably worse than Mars. Instead, we are going to go straight to the Dyson swarms. Turning every hunk of rock floating around that star and do another habitat.
One of the merits of the Bobiverse books is that there is no FTL. Each chapter is from the perspective of a Bob and the time frame may not seem relevant to the current drama. Some chapters might be a full decade apart.
6:19 Instead of building one ULTIMATE machine that would never break down but also never be feasible to be created, how about we instead focus on redundancy? Say instead of just one solar array, there’s five, and instead of one air scrubber, how bout’ ten moar? By having more of one machine on a present spacecraft, it can lower the risk of having all those machines break at the same time. It is the same reason why most rockets have more then one rocket engine, to reduce the likelihood of mission failures. Just some food for thought.
Remember, it's not about the destination, it's about the cosmic horrors beyond comprehension along the way.
“The real treasure was the mental and physical trauma we received along the way.”
And all the beautiful radiations.
Will horrors beyond my comprehension be scary if I don't get them?
😄😄😀😁
Lol thats the slogan they use to recruit people for the voyage?? 😂
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Wise words from Douglas Adams
Shoutout to Rimworld, a setting with fully interstellar civilizations and multiple settled worlds with super high tech, but no FTL
Technically... The "Solar Pinhole" psycast is FTL. You create a microscopic wormhole into "the core of a nearby star" in under a second.
Could be a lore oversight, or maybe FTL is indeed possible on a microscopic scale.
yesssssssssss i love rimworld!
@@awsomebot1 Psycasts are archotech-derived, and they've been shown (like with vanometric cells) to be able to violate the laws of physics, so they probably can achieve at least some level of small-scale FTL. No human-made craft can achieve FTL in Rimworld, though.
@jordancorkery4465 I think vanometrics don't necessarily break the laws of physics, just that humans don't understand it. The lore even implies it's not actually free energy because archotechs avoid using it.
I think even archotechs don't do FTL other than being able to "connect" to humans instantly (psylink). You could say that's consciousness woo woo, but Solar Pinhole is distinctly FTL travelling of matter/energy
@@awsomebot1 any skip psycast is FTL, yeah, that's kinda what I was saying. But that doesn't translate to interstellar FTL travel; for all we know, there might be some upper limit to how far or how much matter can be skipped across a distance, the same way there's an upper limit to how much archotechs will scale up vanometrics
Always wanted to see a sleek soft sci-fi ship like Enterprise duking it out with 700+km monstrosity of a hard sci-fi colony ship that might be less advanced in some tech, but was build to far greater degree of reliability and has scale to back it up(phasers are cool until you remember that said "old timer" would have anti-asteroid CIWS flinging enough antimatter canisters to vaporise incoming planetoids).
TBH a lot of hard sci fi warships (or even warships that could be achieved with our current day technology such as the real USAF proposal for an armed Orion nuclear pulse) have a lot of advantages over soft SF spacecraft.
A typical Orion spacecraft can accelerate itself to ridiculous speeds, throw a bunch of slugs filled with deuterium and tritium at any soft sci fi fleet, if they have “energy shields” that can be overwhelmed as seen in most soft sci fi that’s how they work, then that should be enough to overwhelm the vast majority of them. At which point your second volley of thousands of tiny tungsten pellets that hit with nuclear warhead level yields will follow your deuterium fusion shield wreckers, leaving your soft sci fi fleet of ocean liners I mean spacecraft as nothing more than an expanding cloud of hot gas.
Most hard SF warships are kind of weak TBH. Their accuracy is stupidly low along with the range of their weapons.
Maybe some really advanced soft sci fi ships that have magically super strong armor and energy shields that can charge themselves with the impact of those high speed slugs could stand a chance, but your average star destroyer could be obliterated by an Orion nuclear pulse a thousand times smaller
I don't think it would be that easy
You would probably enjoy "The Man-Kzin Wars" by Larry Niven
@@ProductivityAccount-wl3ik Star Trek tends to be underestimated since the heroes are always looking for peaceful solutions but those shields tend to outright ignore nukes. Even the original Enterprise could glass a whole planet by itself, and have hulls that can easily with stand fast maneuvers at relativistic speeds.
Still it's an interesting concept. An FTL warship having problems with a sublight generation ship just because it's a massive brick the size of Texas designed to eat all the damage the interstellar medium can throw at it without waking up the people sleeping inside.
@@3Rayfire Part of it is soft-sf ships are literally less structurally sound than something we'd have to build IRL, because, setting aside the reactors and disintegrator weapons, force shields reduce the need to spend resources on hull plating and ablative shielding and what not, *and* access to FTL supply lines (usually) means you can risk outfitting your ships with technology that is both less reliable and requires more advanced manufacturing to run and maintain
Truthfully though, the biggest threat to an soft-SF ship from an old pre-ftl behemoth is whatever or whoever is inside it
The Sidonia is my favorite iteration of a generation ship, rugged, built to last and a BFG to boot.
SIDONIA IN THE THUMBNAIL WE ARE SO BACK
such an underrated show!
Come for the Hard Sci-Fi space battles, stay for the gratuitous fan-service
@@weldonwin yes, but also the space battles
I think the thumbnail has been changed. 😢
Movie was a let down. Dead things should stay dead.
Shout out to the _Marathon,_ which is actually the Martian moon Deimos, repurposed into a colony ship that took 300 years to reach the system of Tau Ceti. The people who were born during this trip were called BOBs, an acronym for Born On Board.
ESCAPE WILL MAKE ME GOD
Hey Bob
Shout out to David Weber in his Honorverse world building. Not only having cryo ships that don't keep the pasdengers in stasis 100% of the time, time dilation effects, and a plot point of later developed FTL travel beating colonists to their new home (for good and for ill).
Also, that B5 episode with the sleeper ship that launched only a couple years before first contact with the Centauri.
Love the confused captain O’Neil when talking about time dilation. excellent stargate meme
That’s Colonel..with two L’s 😉
That's O' Neil, with two L's (hold up three fingers). There's another guy, no sense of humor.
As a matter of fact, it does say Colonel on his uniform. (It doesn't)
The Sidonia! Wooo ... would be fun to see you guys do a breakdown video over it sometime
Don't forget about heat build up! It's incredibly difficult to shed heat in a vacuume, especially on longer voyages 👍
Love your channel ❤
Was surprised to see a minecraft animation in this video. Looked it up and... what the hell?
>"The Three-Body Problem in Minecraft" is a Chinese network animated series based on the science fiction novels The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin. Initially, the animation was an unofficial machinima doujin work, but from the second season onwards, it became an official adaptation.
Talking of maintaining a colony ship with religious fervour. I remember a friend briefly mentioning in elite dangerous colony ships created before the discovery of FTL are treated like uncontacted tribes. There's just so many different things you can do with that. It may be financially unviable but it would definitely be possible to get the descendants of colonists wherever they were going within their lifespan. But the place they were going to colonise is probably already fully inhabited had a devastating war been reduced to ash and rebuilt.
Knights of Sidonia is criminaly underrated
Nah. It got bungled with a series that never found time to answer questions and the mangas pacing is...... eh.
I really enjoy the near lightspeed travel in Lancer (the ttrpg). While FTL does exist, it's rare, expensive, only connects between specific FTL stations and needs to be set up at both the start and end points, so most interstellar travel is done at nearlight speed instead.
A lot of the setting takes into account how a galactic society would be shaped by the fact that going to space for a living basically entirely uncouples you from the regular flow of time. On many of the more remote planets, dedicated space traders are treated almost like mystical fey creatures that show up once every one or two decades and never seem to age
7:54 always appreciate seeing Planetes callouts, such an underrated sci-fi. Same guy that does Vinland Saga for anyone who enjoys that.
Planetes so good
Also worth mentioning that Revelation Space (in particular the book Chasm City) also mentions other interstellar voyages from before the Lighthuggers were built: A generation ship flotilla to 61 Cygni A (went badly), and 4 of the frozen embryo type ships (All 4 failed, and were later recolonised by Lighthugger).
Great topic choice. Many aspects I never considered before. Keep up the great work!
your videos have really helped me efficiently design spacecraft, space warships, space fighters, etc keep up the good work man, I really appreciate the videos.
4:25 please do note that from a physics and medicine perspective; "the ability to 'freeze and thaw a person' dozens, hundreds (if not thousands) of years later all but demands the existence of reviving the dead AND near godlike life extension capacity."
Does it?
Age is due to telomeres shortening after attempting mitosis. Therefor, if you stop the bodies functions it doesn't replicate new cells so you don't age... right?
Restarting the heart should be possible with implants similar to a pacemaker just a bit stronger. We might need some kind of anti coagulants incase your blood clots.
A lot of this would depend on trial and error and what cryogenic even look like. 0:59
Part of why I am simewhat in favour of cloning research used to create brain dead copies so experiments would be somewhat ethical.
@@devonhutchins2176 I can weigh in on part of this. Pacemakers and defibrillators only work on hearts that are beating. The shock doesn't make the heart start, instead it resets the heart rhythm so that the current irregular beats (which would kill you) become a regular rhythm again
In the future I imagine they could come up with a more advanced version though
@@rayzerot I am aware and thank you, I should have been more precise with my language.
I suggested the idea as if the brain uses electrical impulses to tell the heart when and how to beat it should be possible to replicate such artificially. Hence restarting a stopped heart. There has to be something wrong with my understanding as to why this couldn't be done or it might just be a matter of we haven't bothered building it yet.
@@devonhutchins2176
You can cure age but you gotta find a way to deal with the naturally occuring isotopes in your body dosing you with a lethal level of radiation over centuries and outright killing your cells regardless of stasis or not. Something that's not mentioned at all in this video.
I wanted to write a sci-fi/horror story where the ship was capital-H Haunted because suspended animation is functionally being trapped between life and ☠️ for centuries, but I'm not clever enough. I guess it'll just have to be a background detail.
Glad I came across this video because I definitely plan on writing a few stories in my personal IP about derelict Generation Ships, even though most races have access to FTL (primarily Warp Drives and Wormhole Generators); Superheroes are often dispatched to investigate the derelict vessels to see if the ships themselves can be salvaged or repurposed (which is important, even in a post-scarcity, quasi-Solarpunk society), and more importantly, rescue and recover anyone on board!
May I ask what they’re called, and (just as importantly) where it might be possible to read them?
the reference to Revelation Space threw me for a loop
I like the sci-fi concept of FTL only being possible outside star systems because interplanetary traversal allows for more dynamic storytelling while interstellar traversal is a whole lot of nothing.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is an excellent look at the problems of realistic interstellar colonization. One of the main characters is the AI overseeing the generation ship and its inhabitants
KNIGHTS OF SIDONIA SHOWCASED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jack Mcdivitt did a series where they cover this in great detail throughout the books. They run into one that looks like an astroid but is a generational ship that dips and scoops fuel from planetary atmospheres
Love the pandorum scenes! And big ups for featuring Zando!
The three body problem in minecraft?!?!
Was wondering the exact same thing
Let’s go…it’s just gonna take a while to get there.
you have no idea how happy i was to see the black hole
sidonia mentioned
Another potential option for shielding is to keep your water at the front end of your ship. A mushroom shaped cap filled with water would shield well against particles and radiation. As for micrometeors, you'd need to armor the cap differently.
Glad that you mentioned Revelation Space here! Reynolds takes things even further with House of Suns, set millions of years in the future in a galaxy fully colonized by humanity, in which the reality that FTL is impossible remains true. The story takes place over hundreds of thousands of years, depending on your reference frame.
The Enzman Echolance is my favorite of Sublight ships, and hopefully one day they will be real
I always interpreted that the ISV's from Avatar was a ~14 year round trip from Earth to Pandora. They stayed in orbit long enough to refuel before heading home. Another ship would arrive shortly after the previous ISV departed. The skeleton crew that was conscious during the trip would have experiences less than 7 years of time passing of course due to relativistic effects.
If you look at the timeline from Way of Water, it wasn't 14 + 14 years for the fleet of ISV's to return, it like sub 20 years given that that Spider (Miles Quaritch's kid) was a teenager in the movie but was was a Baby when the Venture Star departed. and the eldest of Jake and Neytiri's kids were again no more than teenagers, or the Pandoran equivalent.
After Avatar ends the Venture Star returns to earth (along any other ships in mid transit) as there were many other ships in transit in both directions. Then they regroup to re-arm and re-mobilize to build those large prefab base cores that they dropped from orbit at the start of Way of Water. A fleet of a dozen ISV's all depart a few years later. The use of fusion drives to clear a large safety zone to enable them to build a secure beachhead was brutal yet effective.
I believe you are correct. Google says that the venture star has a cruising velocity of 0.7c, with a six-month acceleration/deceleration period on either end of the trip. Rough napkin math tells me that the time dilation for 0.7c would mean the trip took something around 7.5 years to an outside observer.
You are correct. I think Hoojiwana made a goof.
The trip each way between Earth and Pandora is indeed 7 years.
I thought Sully said he was asleep in transit for 6 years in the first movie. It gave the Avatar clone body time to mature so the travel time was a benefit.
@@MichaelRainey yup "It doesn't feel like six years --like a fifth of Tequila and an ass kicking" Cryo was 5 years, 9 months, 22 days.
For a really cool look at a galaxy spanning civilization that doesn't have access to FTL (but does have stasis/cryo tech) read House of Suns by Allastair Reynolds
I came here so early the interstellar ship didn’t set off yet
I'd love to see you guys do a breakdown on the Sidonia. I don't know how unrealistic it is, but it's cool as hell and a pleasant surprise for a Netflix original.
Lastly the issue of being bypassed by faster, more advanced drive tech while on route.
Haha, I'm so glad you brought up Revelation Space and the Lighthugger ships. It's my absolute favorite sub-lightspeed sci-fi setting. Time dilation plays such an integral role in those stories. Even if you're a near-immortal augmented Ultranaut, you'll still have to deal with news being several decades or centuries out of date by the time you reach your destination. Just amazingly brain-breaking stuff. It makes FTL seem boring in comparison!
I think it would be interesting to see nonftl travel ships in a world with ftl. Would be interesting to see why someone would choose to use the flow mode. Perhaps religious, or a weird way of vacationing. Or perhaps factory ships that use the travel time to produce goods for the eventual colony world they are going to
1. Have you ever heard of Earth Star Voyager? I don't recommend it, but it had a half measure take on the generation ship with a crew of youths/children/wunderkinds, scheduled to be adults when they reached their destination.
2. Like flying through a particle beam cannon? What if you fired one in front of the ship and fly behind it in the gap it makes? ... I think I just re-invented the deflector dish.
Per Particle beam cannon and a big sail (,,Matter- Sail") accalerate to the Stars ➡️ sail and particle beam is the perfekt shield for Interstellar dust and gas 🤔
Speaking of things you would need to worry about when it comes to a long voyage crews mental health, BORDOM, oh lord bordom, imagine you packed for a week long trip when it comes to fun stuff, and then had only that for entertaiment for DECADES.....
I’m surprised we don’t have a Gundam spin-off set on a generation ship. Or a Eureka Seven pre-sequel, not that I’d trust Bones not to butcher it. Maybe the pachinko guy can do it.
“The Sky Prison: Avalon” is ok, though the generation ship aspect is only barely present. “2001 Nights” has some generation/seed ship ideas early on, but they develop FTL later. I’d like to see more Hoshino Yukinobu adaptations.
I do like huge colony ships in films.
what the hell was that three body minecraft thing? I'm gonna need an official Spacedock reading/watching list because you seem to find the darndest things
Glad to hear revelation space mentioned, as soon as I saw the title, that was the reference in my mind.
The light huggers from revelation space are some of the best non FTL spaceships I’ve ever read or seen. I highly recommend the series for those who love hard science but still want a futuristic setting.
It's been a long time since I've seen Knights of Sidonia brought up. Great series, wish more of it was animated.
Personally I’m gonna give space travel a miss until someone can prove Einstein wrong and figure out how to achieve superluminal speed.
Does that apply to interplanetary travel
Thank you, this was very relevant to me because the universe my short stories take place in lack FTL
I've always pictured a sub lightspeed craft utilising a constant string of sling shot manoeuvres and when it gets to a target system it takes a final U-turn slingshot to slow down around the host star.
"I've been to the edge of space - there is just.......... more space."
-Jayne Cobb (Firefly) 😁🤘
excellent to see a light-hugger in the show.
I'm happy to see Blindsight getting referenced.
First Spacedock post notification! This seems interesting.
O.M.G! You used The Three body problem (I’m talking about the Minecraft adaptation!!1!!!!!1!1!11!)
SOMA AND Alastair Reynolds in the same Spacedock video?! My two favorite obscure sci-fi universes!
Ich habe dieses Video meinen Freunden gezeigt, und jetzt haben wir ein neues Ritual des gemeinsamen Lachens😘
I've been playing around with a concept for a low(ish)-tonnage, low(ish)-tech interstellar ship. It has a conscious crew at all times, and they have to raise their own replacements, but unlike the typical generation ship design, the crew is small and uses a stockpile of frozen gametes or embryos (collected before launch from a much larger population) to maintain genetic diversity. No need to propel an entire small country up to relativistic speed or conquer the extreme challenge of bringing people back to life after freezing them.
Very awesome
Excellent breakdown.
There was an acceptable scifi miniseries called "Ascension" and it deals with a generation crew onboard a STL ship and the internal class system that they made up. Uppers are the upper deckers who are officers and scientists and Lowers who are the engineers and farmers. and the miniseries features the ship in mid voyage.
My first introdction to relativistic space travel is Turn Right At Orion by Mitchell Begelman. It's is truely mind-blown for me that if going fast enough, someone can go thought the space and history of the entire universe within the human life span.
4:53 Mind uploads and artificial human bodies made to mimic the way human bodies function is a big plot point the game _Xenoblade X._ In order to save as many people as possible, human minds were loaded into servers on ships that also carried the genetic profiles and materials required to clone new bodies for the preserved minds. Most of them slept, while some were in the aforementioned robotic artificial bodies in order to crew the ship.
I think the Lost Fleet books also mentioned moving so fast that accuracy and the likes become a problem. It was quite interesting.
How dare my youtube recommend me this 6 minutes after it was posted!
Minor correction: Satellites in very low Earth orbit do experience negative time dilation (their clocks tick slower) relative to ground because of their high speed. However, the higher a satellite's altitude, the slower their orbit and simultaneously the less they experience gravitational time dilation as well because they're not as deep in Earth's gravity well. Above an orbital altitude of approximately 10.000 km, Satellites actually experience a net positive time dilation (their clocks tick faster) relative to ground.
What love for you to look how fast are the babylon 5 ship especially using the hypergates
The RPG lancer has a great plot point about sub light ships. A generation ship leaves a dying earth on a journey that will take thousands of years at 50% light speed. Back on earth humans survive the apocholypse rebuild and develop new faster ships and accidently beat the old ship to its destination. Needless to say, when a thousand yeat journey to a new world ends with some other humans sitting on your new Eden, conflict ensues.
I would love to see a revelation space tv series or mini-movie D:
If you want to explore this stuff but still want FTL, you can take the approach Alien did, and have reverse time dilation. The journey takes a few objective minutes, hours, days, etc, but the crew experiences years or decades, requiring stasis systems.
The pblem with a generation ships crew treating their mission as a religion was covered by Robert Heinlein in Orphans of the Sky.
It's a kids novels. so don't expect too much out of it. But you should give it a read if you can find a copy.
Heinlein is also responsible for coining the term Gerneration Ship.
What's funny about the term "slower than light interstellar travel" technically defines most so-called "FTL engines".
- The ships in Star Trek don't travel faster-than-light, they stay still within the warp bubble.
- The ships in Star Wars enter a hyperspace tunnel, they're not moving any faster within it than they are in normal space.
- The ships in Battlestar Galactica don't move at all, they zip to their destination in an instant.
As a bonus, pointy spike ships also looks faster.
Pointy ships also have a benefit of being scary.
Don't forget to paint it red for maximum speed boost!
Put the money into defensive shields AND anticipate enemy strategies like attacking everything outside the shield, etc. Shields change weapons and escalate countermeasures to prices the enemy may be unwilling to pay, except perhaps due to egotistical spite. Shields can either absorb the incoming gigawatts and/or shunt it into another continuum. Easier said than done, but a strategy matrix worth studying, IMHO.
Radiation is the biggest problem with any space travel
It's not in the book for long, but I really like the relativistic voyage in Mickey 7(soon to be Mickey 17 in cinema)
And they wipe out a planet with a relativistic bullet, which is awesome
Knights of Sidonia my beloved
1:50 that depends. Yes, the satelites do experience a teeny-tiny bit of time dilation, but we also do, because of Earth's gravity
And down here we experience MORE time dilation than the GPS satelites, for example. They have to constantly "rollback" time to keep in sync with us
I'm surprised I didn't hear this unique hazard mentioned. If you're going to rely on intermittent or full stasis of any type for extremely long journeys, the radiation from isotopes naturally in your body would start to cause negative symptoms over hundreds of years where they begin to reach lethal levels given enough time.
Any lengthy trip that's not a generation ship has to find a way to mitigate or outright cure this issue, whether that's through improved medical technology or nanites that regenerate you depends on the setting, but IRL it will be a gigantic hurdle for travel times that take thousands of years where the original crew is meant to see the end of their journey.
i think another thing is in raised by wolves, the Mithraic Ark and thir matrix zone of nuilding blocks and playing duck duck goose.
Something that wasn't considered in the video where generation ships are concerned is this,; how do you convince a crew of people who were born and grew up on a space ship to move down to a planetary body once the trip is over? Especially if it is the third or fourth generation raised in space? The artificial environment is all that they know and is comforting and safe to them. I doubt that the majority of them would want to leave once the ship arrived.
go .9 repeating and you're good to go LOL
Chad Oliver's short story "The Wind Blows Free" gives an interesting take on what could happen after many generations on a generation ship - what happens if the ship arrives at and lands on a perfectly habitable planet, but they've got used to their life of privilege (the best food, quarters, choice of partners, etc) and control, and don't want to relinquish it, so keep the arrival, landing and habitability as a closely guarded secret from the passengers?
The bit on a years-long shift system reminds me of the Very Normal Spaceship in Derin Edala's 'Time to Orbit: Unknown.' I haven't finished it 'cos it's now been published physically and I caught up with the digital version while it was being posted, and I'd rather get the physical book once delivery to my country is sorted, but I encourage anyone interested in this sort of thing to check out the crack cocaine that is TTO:U
When I wrote my book I struggled so much over the method of FTL; too slow and the story can't be fast paced, too fast and the sense of urgency kinda fades if everyone can zip all over the galaxy like in minutes like in Star Wars. And then I chose not to ignore the effects of gravity and not have artificial gravity which probably increased my book's length by 20% just explaining the work-around.
Space Tentacle Waifu Anime had the best one.
It’ll take a bit to get there but it’ll do it
What was some of the footage for this video of?
Also, can you do a video on self-sufficiency of a ship and station, such as hydroponics guardians, life support recyclers, on board manufacturing, etc? Maybe even something like with the Homeworld ship or Eldar Craftworlds where you build fleets and armies all on the ship, as well as presumably all of the civilian stuff.
Lighthuggers
generation ship is litteraly homeworld lore
The trick is this: the ship is the colony. You’ve got some sort of large permanent reasonably self sustaining habitat. Picture Babylon 5. Put engines on one end. Boom: interstellar generation ship.
It would matter less to the crew if the voyage takes five years or 500 years be because they are taking their homes and their communities with them. They are not intending to get off the ship at the other end. They are not planning on colonizing a plan or some dumbass thing like that . When they get to the other side, they are going to asteroids and more Babylon 5s, the without engines on them.
Humanity is not going to cross interstellar voids just so we can climb back down into the gravity wall of some crappy rock that’s probably worse than Mars. Instead, we are going to go straight to the Dyson swarms. Turning every hunk of rock floating around that star and do another habitat.
Time To orbit: unknown by derin endala deals with this this quite a lot and is a terrific read
One of the merits of the Bobiverse books is that there is no FTL. Each chapter is from the perspective of a Bob and the time frame may not seem relevant to the current drama. Some chapters might be a full decade apart.
8:15 or do as Marathon ship did in bungie game. cruise around with one of the mars moons. 🙂
Ahle Heinessen mentioned raaaaah
I almost wanted to watch Lightyear just off the scenes of relativistic time travel shown. Then I remembered the idiotic "twist".
JFYI, time in GPS satellites is going faster😉. GPS satellites' time is also influenced by lower gravity and gravity's effect is stronger.
6:19
Instead of building one ULTIMATE machine that would never break down but also never be feasible to be created, how about we instead focus on redundancy? Say instead of just one solar array, there’s five, and instead of one air scrubber, how bout’ ten moar? By having more of one machine on a present spacecraft, it can lower the risk of having all those machines break at the same time. It is the same reason why most rockets have more then one rocket engine, to reduce the likelihood of mission failures.
Just some food for thought.