Shake 'n bake colonies

Question

So here's my rough idea for how you could basically send one large ship with a crew of a few thousand (at least ten thousand, maybe forty) to establish a colony on an Earth-like world:

First step is to build a ship. For the purposes of this thought experiment it will be an FTL ship but this is honestly inconsequential. The ship should be a few hundred meters long and shaped like a football with two segmented tori attached to the main shaft. The bulk of the ship will be used to house food, supplies, and the 10-40k freeze-dried (obviously not literally) colonists, who will be hibernating for the vast majority of the trip. The tori meanwhile pull double-duty as warp drives and as prefabricated hab modules.

Second step is arrival. Upon reaching the planet, the ship will decelerate and discard its tori, which will break apart into their individual segments and begin a controlled descent into the atmosphere with the aide of parachutes. The ship itself, meanwhile, will allow gravity to do its job and take it down to the surface ahead of the modules, for reasons explained in step 3. Once the modules have reached a safe speed and height from the LZ, the parachutes will detach and the modules will drop. Once they've landed, they'll begin automated self-assembly into various utilities like habitats, drilling platforms for mining, storage units, generators, and ideally a functioning power grid.

The third and final step is actually clearing the LZ and properly positioning your modules. This is why the main body of the ship is allowed to descend faster than the modules. Once near the surface, the ship will engage its retrorockets to rapidly decelerate. The resulting heat and thrust will clear the immediate area around the ship of vegetation and other obstructions, and on an oxygen-rich planet like the one in my story, the resulting forest fire will hopefully clear not just an LZ, but burn down a large enough area of forest to begin establishing a proper city or town, with the main shaft of the ship (now embedded into the ground like a skyscraper) serving as its center. With the area thus cleared, the modules can descend and begin assembly of the colony infrastructure on clear, open ground.

Does all of this sound feasible or logical? Are there any blatant violations of logic or physics I should be wary of? Most importantly, would the forest fire caused by the descent of a spaceship onto an oxygen-rich planet merely clear a few kilometers of forest as planned, or would it spread out of control and scorch a much larger area?

Answer 1

Sounds pretty reasonable to me up to the landing.

I would suggest breaking your main part (with the freeze-dried colonists) apart, too, in order to land properly. Otherwise you've got something about as as intelligent as a Star Destroyer trying to land on a planet. Deep space vessels normally are not built in a fashion that enables a safe atmospheric entry. And that is not because they don't survive the temperatures of atmospheric friction, but because of the gravity forces and the inability to fly more gracefully than a brick of lead. Since you already got rid of your tori, you don't even have any engines anymore on your brick of lead to brake properly (not that using interstellar engines to brake inneratmospheric velocity is any kind of a good idea -- see the section for Propulsion systems on Project Rho)

Of course, if your FTL (or whatever) drive uses gravity manipulation, then just forget the above paragraph -- unless there is a reason why you can't use the gravity drive close to a planet. Just lower your ship as quickly as you want (you should probably not try to overtake your falling torus segments in case one decides to land on your ship) and go for a perfect touchdown as smooth as a landing feather.

Clearing the LZ: You should neither count on forest fires (ever tried to set a rain forest alight? Or seen what kind of a mess a burned-down forest really is?) nor on finding a nice lush and green meadow. What you should do is land on a surface as hard, dry and flat as possible, with as little vegetation as possible. Sahara destert -- not so good because of all the sand, but the African Savannah? The Jordanian highlands? Or Nevadah/Utah? I would go there.

Seems a little bit counter-productive to settle in a desert-like environment if you've got farmer-colonists, but it has several advantages:

1. Very little icky and potentially highly dangerous vegetation around for your colonists to fall afoul of until they've got proper biological data
2. Very high visibility so that potentially highly dangerous fauna doesn't surprise your colonists by jumping out from behind the next tree
3. Generally good weather with little precipitation that would hinder visibility and your very ecologically friendly solar collectors (at today's standard one of the easiest ways of generating electricity)
4. Very easy to deploy 4-wheel vehicles to help with setting up, exploring the surroundings, etc.. Your robots that set up your mines etc. will love you for not letting them slog through a rust-inducing swamp / rivers
5. Endless plains to expand upon if you need more space, and probably very few animals / aliens wanting that same land

Everything else can be started from there, geographic and biological science, finding out where best to set up the farms, etc.. But to have an easily securable, defendable home-base? Priceless.

Answer 2

I see it being feasible, but not terribly practical. There's too much emphasis on speed. It feels more like a combat zone insertion than a colonization effort.

Colonies are operating on the timescale of years and decades. There's very little disadvantage to spending a few days, if not a few months, in orbit to identify the best approach to building a colony. Send down modules slowly, right where you need them.

If you want to go with the forest fire approach, my recommendation would be to have your colony choose that approach as a deviation from the plan. Something went wrong with their original plan to clear space, and they needed to improvise. If you think about it, a society with interstellar travel and self assembling modules is not going to have much of a challenge hacking down a few trees without causing a forest fire. However, if something were to go wrong with the original plan, they might choose the more destructive approach.