I don’t think a colony has to be a moon or a planet. Torii, bernal spheres, cylinders, and all manner of other shapes have been tossed around as potential space colonies. In terms of that, there are probably a huge number of colonies that are just mining outposts, like the old mining towns of Nevada. When the sector is used up, they move on. Also, do you have any idea how many people a moon or planetary colony can support? We’ve got 7 billion on Earth thus far, and while I think we’ve reached capacity, I am overruled by the gene pool. So don’t worry about colonies, Tara, there is plenty of room and to spare for them.

I also think that IP has plenty of work for it to do, considering. Chew on this for a while: how does one truly recognize a pirate ship? It’s not as easy as it looks, especially if the ship launches fighters or smaller ships, and hides in an asteroid belt while the small ships strip the target. Also, in terms of organized crime, I’d think there’d be plenty. It would be underground, as on Earth, but black markets and trafficking in drugs and people would still be profitable. Think Mafiosi, not “Pirate King”. Nor is this something that we ever need to see or know about. How much does your average citizen know about the Russian Mafia?

Engines. Ah, engines, the bane of any sci-fi writer’s existence. For me, I’d say that big ships have a primitive form of FTL that takes weeks to months between systems, and smaller ships use jump gates built by larger construction ships. That makes it suitably limiting, in terms of speed, and means that a faster, more efficient form of travel, like this newfangled engine, will make many, many people interested. As the man said, I don’t need to know how it works, as long as you say it does, I’m fine.

As for story. This is quite possibly one of the best Sci-fi’s that I’ve ever read, because it’s something different. I’ve met these people in the real world before. I’m even friends with some of them. (Whereas I’ve never met someone even remotely like Han Solo or Jean Luc Picard) They don’t fly around blowing up pirates or fighting a war, and they aren’t strapped to a gun at all times. The women don’t have more skin showing than a burlesque dancer, and the men aren’t all tall, dark and handsome. Their problems and adventures are more or less mundane (except for the obvious “Whoops, we just jumped into another reality” and that could happen to anybody who tries to go through the fabric of the universe a speed so fast it boggles the mind). The adventure is the vehicle, but the characters are the story, and that’s something really rare, both in modern fiction in general, and in science fiction in particular. Kind of makes me wish I’d thought of it.

[lurk]

And as far as terraform-able planets and their orbits… Don’t worry about it. Fifteen years ago, who would have said that super-Jupiters could even exist inside the water belt?

It’s the story and the characters we’re here for, not the tech.
I’m staying. (and probably listing to too much otr Lone Ranger)
Baxter

First, the “pushers” (aka star gates). The simple solution is to make it a requirement that in order to send a vessel through a gate, you need a receiving gate at the far end. If that is the case, a starship must still be dispatched from Earth or one of her daughter systems via slower than light travel to the destination system. Such an expedition will take generations to arrive, but once the gate is deployed future travel is for all practical purposes instantaneous, and limited mainly by the energy costs to send vessels through. It’s possible that gate travel does take some time (since there is nothing that says that the trip has to be appear instantaneous to the rest of the universe) in which case a gate may be “tied up” while ships are in travel from one system to the next. In that case, Earth would need to look into building multiple gates in each solar system, and at coordinating a very careful schedule of transits to make travel possible.

At any rate, development of a truly faster-than-light drive, such as the one being tested on the Galaxion, would remain a very high priority since it would allow people to expand the gate network faster. Additionally, if a war broke out, either between competing Human factions or with another race, gates are both a strategic asset and a liability. Should the enemy destroy your only/last gate in a given system, you now need to spend generations sending another vessel to open a new gate before you can return to that system. With a FTL-capable ship, you now have a way to resume contact much sooner.

As for colonies, most people mistakenly assume that colony worlds would be like what we live on here on Earth, or planets that we can readily “terraform” to meet our needs. I frankly think most colonies would be enclosed stations, either orbiting a body such as a moon or inhospitable planet where we are extracting needed resources, or built directly onto (or inside) the surface of such a body. Why try to completely recreate a new environment planetwide, especially when the planet’s natural environment will be “fighting back” against the changes, when it is far cheaper to build a contained colony with the environment you desire? With a bit of work, it would be possible to build a large colony that provides the illusion of an open, Earthlike environment even under these circumstances, and it would still require far less time and resources to setup and maintain that trying to force a planet’s environment to completely change to our demands.

As for an energy source to power all of this, perhaps Humanity has finally developed a way to build fusion power reactors? They would likely require large amounts of hydrogen for fuel, but that might be harvested from gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. The majority of planets that we have found in our search for extra-solar planetary bodies have been actually larger than these planets. mostly because our limited techniques for finding planets can only locates ones that are large enough to produce a noticable impact upon their host system either by causing the star to slightly shift in it’s orbit or the planet actually occludes/dims the star’s light briefly as we observe it.

In any event, robotic craft should be able to skim the upper atmosphere of these gas giants to bring back load after load of both the hydrogen needed for fueling mankind’s power needs, and other complex chemicals we would want for industrial and even medical uses. We would also want to harvest metals and other minerals from asteroids or moons/planets to provide raw materials. We may even be using these colonies to produce industrial goods or materials that are too dangerous or polluting to produce here on Earth, allowing mankind to try to rebuild the planet’s ecosystem when we can draw upon offworld resources and production to meet our needs.

As for the Myradi, we really do not know very much about them or their relations with Earth as yet. They may be peaceful and trade openly with us, or reclusive and want little to do with us. Or they may even view us as potential competitors (remember, just because we may have completely different biologies doesn’t mean that we won’t want to establish enclosed colonies I mentioned above in the same areas to recover the same resources). It may be that Earth needs the new drive system because it is worried about a possible threat, real or imagined, from the Myradi. It’s also quite possible the Myradi have several colonies of their own, and the one system we’ve encountered them in is NOT their home.

From the story/society angle, based on what has been said before, it seems to me that the existence of pushers/stargates would be a political/funding problem for the Nelson Project. After all, why develop a new stardrive when you already have gates that let you do the same thing in practice? Just keep building gates at whatever stars you want to open for development and relocate exploration ships to use said stars as bases. As long as you’re not looking to fill up the Galaxy in a tearing hurry, there’s no need to develop anything faster.

Plus, one might not need fast speeds to maintain a more developed feel to the Inner Terran Sphere – just lots and lots of traffic. Trade routes between Sol and Alpha Centauri, for example, might see ships entering and leaving several times a week. It might still take you three weeks to go from one to the other, but if you miss one ship, you still won’t have to wait long for another ship to show up.

From the physics angle… we’re still very much In The Dark on how conventional FTL travel works in the Galaxioverse beyond a set speed. The mechanics of FTL might make or break the stargate concept.

Does conventional FTL operate by shifting a vessel into a “hyperspace”, travelling to the destination using ordinary engines, and then shifting back into normal space? This might be gate-friendly as you could have fixed stations that shift vessels to and from hyperspace without difficulty. It might also allow for a unified FTL physics, where the Nelson Jump Drive simply goes to a level of hyperspace that until now was only talked about by theorists.

Or does conventional FTL employ some form of warp field or bubble a la Star Trek / Alcubierre fields? This is less pusher-friendly (though not impossible), and may require even larger amounts of power than simply fitting a ship with a drive and keeping it fuelled.

Re: habitable stars. I think the issue is that the Inner Sphere has very little “real estate” compared to the entire Terran Sphere (1 parsec radius versus a 5 parsec radius) The outer sphere does have a lot of stars that could be suitable homes for humanity either with already liveable worlds or easily terraformable ones (by easy I mean “liveable after a century of concerted effort”).

Within 20 light-years of Sol (almost 7 parsecs) there are 2 A-type stars, 1 F-type star, 6 G-type stars, 16 K-type stars and 88 M-type stars. Any one of these could house liveable worlds but the F, G, and K type stars have the best chance of possessing same. M-type stars have the problem – some might say challenge ^_^ – of being so dim that a world warmed to Earth-level temperatures would also be tidally locked. Not a showstopper per-se, but beware the near and far poles on those worlds. Most M-type stars are also flare stars, with radiaton bursts that put our Sun’s activity to shame. Again, not a show-stopper, but colonies on worlds like these will likely have to be built underground, to keep people from suffering skyrocketing cancer rates every time their sun burps.

A-type stars, conversely, produce enough UV that you’d need one heck of an ozone layer to keep it to a bearable level. They are also fairly short-lived stars; with an average of only a couple hundred million years before they run out of fuel. Again, terraformable worlds are possible there, but native life would be extremely unlikely. One might find a “scumworld” there – bacteria present in deep oceans or in cracks going deep underground, but nothing more complex than a jellyfish…

That, of course, assumes natural evolution similar to what we’ve seen here. Some things might jump-start the process from seeding the world (panspermia) to truly fast-and-fierce evolution (Harlan Ellison’s Medea, or the planet Isis from Robert Charles Wilson’s book Bios). Or perhaps past terraforming attempts by others. Who knows who was in our galactic neighborhood a million years ago?

About the “pushers” concept– does it make sense to use that kind of thing in conjunction with some sort of FTL drive? I think I’d always had the idea that it was one technology or the other. Having those kind of things to defend would indeed make for a more interesting space battle, but just my luck, I’m not planning to write any big space battles! I guess with writing stuff like this you never know until it’s over, but right now it’s not on my agenda.

@Nate, to answer your question about TerSA and IP, TerSA is a very large corporation that has similarities to NASA, but they are private sector. They are technically not a monopoly, but in practice they might as well be. Nearly all the colonies were founded with TerSA capital and are supplied by TerSA ships. I wouldn’t call them an evil corporation, but as with any overly large company that supplies a necessary service, there are… problems.

IP, on the other hand, is public sector, and their function is something like the Coast Guard. When ships get into trouble, they are sent to help. You could also think of them like the International Rescue team of Thunderbirds fame. They probably do deal with space crimes, but it’s not like there’s any big organized crime out there.

Now I am wondering exactly what the roles of TerSA and Interplanetary Patrol are. My guess is that TerSA is the rough equivalent of NASA (because of the soundalike name) while IP, the bigger and more ‘military’ type organisation, is the rough equivalent of the US Dod (perhaps specifically the Navy or Air Force) – but other than the Myradi who don’t appear to be an immediate military threat, I’m wondering why there’d be a big quasi-military space force without any hostile neighbours? And if they’re both ‘civilian’, then what are the distinctives between them?

Are they backed by different countries, governments, corporate consortia, or political philosophies? Is IP the ‘patrol’ in the sense of being an ‘interstate domestic police force’? If so – why is it so big? Is there a really bad ‘space crime’ problem? Are there armed insurrections or terrorists or pirates that need to be put down? Is there a cold war going on between the colony worlds that most people don’t like to think about? Or are there a lot of natural disasters, or food shortages, with IP something like a space Red Cross or Salvation Army – or a non-military but socialist government in human space that believes in pooling resources? We know TerSA does ‘science’ of a kind and is the ‘underdog’, but IP does science too, and has a bigger budget… and both organisations have military-sounding ranks… so what’s going on behind the scenes?

The reason why I ask is that things like ‘starfleets’ or ‘standing armies’ are extremely expensive and so their existence tends to drive politics and character conflict. From what little history I’ve learned it seems the British Navy and Empire grew out of the need to protect merchant shipping and trade monopolies from 1) pirates, and 2) other competing colonial nations – and the 1) often turned out to be agents of 2). (‘Privateers’ and ‘Letters of marque’ and other such fun things). But space doesn’t have a 2) yet, unless we bring that conflict with us.

I like Seanna’s idea of “pushers” that give ships a boost in whatever direction they’re going. In my mind, these pushers would likely be expensive to build and maintain, so having these in place should in no way change the desire of both TerSA and IP to have a faster way of “getting there,” wherever “there” might be. Certainly, if “there” is someplace new, on the “outer rim” to borrow a Bab5 phrase, then there wouldn’t be a quick way of getting back home once they got “there”- and hence the lure of the Nelson Drive, which, theoretically, /should/ work in both directions (although it hasn’t yet!). As we haven’t progressed far enough in the story for the characters to have figured out just what’s happened, I won’t speculate on this thread any further. As Tara’s original post said, though, there iare the Inner Colonies, and the Outer Colonies. I like the potential created by pushers for giving the Inner Colonies a more cosmopolitan, important feeling, because it’s quicker to travel between them and to Earth, than it is for those in the Outer Colonies. While the Outer Colonies are important for the resources they contribute to the whole, they are far newer, less established, by comparison to the Inner Colonies, and having the wherewithal to build a pusher in the right place to entice more traffic out their way would be difficult to come by. Those in the Outer Colonies are much like the frontiersmen exploring the wild west, and life often is not easy.

I love all the suggestions for possible habitable planets. Makes me want to figure out how to do a 3D map hanging from my ceiling to figure out where everything is! I think in my conversations with Tara, we figured there may be only one or two worlds that Terrans have happened upon in their explorations that were deemed colony-ready without any terraforming. Well, one colony in particular, and it’s pretty far out from Earth, but we allowed that it /might/ not be unique in our Galaxioverse. Most colonies had to have some sort of terraforming done to make them human friendly. And while they are doing terraforming on Pluto, I don’t believe Vessa said it was /easy/ work. Each location would have its own particular challenges, and the process would need to be tweaked to accomodate it. I could certainly see a terraformed colony on a world that does not have easy access to a water supply, which creates unique struggles for the colonists – so Andrew’s suggestions for small moons in the Centauris, or a brown dwarf here or there, are appealing to me. There would have to be a valuable resource there to make the struggle worthwhile for TerSA to pursue having an established colony. A chance to make a big buck, if you will. I guess my point here is that I wouldn’t rule out any particular star or location based on what we know about them today, because once we, as a human species, actually get there, we could find things to be very different than what we can see from Earth, or find other potential.

As for the current conventional drive, I would say there has to be a certain suspension of disbelief for this all to work. We need to assume that the drive is “safe” to use, however it works. If it’s a miniature black hole, well, then, we’ve come up with a way of harnessing it (Hello Dr Future Scientist), and it’s been in use so long with no mishaps that it’s considered safe. The new, unknown, in this story is the Nelson Drive and in order for the contrast to work, the way they’ve always travelled has got to be comfortable and familiar to those using it.

The Myradi, well, since we have only had veiled references to them and what they meant to our character’s notions of the universe, I don’t really want to comment on. Anything I say could be changed by Tara at any time, and be made null and void, so I’ll leave them for another discussion thread.

Given Tara’s definition of one colony = one settled world, and given that the rough size of the Terran Inner Sphere of Influence would likely extend out to Alpha Centuari and not much farther, let’s take a look at the neighborhood (excluding Sol).

The Alpha Centauri trinary system presents some opportunities and problems for settled worlds, depending on what you’re looking for. Solstation.com has the details, but the basic break-down is as follows: Alpha Centauri A is a G0 main sequence star, pretty sunlike but more massive and hence brighter than our Sun. Orbiting it (okay, both stars orbit each other) is B, a K2 main sequence star – cooler and dimmer than our sun, and outputting less UV. The two suns have a close approach of 11 AU – and this suggests that the “safe zone” around each star for planets is 2.2 AU (any further out from either star and a planet either assumes a figure eight orbit, freezing at certain spots in its orbit, or gets flung outsystem). Lastly, C (also known as Proxima Centauri), is a M2 red dwarf almost a tenth of a lightyear away. Red dwarfs are not good candidates for liveable planets, but domed colonies, or O’Niell-type space colonies would certainly be feasable.

There’s been some debate over whether or not Alpha Centauri A and B could even form an Earth-sized planet, with the rough answer being “not very likely”. So our worst-case scenario are a few small worlds the size of our Moon, or even asteroid belts. That said, A or B might luck out and have one or two Mars-sized worlds orbiting them; probably not liveable “right out of the tin”, but certainly good “fixer-uppers”. Such worlds would likely be dry, even drier than what Mars is looking like now – A and B would have swept away a lot more comets and ice-rock asteroids than what existed to help give Earth her oceans. (Still, we know that humanity in the Galaxioverse is terraforming Pluto, of all places, so the dryness of these worlds might not even be a problem worth mentioning…)

So I would gauge Alpha Centauri as a good site for two, maybe three colonies, with a possible one or two fully-artificial colonies at Proxima.

While nobody’s found any yet, there is a small possibility of a dim brown dwarf at a closer distance to us than Alpha Centauri. Brown dwarfs are a locale that don’t get much use in science fiction (yet!), but there may be more of them than there are of “ordinary stars” and they may even have worlds that could be made liveable. Picture a brown dwarf with a world like Europa, only larger, orbiting it. Tidal heating would give us an ocean under an ice-sheath, and if this world orbited close enough to the brown dwarf, it might get enough heat from the dwarf to transform part of that ice-sheath into an ocean as we know of it, and a surface temperature at this ocean similar to what we can see at our artic and antartic locations. A hardy location, with only a dim red natural light source, and you’d still have to get an atmosphere that won’t permanently freeze out, but you might see cities carved into the ice shores of such an ocean.

One or two of these brown dwarfs at a 2 to 3 lightyear distance from Sol might give us a couple of extra colony spots in the Inner Sphere, with some interesting local colour for whoever grows up there.