Evacuation Ship/Fleet Competition Idea

[StormWing0]

Not starting this myself but I figured it'd be interesting to say the least. Say you had to design a ship or fleet of ships to evacuate Earth or some other planet with our number of population.

Your goal here is to design a ship or ships about to move that population or a chunk of it. Now lets assume a single ship can move between 250,000 and 1 million population at a time. For Starmade Reasons we're going to scale that back just a tad bit but assuming the ships you made are scaled up to their correct size they should be able to hold that many people.

I'm thinking the scale used should be builder specific since I'm not sure what scaling down to would be needed in this case. There's no time limit and we're just seeing who's interested in such an idea at this point. If someone wants to make this into a full competition go right ahead.


Meantime if you want to feel free to show off your ideas here.

 

[nightrune]

I like this but we might want to wait until npcs. I've been tossing the idea around of a planetary conquest tournament. Two Planets each have a fleet first to capture the planet wins.

 

[MacThule]

Not starting this myself but I figured it'd be interesting to say the least. Say you had to design a ship or fleet of ships to evacuate Earth or some other planet with our number of population.

Your goal here is to design a ship or ships about to move that population or a chunk of it. Now lets assume a single ship can move between 250,000 and 1 million population at a time.

Whoah. That's Epic.

We can round the current population down to 7,000,000,000 and round down the weekly net increase to 1,000,000. Each super-massive, city-sized ship can move 1,000,000 people (which is a lot. have you any idea what 1,000,000 people in one place look like? i don't because that's the entire population of a major city, and humans don't typically gather in such numbers), and the trip from this planet to the evacuation point took, say... 1 day round trip with FTL drives, routine maintenance, meal and sleep breaks for crew, etc.

So basically you'll need to make 7,000 round trips, plus 1 additional for each week the process takes. You'd need 1,000 city-sized mega ships and a full week to evac the entire population (assuming every human could even reach evac points in that amount of time). The amount of fuel required to provide the thrust to repeatedly achieve escape velocity with that weight of bodies (and food, clothes, medicine & tools) on board would be incredible (not to mention fuel to power FTL drives for so many trips); so it's basically only a possibility in Starmade where we have unlimited ammo / unlimited fuel.

Even then, I doubt the engine will support rendering 1,000 ships the size of a city of 1,000,000 :D

Maybe... 1 big colony / evac ship without the goal of it being able to evac a population the size of The Earth...

 

[jayman38]

Whoah. That's Epic.

We can round the current population down to 7,000,000,000 and round down the weekly net increase to 1,000,000. Each super-massive, city-sized ship can move 1,000,000 people (which is a lot. have you any idea what 1,000,000 people in one place look like? i don't because that's the entire population of a major city, and humans don't typically gather in such numbers), and the trip from this planet to the evacuation point took, say... 1 day round trip with FTL drives, routine maintenance, meal and sleep breaks for crew, etc.

So basically you'll need to make 7,000 round trips, plus 1 additional for each week the process takes. You'd need 1,000 city-sized mega ships and a full week to evac the entire population (assuming every human could even reach evac points in that amount of time). The amount of fuel required to provide the thrust to repeatedly achieve escape velocity with that weight of bodies (and food, clothes, medicine & tools) on board would be incredible (not to mention fuel to power FTL drives for so many trips); so it's basically only a possibility in Starmade where we have unlimited ammo / unlimited fuel.

Even then, I doubt the engine will support rendering 1,000 ships the size of a city of 1,000,000 :D

Maybe... 1 big colony / evac ship without the goal of it being able to evac a population the size of The Earth...

Academic exercises are fun.

You wouldn't have to round down the populace. Any issue that involves the evacuation of the entire planet will kick off enough chaos and panic to reduce the population for you. You're probably looking at a 5% breakage.

If we are talking about a world big enough to hold 7 billion individuals, we aren't talking about an in-game planet in StarMade. So we wouldn't be limited to the game's ability to render 1000 ships. On the other hand, if we are talking about StarMade limitations, the initial population count of a single planet will be far less than a billion, even if individuals are crawling all over each other like a busy anthill, so evacuation won't be quite so arduous.

If we are to consider the use of Starmade technology, there are several shortcuts that we can take to reduce the loads.
1. These city-sized ships would not need to be aerodynamic and can be built in orbit.
2. What else gets built in orbit? A docking station with a teleporter and a large reactor.

The second element will effectively lift the population up off the planet at a minimal fuel cost (just enough fuel to run the reactors on both sides while the transporters move people off-world.) Plus, continuing with Starmade concept that any public teleporter can access any other teleporter in the same sector, and assuming the entire planet is in the same sector, multiple teleporter pods can be built around the planet surface for interfacing with the docking station, so remote individuals won't have to travel as far to get off-world.

Theoretically, you can build multiple docking stations and even more FTL ships, but that requires significant off-world resource logistics. Think: mining ships making a round trip to the asteroid belt and back. So you might have a second station, but it would probably be more efficient to have the teleporters running day and night and just build a few more FTL city ships for the evacuation.

Speaking of academic exercises, has anyone used the new launcher and catcher rail blocks to build a space elevator to a detached space station above a planet? I remember the requirement of connected blocks limiting the utility of a space elevator before the latest update, but that should no longer be a problem, now that we can throw an elevator off the planet and have it "land" on a space station's elevator rail.

 

[nightrune]

Speaking of academic exercises, has anyone used the new launcher and catcher rail blocks to build a space elevator to a detached space station above a planet? I remember the requirement of connected blocks limiting the utility of a space elevator before the latest update, but that should no longer be a problem, now that we can throw an elevator off the planet and have it "land" on a space station's elevator rail.

This is a fantastic idea! I may have to do this...

 

[StormWing0]

Also keep in mind we're scaling down the size of the ships for the sake of starmade and server so we all don't break the servers we choose to build on. XD

 

[alterintel]

A couple Billion is allot of poeple. Maybe consider a seed ship size population of 50,000? Like Battle Star Galactica (the newer one)