Timeline for Is it more efficient to send a fleet of generation ships or one massive one?
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| Dec 4, 2020 at 16:29 | comment | added | Gwyn | Exactly. Another issue is specialist personnel. Every ship needs them. Sure, in a fleet they can video conference, so theoretically you don't need two or three neurosurgeons every ship, unless they have to do an eight hour brain operation ... I would personally still go for 3 or 4 self-sufficient ships instead of one because I really don't like not having multiple redundancy as a safety factor. But can't argue that it would be more space/fuel efficient to do so. | |
| Dec 4, 2020 at 16:00 | comment | added | Peter - Reinstate Monica | Hm, true, there are some things where you have only about 1 in 20,000 or 40,000. There are probably more operating theaters than MRIs (1/24k in the U.S) though, but probably still fewer than 1/10k. | |
| Dec 4, 2020 at 15:34 | comment | added | Gwyn | Not true. For things like toilet/WC yes, but the large facilities not so much. If you have 10000 people each on 10 different ships, each med bay would need an operating theatre, anesthesia equipment, dialysis machine, X-ray, MRI, etc. each with a backup/spare. These are not needed often, but cannot be done without -when you need it, it has to be there. On a ship with 100000 people, you wil still only need one and a spare, or maybe 2, not 10 or 20. This is the same for a lot of the other bigger things like landing shuttles as well. | |
| Dec 4, 2020 at 15:06 | comment | added | Peter - Reinstate Monica | Sur, but that argument is only valid for 20 vs 100 people, or so. For 1,000 vs 10,000 people (which is how I understand the question) the facilities scale linearly. | |
| Dec 4, 2020 at 14:49 | comment | added | Gwyn | Sure, but some things on generation ships, like medical facilities, recreational and exercise areas and engineering/machine shop, etc. would have to be duplicated in their entirety for each ship, whereas shift shedules on the big ship means you only need one of each (med bay can just ad extra beds) | |
| Dec 4, 2020 at 11:56 | comment | added | Peter - Reinstate Monica | Another objection is that, true: The square/cube law is probably the central variable in the equation. But that it works both ways: Yes, the "shell" volume shrinks relatively to the usable volume; but the mass needed for structural stability under acceleration grows cubic while the strength of its support structures grows only quadratic : You cannot simply scale up a small ship. | |
| Dec 4, 2020 at 11:55 | comment | added | Peter - Reinstate Monica | The argument that you need more relative space and mass for infrastructure on small ships is only true for very small ships. Once your ship is above the size where there is the maximum number of people for one set of facilities, this ratio doesn't change any more with size; both scale linearly. | |
| Dec 2, 2020 at 18:49 | history | edited | Gwyn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 2, 2020 at 14:08 | history | answered | Gwyn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |