By the time we found a habitable planet, we’d been in space so long most of the first generation was dead. Their fault. If they hadn’t spent two decades trying to terraform that ball of ice in the Wolf System…

In any case, Penny was a heavenly sight. Our probes confirmed the pictures we’d taken from orbit. She was a near match for earth. She got the name Penny from an old earther who got tired of us calling her Alpha Centauri One, then Centauri One, then Cent One.

 

I do like the rest of the second paragraph. I thought I'd get bored by the talk of how the planet was named, but it was really artfully done.
 

In any case, I'd keep reading.
 

I didn't find the MC callous, necessarily, just disconnected. Which is entirely plausible for someone who's spent most/all of their life on a generation ship.

I'd probably read on.
 

Also, is this a multi-generational ship that they're on? If so, there are many near-Earth stars that wouldnt need a multigenerational ship...if your ship is fusion-powered (fusion utilized as both energy source as well as propulsion), then you can reach a lot of near-Earth stars in a single generation. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars, a converted asteroid travels to Barnard's Star (I think; I can't precisely remember what star it was, but it was relatively close to Sol), and Robinson said that the journey would only take 20 years or so.

Did a quick copy-paste from a website I just Googled on near-Earth stars within 10-20 LY:

# 36 Ophiuchi 3?*
# 40 (Omicron2) Eridani 3*
# 61 Cygni 2*
# 70 Ophiuchi 2?*
# 82 Eridani*
# Altair
# CD-46 11540
# Delta Pavonis*
# DENIS 1048-39
# DX Cancri
# Epsilon Eridani*
# Epsilon Indi*
# Eta Cassiopeiae 2*
# EZ Aquarii 3
# Gliese 229
# Gl 570 / HR 5568 ABC*
# Gliese 876 / Ross 780
# Groombridge 34 AB
# Groombridge 1618
# J. Herschel 5173 AB*
# Kapteyn's Star
# Lacaille 8760 / AX Mic
# Lacaille 9352
# LHS 1565 / GJ 1061
# (LP 944-20)
# Luyten's Star
# Procyon 2
# Ross 128
# Ross 248
# Sigma Draconis*
# Struve 2398 AB
# Tau Ceti*
# Teegarden's Star
# Van Maanen's Star
# Wolf 424 AB
# Wolf 1055 AB / VB's Star

from http://www.solstation.com/stars.htm

Personally, I'm a fan of Procyon and Epsilon Eridani.

I'd read further, from this piece.

[This message has been edited by Nietge (edited June 17, 2006).]
 

The suggested etymology of the planet name is just not very convincing and it distracts us from the story. If the name of the planet isn't a major plot point (meaning it affects the ending) then don't bother to bring it up.
 

But there is one problem, your story, people trying to find a habitable planet, is a bit unoriginal...unless there is a twist, of course.
 

And I got all of these ideas from your fragment, which means you packed a lot of stuff into a very efficient set of opening lines...for me, anyway.

That discussion aside, I really like your fragment. I'd definitely read on. It may be revisiting themes I've seen before, but your mechanics are strong. I thought there was a good balance of plot foreshadowing in the first paragraph and a kind of wry "aside" in the second. I don't mind spending a few sentences developing a tone for the characters and setting. Other readers might not feel the same, though.
 

(Darn, why don't I write fantasy and save myself the headache?...because I love sci fi, I guess)
 

Here is a revision of the second paragraph and the introduction of the ancestor worshipper problem:

Penny was a near match for Pangea Earth. She got the name Penny from a first generation who looked at her land mass and said the copper browns, streaked greens and tarry blacks reminded him of an old penny.
“And she’s pretty as a new one!” He said with a cackle. Our budding little ancestor cult crowded round to ask him what a penny was, and the name stuck. But I know (because I grew up reading terran history) that the expression pretty as a new penny or shiny as one or whatever had gone out of the common language long before that old fraud’s birth. Besides, he was a Kazhak. Nevertheless, Penny he called her and Penny she stayed. And our currency? Change. Toonies, loonies, dinars, shillings, and pennies. No one liked the paper thing, I guess.

I might cut the currency part. Not essential and not sure it adds anything much.

 

Speaking of space habitats, pretty much anyone with the technology to do interstellar travel is going to find them relatively easy to construct once in orbit around a suitable star. They might want to terraform a planet eventually anyway, but as long as you don't crash-land (which makes it a do or die situation) it's not all that urgent a matter.

Anyway, the currency digression really kills this opening.
 

Wouldn't it be plausible that a colony ship too long in space, after a failed attempt to terraform a planet, would no longer have resources to construct and sustain a habitable station around a second planet?

If they surveyed the system already and found a habitable planet, it would be just plausible that they would send a mission designed to land the population on the planet and leave a minimal orbital capability, or that a dire emergency forced them to land on the planet.

But if they've had time to try terraforming an uninhabitable rock in one star system, then travel to another system, they had to be self-sustaining for a generation already. The chances of a crash-landing are tiny, the chances of that crash-landing taking place on an unsurveyed habitable planet are probably even worse. Multiply those chances against each other and you've got an astronomical coincidence. Hah hah.

If you want to say it's a generation ship, and things on board haven't gone quite the way the designers intended, that's different. Or if they originally crashed on the wrong planet and had to put things (meaning a primitive intra-system capability) back together to get to another planet in the same system, or they have some kind of unreliable jump drive, or or or. There are lots of ways to justify the situation you want, but your specifics are just too specifically implausible right now.
 

The ship is multi-generational, and the crash is intentional (a crash landing after a faked life support failure). But apparantly I still have to worry about supply depletion. They were never supposed to be in space that long, and I thought the failed attempt to terraform another planet would put them in properly dire shape, but I can throw something else at them along the backstory. Or maybe they sabotaged or destroyed a lot of their equipment during the mutiny. I guess I better explain why they don't have landing shuttles or the equipment onboard to make them.

Also, I was going to be lazy and let the reader figure out that their ship moves faster than our technology allows now, but not so fast that systems are only a couple of years away. But I'm guessing I might not get away with that after all. Any suggestions on propulsion and speed?
 

I have trouble picturing this "generation ship" as being a long-term solution for a population. (I think that's what Survivor was suggesting, but I might not know enough about what y'all are discussing to have kept up.) Wouldn't the population be growing? Wouldn't they eventually outgrow their resources, no matter how plentiful the supply they started with? Isn't a planet-home the ultimate aim? (I hope this doesn't ring too far off topic. If so, I can move it over to the discussion board.)

As for your last question, I'm not a hard sci-fi person by nature. It's not too difficult to get me to suspend my disbelief if I like your story and like your characters. I've read and enjoyed plenty of books and stories that gave me no information about the workings of their faster-than-light transports, other than the fact that they WERE faster than light. Maybe this is the difference between "sci-fi" and "hard sci-fi".
 

Con 2: There have been plenty of posts before this and most everything else has been said.

Pro 1: The opening has a definate hook[they seem to be arriving near the planet, now]

Pro 2: I would keep reading

That's me, Mark
 

Thanks!
 

Our current technology would allow us to send something (but not live humans) to Alpha Centauri in a couple of (subjective) years if we really wanted to do so. It isn't high on anyone's list of priorities right now, though. Just cruise the NASA site and Space.com for ideas, pick one that seems good to you. Or just don't bother mentioning it.

That might be a better strategy, since right now your details are what's killing you. If you include a lot of details that many people will be able to easily cross-check for accuracy, you must get them all exactly right.

If the ship isn't designed to land (and there isn't much likelyhood that it would be designed to do so unless it were specifically designed for already known conditions on the target planet), then intentionally crashing it is simply suicide for most of the people on board...it's a way to destroy the ship and leave most of the materiel on the planet, not a way to get the colonists down safely (meaning, you know, alive).

If you want a good 3D starmap with functions that allow you to search out stars by spectral class, size, and location, try Celestia. You can download it for free, and it's fun to play with even if you don't bother to use it for research.
 

areitan@yahoo.com
 

There's 2000 people on the ship, they've been controlling their population since the beginning. The technology they have is barely above what we have now, when compared to what is used in most sci-fi novels. It takes several years (not sure yet how many) to reach the nearest solar system, longer to reach one likely to have a habitable planet, then the nearest planets don't have a planet they can use, so they keep going, now in worse shape because they've used up so many resources on the failed terraforming.

So now I need to ask: What made earth so bad they were willing to risk it, and weren't willing to go back. Although a mutiny might make the winners unwilling to go back home again, too.

How fast are they actually going.

How can they crashland that ship onto the planet (I was thinking it was a backup feature, not something the designers ever wanted to use, but added on anyway, just in case, but I have no idea how hard it would be to land a ship that big without killing everyone onboard).

Which system did they first try to terraform, and where are they now? And how far from earth? And what resources do they have left? How many years has it actually been since they left earth anyway?

Hm, I think I aspired to hard sci fi, but my first draft is soft. And I don't want to leave it that way, or rather, if I don't have to explain, I won't, but if I do need to, I don't want to get it wrong!
 

So the mission is assembled with full knowledge of the target system, and the target planet. The colony ship is designed with several modules, the bulk of which are designed to separate and land on the planet intact to provide an immediately functioning infrastructure and to accelerate terraforming efforts, with the remaining part of the ship (engine core and orbital support elements) remaining in orbit around the planet. The relative travel time is only a few decades for the crew (both due to relativity and some form of suspended animation), but it takes a century or so from the perspective of people back on Earth. Alpha Centauri A isn't a bad choice for the target system, it's quite similar to Sol in most of the important respects. You can choose another destination by looking around in Celestia, if you like (some people think that the proximity of two other stars would interfere with planet formation around Alpha Centauri A, though really it would probably only keep a large gas giant from forming).

The ship has an operating crew of 2000, but it carries human embryos for bio-diversity along with stocks of seeds and whatnot. Research the basics of what we can do now in terms of conservation efforts and so forth and sort of fill in the gaps. Perhaps some of the crew members are cloned embryos, you take a healthy blastocyst with a good genetic profile, and chop it up a few times. Each of the smaller clumps should develop into a viable blastocyst (there are biological limits to how far you can take this, but 16-32 is pretty safe, with failures you'd have 10-30 clones). That way you don't have to worry about inbreeding or infertility problems during the journey (after landfall, you're on your own). You can take or leave the clones idea, maybe they'll be content with letting the crew reproduce naturally for a couple of generations and hoping for the best.

Anyway, let's say there's a nearly Earth-like planet. Big oceans, continental landmasses, atmosphere with the right elements, though you can take or leave the diatomic oxygen (that would probably require existing ur-plant life that was somewhat similar to Earth, not impossible by any means but potentially implausible to some). The colony is set up to land there. On the other hand, there's another planet that is basically like Mars, only perhaps a little warmer, maybe massive enough to support a little more atmosphere.

Due to some horrible screw-up, be it mutiny, meteoroid, or Mephistophles, your poor unfortunate colonists end up landing on the Mars-like planet rather than the target. They end up having to bail out of the orbital module, everyone gets stuck on the planet somehow or other. Let's say a reactor accident on the engine core renders the orbital component uninhabitable. So they have to stick it out on the crappy planet and use primitive space shots to try and put crew back on the orbital module after the radiation dies down. Whatever. Then they have to recover enough of the landed modules (and crew) to reestablish on the original target planet.

Anyway, it's easy enough to put together the scenario, if you change the scale to fit your available technology. Then the trick is writing it. Which is not quite so straightforward.
 

I like the Mars-type planet idea, and I read somewhere that algae dropped into the atmosphere will theoretically make a planet like Mars habitable within a couple of decades. Only I'm thinking the Mars type is the first one they try, then they are out of equipment and either must return to earth (the successful mutiny doesn't make that appealing) or try somewhere more distant with a planet their probes (another great idea!) say is closer to Earth in atmosphere and plantlife. How likely it is that any planet within twenty or thirty years' travel is that similar I leave to the hardcore skeptics.

Does anyone know anything about altering DNA on the fly? So that, with advanced planning, maybe colonists could alter their own DNA and not wait for the next generation? Maybe they could alter themselves to adjust to the second planet's atmospheric differences? I made it very oxygen rich (so much so that fires in the lowlands are a big problem). But other atmospheric elements might be toxic to humans. Probably would be.

Speaking of mucking around with DNA, there has to be a sci-fi story in this one somewhere:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9C02E5D91130F933A05750C0A96F958260

So the better planet must be in the same system. Therefore it would have been the original target planet, you need to introduce some catastrophic event to force them to land on the worse planet first.

As for the genetic modification idea...it's a lot easier and safer to just have people use life support equipment.
 

But that throws a big problem in my plot. It might actually be a good problem though. It might add depth to the conflict. My antagonists are a little too one dimensional, same with my protagonists. And that solves my language problems, when the people on the ship have only had a few weeks or months to study the inhabitants language and vice-versa. With this twist, they'll have generations.

Let's say I want some time to pass between the mutiny that ends the attempt to terraform the planet and going to the inhabited planet. Even decades. Is there a way to make the ship travel so slowly it takes that long to leave orbit and then reach a nearby planet? I want to hobble their ship's speed without making it likely they'd die on the way. It can't even be very far away, since the distance would be similar to the distance between Mars and Earth.

That means I need a prior contact with those inhabitants, a hostile one, because it's likely the colonists would at least try to communicate and ask to settle there before going on to the less likely planet. And they've failed and they're on the way back to a planet full of creatures who have been hostile to them. They can't leave the system, and they can't stay in space forever, the ship's systems are running down. It might be a generation or two more before the ship fails, but it will happen.

Now that's a nice dilemma. My original conflict was between people wanting to settle no matter how the inhabitants react (war as necessary) and those who would rather risk finding a different system. In this case, the conflict would be between those who want to stay in orbit and build friendship with trade and communication, even if it takes a generation and gives the inhabitants technology they can use to fight back with, and those who want to get down to that planet now, and clear out a space for themselves, by force if necessary.