Generation ship design project

[stevebowers]

IMO the "ship" in "generation ship" is a misnomer. Core to the idea of a generation ship is that you have an industrial economy sufficient to maintain a transplanted biosphere sufficient to sustain a population large enough to work the economy, all within a closed system. That's not a ship, that's a mobile habitat. Hell a better mental framework would be a mobile, closed, city-state.

Nothing like that should require that the inhabitants build a habitat as quickly as possible on the far side. An ark of this kind would be more than capable of continuing to act as the habitat it always has while the citizens work to gather fresh resources for the first time in generations.

That's the concept behind a true generation ship, certainly. The best use of this concept is to reduce the speed significantly in order to reduce the amount of propulsive energy required; every time you double the speed, you square the required energy (at least). But a longer journey time, measured in thousands, rather than hundreds, of years, makes it more likely that the closed ecology will fail en route.

That's why I prefer quasi-generational ships, that use as much stored information, autonomous equipment, discarded mass and miniaturisation as feasible; they can arrive quite a bit faster and are less likely to fail. They also need more advanced technology, and more propulsive power.