Split Decision

Starships. Not really 'nuff said. Yes, I covered drives, but there is so much more to say. Everything from the structure of the hull to who should comprise the crew.

Let's just mention hulls for a moment. The issue is: should we go for a low-mass shell or should we tell the drive design gang to suck it up and use a hollow asteroid. I have to admit that unless someone drops a warp drive in our laps, I lean towarrds the latter. The good-sized nickel-iron roid would give us a lot of stress-free shielding and that's not a thing to ignore. Shielding is going to cause a lot of sleepless nights for the engineers.

And crews.

I'm not going to assume that any ship is going to be generational, just that it's going to be a long trip. That depends so much on the drive that we, now, can't leave out any possibilities. The average I've heard, though runs decades and even that's only to the NEAREST stars. One way. We're not crewing with infants... or eunuchs... so it will be generational whether we like it or not, barring that warp. And the crew has to be large enough to allow for people to find acceptable love matches. About all we can do is weed out any anti-racial flakes. That homogenous attitude will have to carry over into skills, as  well. We will certainly need teachers to pass along the skills. Since this whole thing is not a backyard project, we're going to have to deal with military types supplied by the government. It's not something you want to trust robots with.

No prejudice, just that I have yet to see a robot supply compassion or friendship that I'd trust first contact  to.

Is that crazy? I don't think so. It seems to me that it's so critical that we have to assume that anyplace we plan on going, we're going to find somebody else already there.  They'll either be tourists or local residents. Being logical, it also means that yes, those interesting lights in the sky are not ALL weather balloons! Let's be grateful that the people behind those lights have been fairly peaceful, so far. And we should plan to carry on that tradition. I, myself, have seen something that is in the purest sense  a UFO. I have no idea what it was, but when you see a 10x20 or so bright white glowing rectangle floating along on a windless night doing 20 mph, silently, a hundred feet up, it does give you pause. Then you get a big laugh out of it when they try to tell people that it's an advertising banner being pulled by a plane. I would like to believe that we are mature enough not to make pulling the trigger the first thing we do.

So, maybe not all the crew is under age 22... We really can't afford any xenophobes in that group and we need a few 'older and wiser' heads in the mix.

At least we can relax about things like environmental systems and gravity. With the size of such a ship, those issues are minimal and something we could handle with today's engineering. No sweat.