Colony Ships – A short history


Bryan Fel
Hawking School of Astrophysics
University of Callarn
Callarn City
Aret

Abstract

In the early days, protohumanity was a Race was confined.  A single solar system held our ancestors in its sway, limiting their growth and expansion.  They had to find some way to escape, to reach new worlds and territories.  They designed and built the Colony ships.  City-sized space vessels which carried small seed colonies across the reaches of space at sublight speeds, taking many years, often hundreds or even thousands.  This treatise will look at the principles of their design philosophy.  It will look at the technology they used, staggering in its day and much of it designed specifically for them, from the massive fusion power source to the electromagnetic radiation engines.  Finally it will look at their use and applications both civilian, for expansion and colonisation on uninhabited planets or those without sentience, their primary use. It will also look at their more recent military applications as invasion and occupation tools, and some notable historical occurrences of both of these.

Introduction

Protohuman history

Earth

It is essential that we examine the basis for Protohumanity's need for colony ships.  We shall look first at Earth history before the Solar Alliance.  Protohumanity resided on just one world, making forays into space, first unmanned, sending exploring vehicles, remote controlled devices and eventually robots to the planets and out into deep space.  Intertwined with these were manned missions, firstly simple forays in primitive low-speed ships, taking days to simply reach the Moon, and weeks or months to the inner planets.

Protohumanity was beginning to become confined.  As their population broke 6 billion they realised their planet would not sustain them a great deal longer.  Faced with limited resources and vast overpopulation, they looked to expand.  They began by establishing small colonies in orbiters and on the Moon, all the while plagued by internecine inter-nation conflict, primarily between the powerful United American Continent and China, whose empire by that stage covered most of Asia and was still expanding.  As the population approached 10 billion the leaders of the Protohumans began to realise that while competition was generally a useful enterprise, their conflict was limiting them.  The result was the formation of the United Earth Alliance (UEA), under which auspicious banner serious expansion to the planets began.

The Interplanetary Alliance

The UEA began to expand.  The design of compact fission, and eventually fusion, power sources led to increases in the speed of interplanetary travel.  The first port of call was Mars.  Earth's nearest  close-to-inhabitable neighbour, this planet required much reformation, but was soon settled, first by frontiersmen, then by more normal citizens.  Technologies continued to develop throughout this time, ranging from complex hydroponic techniques to more advanced oxygen generation and power sources, all paving the way for what was to come.

The next major step took Protohumanity out to the moons of the outer planets.  These dark, cold worlds, far from the Sun, began to force Protohumanity into the realisation that the space they had was really not sufficient.  The population resisted movement to these areas, despite their numbers reaching close to 20 billion.  Around this time, a staggering scientific advance occurred.  The design of the intergate was pivotal in deciding the direction that humanity took.  Using advanced post-quantum mechanics, scientists created devices which could translate matter almost instantaneously across vast distances.  The only trouble was that there was nowhere for the Race to gate to.

This led to the idea of the colony ships.

The creation of the colony ship

Initial ideas

The idea of colony ships was not a new one.  From Protohuman history, long before the technological age, there was the expansion of aboriginal humans in rafts to Oceania and Australia.  Then the discovery of the American Continent by Europeans and on into the histories already described, moving to the Moon and the planets.  All of these, for their time, were vast steps into the unknown for the good of the species as a whole.

And the idea of interstellar colonisation was not new either.  Fiction writers, frequently remarkably prescient, had theorised them long before Protohumanity had even taken its first steps into space.  So the first ideas were loosely organised, simple concepts, built around the fundamental basis of the need to get Protohumans or other sentient beings and power to inhabitable or terraformable locations beyond the solar system.

Various means were examined.  Firstly, superlight travel, which despite more recent advances, proved far from possible at the time.  The Protohumans failed to even discover the principles, despite coming very close with the development of the intergate and later design on gravity control devices.  Another major idea considered was that of somehow transporting humans as cargo, either in suspended animation, in stasis, or as pre-life, embryos, gametes or other reproductive forms, with reactivation under computer control or the control of sentient robots.  However it was decided after experimentation that the combination of the radiation in deep space and the times involved would lead to the degeneration of such mechanical control long before the journeys were over.

Which led to the final concept.  Live humans must arrive at their destinations, but ones who had been born along the way.  The final concept was decided.  A generation ship.

The final design

The Baron Interstellar Travel Institute on Europa was designated by the United Interplanetary Alliance (UIA) which developed from the UEA, as the home of the the Colony Ship Project.  They were tasked with designing the colony ship.  The brief was “to produce a vessel which would transport a sustainable colony at the highest possible speeds across interstellar space, to either a predetermined destination or one which would be discovered along the way, along with the requisite technology, knowledge and resources to establish a working planetary colony and build a functional intergate.”

They worked initially on using the smallest possible numbers of colonists, in order to reduce the weight-loading and increase the travel speed and resource load as much as possible.  Some early designs even featured working intergates, but these proved unstable and required far more power than could be developed in a mobile vessel.  These small population vessels (SPVs) which had proven invaluable in interplanetary colonisation, turned out to be less useful in longer term movement.  The numbers involved led to impairment of the gene pool, and it was worked out that they were less efficient that lager vessels.  There was also the serious issue of establishing a colony at the other end, given that they would have to quickly be able to build large, highly advanced machinery, which takes manpower.  They settled, then, on a large population vessel (LPV) design.  This design became the colony ship we know so well today.

Colony Ships

Design and technology

External design

Size and shape

The first colony ships were the biggest independently mobile constructions ever in their time, and, aside from other, bigger colony ships designed later, remain among the biggest independently mobile constructions ever built today.  They even dwarf most immobile constructions, the majority of orbiters and space stations are still far smaller.

Figure 1: Horizontal view of a typical colony ship

The basic shape is that of a large convex disc surmounted by structures and buildings ranging from a massive hangar to the vast engines to living and working quarters – essentially a flying city.  The smallest, and first designed, had carrying capacities of around 200,000.  These were 1.5km in diameter, and up to 800 metres from the tip of the tallest structures, usually at the centre, to the base of the disc.

The unladen weight of the ships was vast.  The first were around 10 to 15 gigatons (1 gigaton=1x1012 metric tons) which weight more than doubled when the seed colony and all its requisite resources were loaded, and could be almost triple upon arrival depending on the route taken, and the amount of material collected on the way.

Propulsion

The propulsion was provided by 6 engines equally spaced around the diameter of the vessel, 50 metres in from the rim.  Each was around 50 metres in diameter, and stood around 100 metres up from the rim of the ship.  The engines drew power form the main fusion plants at the centre of the ship.  And the power they drew was phenomenal, the vast majority of the production went to them during flight.

The engine type was not new.  Electromagnetic radiation engines had been in use for many years, but never on this scale.  They worked by channelling the huge energies produced by the plants directly out through magnetic induction tracks and forcing it backwards, the resulting force pushing the sip forwards.  The amount of energy the engines used, and the power they produced, was so vast that it required new frames of reference to comprehend easily.  These were measured in SolEs, for energy.  A SolE is equivalent to the amount of energy produced by Earth's sun in a single second, and each engine used around 1 SolE per day.  This energy produced the vast force needed to overcome the inertia of the ships' vast mass.

Important Structures

Obviously, the most important group of external structures were the engines.  Next was the command tower.

Situated at the geometric centre of the structure, the command tower was invariably within the tallest part of the ship.  It overlooked the entire surface of the ship, and was surmounted by receiving aerials for the telemetry from the origination point and from the subship fleet, which leads us on to the next important structure, the hangar.

Located towards the outer rim of the vessel, between two of the engines, this squat but massive structure varied in size between ships.  However it always contained the subship fleet, a group of minor vessels, manned and automatic, which provided ancillary functionality, maintaining collection grids for interstellar matter to use as fuel, providing telemetry, scouting, and defence as well as preliminary landing craft on arrival planetside.

The final structural design which really should be mentioned is the disc itself.  The basic shape of the ship was vital to its functionality as a colonisation craft, and will be detailed later.

Internal design

Important features

The most important internal feature of the colony ship design was its power source.  Deep in the bowels of the ship within the curve of the disc were found masses of fusion power plants.  10,000 plants per ship, each generating around 0.01SolE used vast quantities of fuel.

The second major important feature was the gravity generator.  Developed after the intergate, this piece of post-quantum technology allowed the gravity direction and strength to be monitored and altered, such that the 'up' direction for the ship's inhabitants was perpendicular to the diameter of the base disc, towards the top of the main spire.  This, again, allowed the use of the ship as a landing craft.

Applications, use and control

Pre-flight

The colony ships were always built in orbit, for two reasons.  Primarily, they were simply too large and impractical to launch from a planet, and secondly, the simple practicalities of finding enough materials – scavenging from the asteroid belt and outer planet moons was the only way to get the required amounts of metals in the overpopulated solar system – required their construction off-planet.

Launch and flight

Launch was simple.  Once the ship was complete, stocked and crewed with its seeder colony, it would be aimed by tugs in the direction chosen for it, be it towards a known habitable or prehabitable planet, or towards a large density starfield which might contain such planets.  Then the fusion plants, the majority of which were disabled during construction, were enabled, and the engines fired up.  Tugs would aid in overcoming the vast inertia of these huge ships, and would keep topping up the fuel supplies until the return journey became too long, and they left the ship alone.

In flight, the engines drove the ships disc-first, applying a constant low acceleration which over the years of their flight drove the speed ever upwards, attaining significant fractions of light speed before the tiny resistances of high-molecular-weight interstellar matter, not caught by the fuel collection grid brought their speed to a constant level, which differed depending on the direction and position.  The engines would be used to maintain this massive speed for the remainder of the flight.

Subship fleet

The subship fleet was an essential part of each and every Colony ship.  Their design alone is fascinating, and fills volumes, so I must be brief.  They were simple ships, designed around a central, detatchable and interchangeable pilot module.  They shared a common design aesthetic, with the pilot module in the centre, surrounded by four engine pods.  As an examplar of this design, see Figure 2, the Colony Subship, Defender class.

Figure 2: Colony Subship: Defender Class

The first major use was in spreading a collection grid.  Interstellar matter was primarily hydrogen and helium, the perfect fusion fuel.  The collection grid was electromagnetic, a vast web of force spread by unmanned subships flying ahead of the main vessel, funneling all low-molecular-weight matter that they came across to a central point, where it was collected and returned to the main vessel by a tankering system.  This web also served as a detection grid for larger objects, meteorites, planetary fragments and so on, though it couldn't stop them any more than it could stop higher-molecular-weight interstellar matter.

This job fell to another division of the subship fleet, the previously mentioned defenders.  All colony ships came equipped with these small, manned vessels.  They were fast, agile and carried heavy laser weaponry.  They would vaporise small threatening objects, and carefully redirect larger ones, so that the colony ship remained safe and secure.

Those ships without a specific destination also maintained large scout subship fleets.  Once they neared star systems, these would be sent out, on journeys that often lasted months, to scout for habitable planets.  They would also be used to search for fuel-rich areas of space if the ship was running low.

Shipboard well-being and maintenance

As the seeder colony began to expand, keeping all the people on board alive and well became more and more of a challenge.  The challenges were many.  Primarily, supply of oxygen and removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  This was never much of a problem.  Oxygen was easy to make using the fusion generators.  Though it was less efficient, they could be programmed to produce oxygen as a by-product of energy generation.  And some of the thousands of generators were always producing oxygen, needed or not.  If it was not needed, it was stored in tanks situated throughout the ship.  CO2 scrubbing was slightly more of a challenge, and the solution was integrated into that of the next major problem – food production.  Primary food production was vegetation based, with massive hydroponic gardens located in many places throughout the ship.  They produced material containing a thorough balance of what a healthy human needed, protein, carbohydrate, fat, vitamins and minerals.  These served as CO2 scrubbers as well, this dual functionality adding efficiency, though of course there were backup chemical scrubbers available in case of problems.  Secondary food production was of luxuries.  Traditionally grown vegetables, meat-alternatives, and in some cases, even livestock were all taken on Colony ships, though often their production was all but stopped by the end of longer journeys due to overcrowding.  The final major issue was removal of bodily wastes and other waste material.  This was all recycled, with bodily waste being fed into the hydroponic and other gardens, and fluid waste purified and reused as drinking water.  Other waste material was all recyclable one way or another, with clothing being made either from natural proteins, and recycled by biodegradation, or being made from artificial fibres which were made to last almost indefinitely, and handed down from generation to generation, with enough stored for the projected size of the colony at launch.  Similarly all the colony would need to survive, from furniture and living quarters to schoolroom materials to entertainments, were either stored at launch for later use, or made along the way from natural by-products.  Even plastics could easily be created, from modified long-chain vegetable oils.

All the crew were expected, and in some cases, conditioned, to do their part in the welfare and maintenance of the ship and its inhabitants.  From medical personnel to astrogators, from pilots to farmers to engineers, all had to be brought along in the initial seeder colony, and trained as the colony grew to capacity.  This was done primarily by passing on knowledge through personal teaching, as in those days the best way to pass along the nuances of knowledge remained word of mouth, though some simpler tasks and basic youth schooling were taught by machines.  There was little maintenance necessary on most of the ships systems, designed as they were for long term operation, however the little necessary maintenance was done by the colony.

The whole of the colony, however, was provided occupations, as all the positions necessary to maintain the healthy running of a city the size of the colony ship had to be filled.  Important positions included the ship's officers, Commander, Science Chief, Tech Chief, Medical Chief, SubFleet Chief, Population and Social Chief, as well as their numerous high-level staff, particularly in the Population and Social sector.

Arrival and landing

Once the ship neared its destination, the deceleration procedure would be initiated.  Engines on one side of the ship were disabled, and the gravity generators were used, to flip the ship around horizontally.  Then, again, all the engines were fired full blast, slowing the ship, while the gravity generators kept the up direction the same.  Upon arrival at the destination planet, the ship would move into orbit, using subship tugs, and await discovery of a suitable landing position.  

Again, subships played a large part here.  They would scour the surface of the planet for a large enough flat area, and clear it of larger animals and plants, setting up a perimeter to avoid their return.  If such an area was unavailable, or could not be found near suitable resources, the one would be constructed, using heavy barrage lasers and bombs.  When the area was ready, the ship could finally land.

It was here that the much-touted convex disc came into use.  It was designed specifically for maximum air resistance and stability on atmospheric entry.  The ship would land like a meteor, crashing through the atmosphere, with only the gravity generators to slow its fall.  It would impact on its target area and sink in, impact force calculated such that the rim of the disc would end roughly level with the ground.  The engines would be used one last time to bed the ship firmly in and ensure it was level and ready.

Post-landing

On habitable planets, post-landing was simple.  The populace of the ship, long since at capacity, would move out onto the surface, using the colony ship, now a fully functional city, as a base of operations, to look for the materials to construct an intergate and its power sources and support structures.  The ship's engines, now useless as relaunch was utterly impossible, were dismantled and used in the construction, as were the gravity generators, no longer needed on-world.  The majority of the power for the gate came from the ship's plant, but at least another 500 plants would need constructing before enough power could be generated to begin gating procedures.

On prehabitable planets, terraforming would be needed.  This process was simple enough, using devices based around the ship's engines, planted at strategic points throughout the planet, to use up planetary matter and generate atmosphere, followed by seeding with massive quantities of plant and animal species in the area of the ship, to sustain growth until the gate construciton could be completed.

Post gate-construction

After the construction of the newly colonised planet's intergate, the colonisation could begin in earnest.  Colonist would flood through, bringing with them prefabricated buildings, construction equipment, everything necessary for the habitation of a planet empty of sentient technological life.

The colony ship would remain a planetary centre, however.  A fully functional, already constructed city with inhabitants long used to the planet they were on was invaluable in keeping control of the planet and its inhabitants.  In some cases, new planets became almost feudalised, with initial colonists becoming an aristocracy of sorts, with a middle class formed of the first gaters, and a subclass of later arrivals.  Once a web of intergates formed and the UIA expanded to the stars, this was curtailed, though in many cases it could not be completely stopped.

Militarised use

Differences in design

The primary differences in design were functional.  These ships mounted huge weapons, particularly around the rims, which could be aimed in any direction during flight, and used as defensive positions post-landing.  They also retained far fewer buildings, keeping none of the civilian versions' work places, only barracks and training rooms.  Essentially they were massive troop transport dropships.  They were also heavily armoured, with far thicker discs and the outer buildings often designed as ablative armour, and barely manned, if at all.

They would also often have more hangars, three at least, sometimes six, depending on the particular mission of the ship, which would house fighters and bombers for space and atmospheric use, and all the supply ships, ground attack craft and worker vessels needed for whichever war they were involved in.  They would also carry other subships, designed to fly ahead of the parent craft and mask it from detection.  This stealth web would usually replace the standard civilian collection grid.

Differences in use

Where civilian colony ships were launched singly, aimed to slowly and as gently as possible establish a colony on their target worlds, the militarised versions would launch in fleets, often up to 10 at a time, each carrying at least 100,000 troops and their equipment.  They would land at full speed on any area of the target planet, using the massive forces of their landing to disrupt enemy positions and leave the troops within plenty of time to establish defensive boundaries and positions.  Again, the landing crater, usually larger than in civilian landings, here proved important, providing a ready-made outer defensive perimeter as well as a construction space.  Their engines, instead of being used to build intergates, were converted into weapons, mounted on mobile housing they could be used to fire devastating destructive beams at any point around the landed ship.

Properly applied these ships were truly devastating weapons, which could quell rebellion before it even started in many cases.  Arriving totally unannounced and undetected, the sight of a ship, or a fleet of ships, crashing through the atmosphere, glowing violently red, before thundering into the ground in a firestorm and earthquake, would devastate morale and destroy most organised resistance, particularly if the landing was correctly aimed.  And though the majority of the population would be left unharmed, and in some cases fully militarised, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of well-trained troops, with pre-established, highly defensible bases and full ground and air support, would usually make for a quick and decisive military action.

And unlike the civilian uses, military use was not confined to landing the ships.  Space battles were common, with piracy often rife in the outer reaches of the UIA.  And in space, though somewhat slow and ponderous, Militarised Colony (MilCol) ships were still the largest mobile elements in existence, and mounted some of the biggest most destructive weapons, even without their biggest ground-based armaments.  Though rarely front-line ships, they served as a base of operations for many spaceborne campaigns, as support, and a supply base.  In some cases they were used where no planets were available, to garrison space lanes or uninhabitable resource-rich areas.  In some cases they were held in orbit over contested planets as a threat, without the intent to land unless it was absolutely necessary, but providing the use of their subship fleets to provide air/space support and keep troops on the ground well stocked with equipment, supplies and munitions.  

And similarly to the civilian versions, the militarised subship fleets were invaluable.  With the MilCol ship as a base of operations and supply either planetside or in space, these ships were freed from the obligation of most fighters to mount extensive fuel and life-support stores, leaving space for larger, more manoeuvrable engines or more powerful weaponry.  The subships proved decisive in many situations, often winning dogfights against overwhelming odds.  Overall, militarily these were hugely useful devices.

Notable historical cases

Civilian

The most historically notable case of the use of a colony ship is the first launched, and first to arrive at its destination, the UIAV Hope of Civilisation.  The Hope was built in orbit around Europa, at a time when the UIA was in despair.  Overpopulation was causing the alliance to bulge at the seams.  Poverty and plague were rampant across the inhabited worlds.  The Baron institute had long since discovered a comparitively close, already-inhabitable world at which to aim their colony ship, and had a design.  It needed constructing.  The Hope of Civilisation was born.  If it was successful it would pave the way for others, and would allow Protohumanity to establish colonies outside of the horribly limited environment of their single solar system.

Its construction was plagued by misfortune and worse, terrorism and hatred.  Many believed that such ships could never be beneficial, and resisted their construction violently.  But those who trusted in the UIA, the Baron Institute and their aims, persevered and the ship was eventually successfully constructed.  It left in the Earth-calendar year AD2584 and arrived at its destination without incident 450 years later.  The UIA was nearing explosion when it did.  There were paramilitary elements, rampant terrorism and poverty, and the whole alliance was close to civil war.  Then the intergate opened.  The world that was now a colony was a vast one, with space of many billions, and it acted as a release of pressure, bleeding away the masses of excess Protohumanity.  The way was paved for hundreds more colony ships to be sent out, which allowed the expansion of the Alliance to the galaxy spanning state we know today.

The second notable civilian colony ship was the UIAV E.E. Smith.  Named for one of the science fiction writers of the early AD1900s, this was the first megacolony vessel.  An experimental design, it was a construction of 6 loosely joined colony ships around a central supercolony ship, a type which held around 500,000 when at capacity.  It was designed not as a device to establish and intergate, but primarily as a pure colonisation machine.  It dropped more than 1 million colonists on a world which was unsuitable for the use of intergates due to the close proximity of a black hole.  This world flourished until it was rediscovered many years later following the colonisation of a world which could be accessed by intergate from it.

Military

There have been few notable uses of militarised colony ships (MilCol Ships) in war.  Protohumanity never encountered alien races, and following the first military uses of the colony ships, outright rebellion big enough to warrant their use was almost unheard of.

Perhaps the most notable, however was the infamous Van Erikson's World incident.  The fanatics of this feudalist world had been fomenting rebellion from within the populace for many hundreds of years.  This insidious uprising led to outright rebellion across this heavily populated world's entire surface.  The rebels had used the planet's infrastructure and machinery to manufacture complex defenses and scanning grids, capable of detecting and attacking approaching MilCol ships.  A fleet of 10 were launched to quell the rebellion.  As they approached, one was destroyed, and 5 were damaged beyond the ability to continue.  The remaining 5 achieved orbit, but 3 were quickly shot down.  2 attempted final landing, though one had microfractures in its landing shield which coupled with heavy fire caused it to burn up on entry.  The final ship was decisive.  Its landing was aimed for the original colony city of the planet, the centre of its organisation and still a primary power source.  The city, weakened by fire from the subship fleets of the 5 MilCols that had attained orbit, was smashed into vapour by the fury of the MilCol's landing fires.  This tremendous blow to morale, coupled with the resultant lack of power to the surrounding area, broke the back of the rebellion.  The world was renamed for the heroic commander of the fleet, MilColCom Ahrlen Van Erikson, who died attempting to land his MilCol, the United Fist which burned up with all hands aboard.  Van Erikson's world is now a central navy outpost, and it's colony city, built from the MilCol that landed successfully, is named for that ship, the Bragadocio.

Their use in space combat was far more frequent.  One such occasion arose when a group of renegades which had been living and growing for many years in the asteroid field of the Sympract system suddenly expanded its operations.  They had been preying almost unnoticed on ships trading between the system's 3 inhabited planets, kept in check by the local militia, but then their leaders in typical Protohuman fashion, got greedy.  They attacked and captured 2 civilian colony ships, disabling their engines and subships and holding them hostage within their asteroid belt home territory.  The call for help was sent, and, due to the possibility that the captured colony ships might be turned to the pirates' advantage, 2 MilCols were sent from a nearby naval world.  They arrived within the month to find the local militia still at a stand-off with the pirates.  Intervening quickly, the commander of the first moved his ship close to the fields, sending his subships to meet what little the pirates could offer.  He was surprised.  The captured colony ships' defenders had been pressed into action against him.  He lost a significant portion of his subship fleet, and was nearly repulsed when the second MilCol ship took decisive action.  In an innovative move, its commander used her very landing disc as a weapon.  She hammered it viciously through the asteroid field, trusting in the thickness of the disc and their relatively low speed to destroy the asteroids without too much danger to her.  A kilometre-wide column of destruction crashed through the asteroid field, crushing the pirates' main outpost like it wasn't even there.  The remainder of the pirates threw down arms and surrendered, and the colonists were freed with minimal loss of life.

Conclusion

Colony ships, then, were an escape for the Protohumans.  A release for a society close to explosion.  They allowed the expansion of civilisation to the stars.  They were built in and launched from orbit, simplifying the process of their construction, and their flight, on the whole, was simple.  

They arrived at their destination and were landed whole, becoming a colony city, a centre for the construction of an intergate, primarily.  But once that was complete and colonisation began in earnest, the colony city was a beacon of organisation and government, allowing control and direction of the newly forming populace.

MilCol ships, on the other hand, were a powerful weapon of war.  Following their first uses they were maintained as a threat, promising annihilation to rebellions in short order.  They were a bastion for space combat, maintaining large fleets of subships, a devastating weapon of invasion, raining destruction on vast areas as they landed, and a readymade defensive beachead.  Throughout history there remain no cases where they have failed when they have been used to quell planetary rebellion.

These mighty devices, then, were invaluable in the development and expansion of Protohumanity, and the subsequent rise of true civilisation.  Without them, at best we would remain Protohuman, trapped in a single solar system, pitifully limited.  At worst, we would long since have spiralled into annihilation from internecine conflict and war.  They truly were the basis of society's success.