posted
I'd like to here some opinions about the use of suspended animation on passenger ships.
In the early days of warp, voyages between even the closest systems took at least a year. If you were traveling at that time, would you have preferred to sleep the entire way or would you preferred to stay awake and work, study, or play?
As warp speeds increase and transit times decrease, at what point would your preference for sleep or wakefulness change?: at 6 months, 2 months, 2 weeks, etc.
Figure, too, that staying awake is much more expensive than sleeping. The ship has to provide food, life support, entertainment, recreation, elbow room, communications, etc.
Remember, too, in the early days (at least before ST:Ent came along and changed the rules), instantaneous communications weren't available ship to shore, so you could sit around and play on the internet all day.
-------------------- When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
Well of course the most common reasoning behind sleeper ships is that the time to travel is so long it's not feasible to provide the resources to the crew - as you said it's much more expensive and resource intensive, or, it's simply impossible to reach the destination within the lifetime of the crew (like with the DY-100 floating about for nearly 2 centuries, albeit that wasn't their original plan).
In the case of early warp in the SFM version, rather than the Enterprise version, it wouldn't be impossible for the crew if it's only something like 1 or 2 years. But it certainly would be hellish for a crew to have to spend a year or more in close confines with no outside contact, or at least seriously delayed contact with the outside world.
If it took 1 year to reach your destination wouldn't that be a waste of a whole year of someone's life? Obviously they could be working on whatever they do. Logically if space travel was so laborious at that time in history only important people would traveling past the solar system so the work they could get done would justify them spending a whole year cramped up in a spaceship, but I know I certainly would prefer to be frozen or whatever during the year it took to travel.
Something like 1 or 2 months is probably the maximum most people will be prepared to comfortably endure being awake on an interstellar voyage with no or limited external communication.
P.S. Masao whatever happened to those tender ships you were doing ages ago? There was the Sahara and an earlier more primitive one and a massive thread a few pages back.
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Registered: May 2004
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posted
Marauth: This question is related to those transport/cargo ship pictures. It's research!
If transport takes so long,there wouldn't be too many reasons to travel. An obvious reason would be colonization/emmigration. I suppose a very dedicated employee might be transferred to set up a new branch office, embassy, or factory in a neighboring system. Starfleet or other institutions, of course, would send people out on long missions of diplomacy, science, and defense. Rich people might also take extended journeys just for the fun of it.
-------------------- When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
Some points I didn't already rant about at Trekbbs:
If transport takes long, but cryosleep stops one from aging, a culture of repeated one-way trips could emerge. Even Joe Average might travel from star to star to star, his allowance allowing, as long as he accepted that everything he left behind would be gone forever. He'd skip decades of his life in cryosleep every two weeks of his subjective life, live for 500 or 1,000 years, and see the galaxy in all its glory.
Of course, such a culture would collapse with the introduction of faster travel methods, something that happened fairly quickly in the Trek universe. For Trek Earth, there would not have been enough time for such a culture to emerge between Cochrane's and Archer's maiden flights - and the existence of other, more advanced and faster cultures in the Trek universe would also mix the broth a lot.
If Trek cryosleep simply allows you to stop consuming the ship's stores, yet still ages you at the normal rate, then the situation would again be very different. Did Khan stay young because of cryosleep, or because he was a superduperman? We haven't heard of centuries-long cryo-trips being performed by anybody else but Khan and the Klingons, really, although we can assume many early colonization missions involved decades of deep freeze.
By the 23rd century, cryosleep must be a relic of the past - but by the 25th, an analogous travel culture might again emerge, this time shortening subjective trip duration to mere seconds via transporter stasis (a technology apparently perfected by VOY "Counterpoint"). This would present some advantages to frequent travelers, and would very clearly divide starfarers to "businessmen" and "tourists", only the latter insisting on being awake during the three travel days.
"We haven't heard of centuries-long cryo-trips being performed by anybody else but Khan and the Klingons, really..."
Well, not "trips", as such, but there were the people in the cryosatellite in "The Netral Zone". I don't think it really makes a difference that they were adrift, rather than intentionally travelling.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Perhaps not... But I'd say it might make a difference that they were dead when they departed.
The cryotech there wasn't used in order to slow down metabolism in order to prolong lifetime or make a long journey feel shorter. It was used to slow down decay of the deceased, in the faint hopes that future science would not only find a way to reanimate the dead, but to undo their original causes of death. Which, of course, happened. It's unclear whether this 1980s-vintage tech was eventually developed into the functional 1990s cryosleep, or was a largely unrelated parallel technology.
posted
I think it was specifically mentioned on Voyager that sleeper ships were used in early colonization during the 22nd century. If I recall it was an anecdote about Harry Kim's ancestor being the captain of one such ship and that he was the only one awake throughout the whole journey.
That arrangement would make sense since there's plenty that can go wrong with an automated flight that, without human supervision could lead to disaster...like having your AE-35 break down ;-). While at the same time you don't have the problem of hundreds (thousands?) of passengers eating up resources on long journeys.
I forget how long said journey was (I do remember that he had to turn around and go back home, so the ship was capable of a round trip) someone with the DVD or a better memory than me can probably dig up a useful quote.
I actually remember writing something like this into my defunct DY Series article some years back. Specifically that several early sleeper ships had been lost due to technical faults and/or enviromental accidents, which precipitated the policy of a caretaker or skeleton crew to supervise the largly automatic voyage.
It's up for discussion on the wisdom of leaving someone on their own for months or years, weighed against the potential for non-professional stress resulting from being locked up in a confined space with a small number of people, although I'm sure NASA has probably done a study on the possible psycological effects of just those conditions.
From a fictional standpoint, you could suppose that the policy of lone caretakers in the time of Kim's ancestor, came after an unfortunate incident aboard a sleeper with a small crew. Perhaps some crew member, who somehow slipped through a psycological screening process, went mad and murdered his/her crew and/or passengers or there could have been a good old fashioned mutiny.
posted
If someone has money in the bank, a cryosleep of several decades would see that money grow with interest. You wake up every few years to spend it, then go back to sleep to travel to the next world.
As far as paying passengers are concerned, I'm sure some crew would be awake to tend the engines and the sleeping passengers. Certain personality types, such as lifehouse keepers or long-haul truckers, might thrive under such conditions. Just keep the engines humming with all the rest of time do to as you pleased.
-------------------- When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
"Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue... AAY!"
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote: I think it was specifically mentioned on Voyager that sleeper ships were used in early colonization during the 22nd century. If I recall it was an anecdote about Harry Kim's ancestor being the captain of one such ship and that he was the only one awake throughout the whole journey.
In "11:59", Kim tells about Uncle Jack who in 2210 (not "160 years ago" or somesuch, but very explicitly in 2210 AD) partook in a deep space exploration mission to Beta Capricus (a star Tom Paris derides as being next door to Earth; it's fictional, but Beta Capricorni is 100 ly away, and thus a fairly good match). The rest of the crew (not passengers or colonists) slept the six months it took for the ship to reach the destination, except there was no destination: Beta Capricus had been a sensor glitch to begin with! The crew continued snoring away as Unca Jack piloted the ship back to Earth over the next six months.
What can be gleaned from this? Not much, really. Just that sleeping was a valid method of travel fifty years before Kirk's time. One should note that Jack put the crew to "stasis", not "cryosleep", and that low-temperature technologies probably played no role in this stasis system, as our TOS heroes are unfamiliar with cryosleep tech in "Space Seed".
However, despite first impressions, the heroes in "Space Seed" do know what a sleeper ship is. Although they say "Necessary because of the time involved in space travel until about the year 2018", they could be specifically speaking of this particular type of interplanetary sleeper ship, as they immediately further specify "It took years just to travel from one planet to another." No bit of dialogue in "Space Seed" unambiguously establishes that sleeper ships ceased to be used after 2018.
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