In episode 1 we learned that the maximum attainable FTL speed at the time of the Bio-Digital Plague was 10x light and in episode 7 we learned that the maximum FTL speed for a cargo ship was 5x light. Those speeds would place the Pentaurus Sector at 100 to 200 years travel time respectively for a sleeper ship leaving the Core at the height of the Plague. Was that a typical amount of travel time for an evacuation expedition or was the 100-200 years/1000 LY-crossed by the evacuees that settled in the Pentaurus Sector the extreme? If it is the extreme, does that mean most other expeditions would have settled within a 1000 LY of the Core, placing most of them 50 to 1000 LY out? Or could other expeditions have traveled even further?
The math would suggest that ships traveling at 5x light could have traveled 5,000 light years during the 1,000 years of dark ages that followed the BD plague.
Assume the same starting time and speed for all ships, the release of the BD plague and 5x light.
Ship 1 travels for 100 years, settles a world 500 ly from Sol, and now has 900 years to grow their civilization before Ep#1
Ship 2 travels for 200 years, settles a world 1000 ly from Sol, and now has 800 years to grow their civilization
Ship 3 travels for 300 years, settles a world 1500 ly from Sol, and now has 700 years to grow their civilization
Ship 4 travels for 400 years, settles a world 2000 ly from Sol, and now has 600 years to grow their civilization
and so on...
So a ship that was in transit for 1,000 yrs to settle a world 5,000 ly from Sol, would be just landing and starting their colony.
So yes, expeditions could have traveled further. In fact, they could still be in transit. However, it is more likely that the majority of them are less than 1,000 ly from Sol. The further out you travel, the more resources you need to get there. You may not have to burn more propellant, (after all, you're already up to speed) but you do have to maintain FTL fields the entire trip to stay at 5x light, and someone has to come out of hibernation every so often to inspect/maintain the ship. (And they need to eat, breath, and poop.) You also have to supply continuous power to the hibernation systems. All of that requires power, and quite a lot of it. It's not just point, shoot, go to sleep, and wake up when it's time to land. To go further out than a few hundred light years you'd have to be pretty well funded and maintained.
I still keep on thinking the passengers on those ships would be vulnerable to the same virus that ravished Earth and older civilizations. One ship in contact with the old civilization and they would suffer the same devastation that Earth did. This makes me think any of these encountered later might have a "shoot first, ask questions later" policy towards any other vessels that show up later.
🙂
@ericnay I would agree with you to an extent. From what we know that has been established in the series, the survivors of the Plague cheated death because of a natural immunity. But, at least the way I read it, that immunity was unknown until the Plague had run its course after the evacuation expeditions had departed. There could have very well been people on one or more of those evacuation ships that didn't have the immunity and all it would have taken was one person that had contracted the Plague but hadn't shown symptoms yet to unleash it on their new world once they had arrived. Or perhaps there was a mutation of the Plague that went dormant for a period of time before awakening to ravish the new colony a hundred years or more after settlement. There are many possible scenarios that could have unfolded.
The exodus would have been a multi-year process. Ships in transit at the time of the big-release might very well not have been infected, depending on their level of connectivity while in transit. In addition, for some ships, it might have been as easy as reboot from a clean recovery image. You also have the poor people factor. They are the ones that were less likely to have the implant, so they would only be susceptible to the biological version.
Then again, the Twister virus could have been sleeping in many ships, waiting to attack well after the ships left. It would make sense that the designers would not want the ships infected in the initial stages, so that they could help spread the disease by carrying people who did not know they were infected. Perhaps Twister was tied into the ships' nav system, and travelling beyond the 100ly border would trigger its release?
Undoubtedly, some evacuation expeditions would indeed be ill-fated. Even the ones that escaped without bio or digital versions might not have survived due to improper planning/loading, etc... Or they could have just had bad luck once they got to their destinations.
I can easily imagine established, unaffected settlements shooting down ships trying to come to their world.
Ugly.
