Where are all the ships?

[echammond]

Expensive doesn't have to mean monetarily expensive. A worldship, I imagine, would need a fairly hefty input of matter, energy, and time to assemble the whole thing and get it up to decent speed. And even more so if you want to jaunt from system to system rather than just kick it off towards the frontier. And yet more needs to go into shielding if you want any sort of relativistic velocity.

And while that might be doable for an archai, it would serve no purpose for them. They have far more effective technologies of their own -- voidships and the like. It would just be an indulgence for the embodied modos.

As for colonising another galaxy. If the archai ever did want to set up some outpost, it would be all voidships and wormholes. You could send a big ship. Powered by conversion, it has a chance of making the journey. But it would be a long, long, long (and, one suspects, claustrophobic) journey.  I'd imagine most would-be colonists would go for something easier.

Cheers for response. How big do warships get in Orions Arm Universe? Are there not many "no purpose" objects that are just to indulge modos? In a post-scarcity world a lot of "pointless" creativity and ostentatiousness, probably depending on culture I guess. Could you expand on the colonising another galaxy idea? Cheers.