Floating Acorn

Seedships

Heirs to the massive sublight colony ships pioneered by Kasjan Lyris and the Deep Star program, the modern colonial seedship is as difficult to characterize individually as its predecessors. While the Deep Star ships were differentiated by the rapid progress and therefore updates to the design - sometimes even during construction - the seedships are instead differentiated by the uniqueness of the worlds and systems under colonization, whose differing requirements lead each colonial expedition to require a radically different bill of materials than the last.

This being said, seedships do share certain commonalities required by their mission of transporting a colony seed and its initial population from star to star. The most massive of sublight vessels, seedships rest upon a thrust frame of massive proportions, wrapping their propellant tanks and oversized engines, atop which - supported by a spine and spiderweb of internal trusses - perches a protective ovoid shroud of nanoceramic. The overall effect somewhat resembles a miles-wide acorn, which is perhaps why most Imperial seedships are named after fruits, nuts, or occasionally divine creative forces.

Within the nanoceramic egg, as you will be able to see from the sample schematics included in this chapter, a seedship resembles nothing quite so much as a cutaway diagram of a complex mechanical clock. While joining a new colony will always mean self-banishment from the luxuries of the Core for an extended period of time, there are always enough unavoidable challenges in planet-breaking that any avoidable ones are best avoided, sensible expedition leaders deem. As such, careful study of the Exploratory Service documentation on the target world produces an encyclopedic list of necessary equipment to be brought along, many of which have their own dependencies and raw materials requirements, leading to every scrap of volume within the egg not otherwise occupied being packed with stack after stack of IOSS-standard intermodal freight containers¹.

(Indeed, the seedship itself is designed to be stripped down to the thrust frame to be reused as additional colonial supply. Even the nanoceramic shroud is recycled: its material often ends up in shuttle landing pads and the colony's earliest roads and boundary walls.)

What else is under the shroud? It depends greatly upon the target world and system, of course, but there will almost always be at least two fully-functional orbital habitats, a series of colony spires packed around the central spine, a number of operating glass-garden domes, certain large prefabricated pieces of colony infrastructure (including a fusion power plant, water purification system, and nanosource), and finally, packed in around the edges, the satellite constellations, frontier shuttles, skycranes, and OTVs needed to unpack the seedship once it has made orbit around its target world.

Most critical, of course, is the Primary Habitat, which is commonly mounted immediately above the thrust frame for ease of access once the latter has been removed. It is usually of a rotating (toroidal) design, and once removed from the seedship becomes an ad-hoc highport² and the first headquarters of the colonial governance; such a central point of operations makes the remainder of the venture substantially easier.

(While the seedship was in flight, the Primary Habitat, with its plazas and parkland, also served as a meeting-place, training center, and recreational facility for the colonists.)

The secondary habitat, when present, is intended to be placed in orbit around a suitable gas giant in the target system. The reason for this is simple: fuel, needed by the colony's own fusion reactors, by the auxiliary starships setting up the colony's orbital and ground infrastructure, and by any other starships visiting the system. Only a limited amount of fuel can be brought with the seedship, and while the first of these requirements could theoretically be satisfied from planetary oceans, if available, and using deuterium-only reactors and helium-3 breeding, to satisfy all these requirements demands that gas-mining infrastructure be on-line as soon as possible.

And then, once the shroud has been stripped away and the container-stacks organized, it is time to emplace the colony itself.

The first landings have been made by this point, enabling the pioneers to find and prepare the initial landing site³, including constructing landing pads for future shuttle flights⁴ and digging foundations for buildings to be landed from orbit; lowered slowly into place by powerful skycranes.

First down, of course, are the essentials of colony infrastructure, including the glass-garden domes⁵. Once they are installed and functioning properly under the care of the pioneers, it's time for the colony spires.

The colony spires are the heart of every new colony. Essentially, a colony spire is a sealed arcology skyscraper, as large as can be built for delivery by skycrane⁶, which housed thousands of colonists in flight and will continue to do so for their first days on the new world. In addition to their residential floors, the spires contain gardens, recreational areas, restaurants, administrative offices, laboratories, medical centers, shopping districts, and everything else needed to support civilization - with, in the lower floors that will end up below-ground once they are landed, utilities, engineering, and manufacturing facilities to support the rest.

Early in the colony's lifetime, of course, it is expected that colonists will want to move out of these relatively cramped arcologies into new planetary homesteads, and so the residential floors are designed to be dismantled in turn for parts to use in constructing other homes, and to be replaced with more functional facilities as the colony grows.

But that's another story.

– Fíerí’s Starships of the Associated Worlds

1. Since they are incredibly useful as impromptu storage, shelter, and construction basics, a not-insubstantial number of those intermodal freight containers are inevitably packed with conversion kits which transform containers into prefab buildings.
2. Serving initially as the base for the deployment of the satellite constellations brought along (for remote sensing, navigation, and communications) and the dismantling of the seedship, but rapidly transitioning into the system space traffic control center and a true highport for the passing starship trade. There's a strong correlation between successful colonies and getting starport access up and running as soon as possible.
3. Statistically, an improbable number of the cities founded on initial colony sites will be named "Landing", to the point that some pioneers amuse themselves by bringing along an appropriate sign.
4. Necessary if you intend to land significant volumes of freight in your frontier shuttles.
5. These are considered essential even on garden world expeditions. Even if the colony intends to perform outdoor agriculture eventually, a reliable source of food that can be isolated and thus won't suffer from new-planet biological upsets is vital.
6. Which, admittedly, is still tiny by arcology standards.