In one of the recent books, Mr Brown wrote a passage where Nathan theorized that humans could possibly one day build a colony ship that married the jump drive with the old style suspended animation technology that was used on ships like the EDF FTL scout ships in order to reach other galaxies like Andromeda. Anyone want to speculate on what kind of ship that would be? I suspect it would be larger than a battleship, but smaller than a battle platform maybe? Probably ZPED-powered with multiple jump systems?
I agree it would have to be a very Large craft and it would require:
storage for:
Suspended animation pods,
Organic matter for large scale food production,
A stock pile of rare earth metals and water,
Mining equipment & Fabricators for construction,
Multiple batches of Nanites,
Multiple Computer Cores.
Multiple ZPED's to power the ship and everything else
Multiple Jump Drives with multiple emitter arrays for redundancy.
Large powerful engines
Exceptional sensor arrays
Shuttles and scout craft
Small rugged land vehicles and hover vehicles for the necessary initial transport and work.
Probes for scouting and planetary communications
A super structure which could be re-proposed into an orbital station and ship repair facility.
A modular design that allows for portions of the ship to be detached whole or in parts and assembled into usable haulers for mining and utilizing the resources of the system. Also it would be a good idea to send back to the Milky Way a smaller ship / series of probes to provide a map of the route to the Colony, and to set up lines of communication between the two galaxy's. (its more direct then the PC route, but you would have to get out of the galactic arm first)
It makes since to take along DNA samples and grow children in maturation pods to toddler stage, it would allow the colony women more work options then being perpetually pregnant. It would also allow the population to grow more safely with a wider gene pool.
Actually it would be a really good use for any of those Jung Battle Platforms that haven't been KKV'd yet
Ok, but I'd ask 'Why go to another galaxy?' The space that FS covers is immense, but its still a tiny fraction of the size of this galaxy! The best colonizer would be a cargo jump ship, like a boxcar, that could make repeated runs for several months. It could deliver food until agriculture could get going. It could bring spare parts faster than they could get manufactured locally, for the first few years at least. It could bring construction supplies, to assist in getting things started.
The amount of cargo one boxcar could bring in 50 jumps far exceeds what a big dumb ship could bring. So just pick a distance you're comfortable with, maybe 20 light years outside of known space, and have at it! Do that several times from each major planet, and you've colonized the galaxy in 50 years.
@ericnay True, the ability to explore and colonize the Milky Way outside the thousand light-year sphere already settled by humanity could be done easily, but my point was to theorize about how colonizing another galaxy as Nathan wonders about in passing. Such an endeavor couldn't be accomplished without a ship much larger than a boxcar.
You could use a fleet of smaller ships but one big dedicated ship with a few support craft for exploration and defence would make more sense
