2 thoughts on ““Worldbuilder’s Bible” available for download”

  1. A few years ago I did some very crude calculations based on my copy of “the starflight handbook”. I am no math talent but, working from the formula’s in the book I got a rudimentary idea of energy levels, velocities, ship masses, investment levels and -consequently- travel times of spaceships.

    Pluto is 5 billion kilometers from earth, give or take. With today’s most energy-efficient systems that’s travel times of months, even with pityfully lightweight payloads. At those speeds a collision with a small pebble hits hard, and such a vessel can’t afford shielding mass.

    Thats interplanetary, ranges of several billion kilometers. To do that any faster than travel times in the order of months we either need massive technological growth in energy and/or miniaturization.

    Or star trek force fields. Or warpdrives.

    So face it that – the solar system up to saturn we will be suck with slowboat travel for the foreseable centuries, a new era of exploration and settlement. That’ll be done in zero G, maybe with cylinder habitats, in hive asteroids factory settlements. I don’t even think that space travellers will bother with settlement on moons, down those icky gravity wells.

    By the time humanity has advanced far enough, technologically, centuries will have passed. I don’t see hyperspace drifting in our laps so it’ll be massively high energy propulsion, small vessels, really weird posthuman intelligences.

    Regarded in that perspective the imagery in that PDF are ludicrous. By the time (post)humanity stumbles over extrasolar planetary systems with potentially habitable planets we will be many centuries in the future and humanity will have changed into something we don’t even have proper words for. I don’t see that settling planets with hard helmets and shovels and futuristic looking hummers.

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