3.5
+++
By ten, Timaeus was full grown. Giant in stature, gentle in personality, and gifted in mind. He was well known, well respected, a public figure, time split between his duties as an Alpha, and his general scientific endeavours. He still liked to poke fun at people, and still enjoyed their reactions at his antics, though.
After a decade, it was clear that estimates needed to be revised. The growth rate of the population had, by this point, ballooned to 4.3%, though it didn't seem like it would go too much higher. At that pace, it would shave two hundred years down to a hundred and forty.
Exponents were devilish things, like that. Starting slowly, but they curved up quick.
A decade in, and the population had risen from thirty five million to fifty.
Fun fact. Sanctuary had been designed to house one hundred million. It could support more, yes, that was just the housing capabilities. They'd planned ahead, when it had been built.
But population growth wasn't the only thing happening. Resourcing efforts had been hard at work the entire time. The megafactory had been completed by three years in, covering tens of kilometers, and it had started its work immediately, churning out hordes of Collection Drones that had stripped the rest of the island bare in short order, only to then immediately put down five additional core taps, all to fuel the resource demands of the megafactory.
All of that was stage one. The part where they merely gathered resources to turn into more industry. Stage two, when they actually began to test the designs thoroughly, physically instead of just theoretically?
That required even more.
Three plans had been debated between for Project Moth, see. All three called for fleets, but all three called for different types of fleets. The first plan had a large fleet of moderately sized vessels, with each one having a small portion of the population, the industry, and travel capacity. Eventually, it had been rejected, on account of efficiency issues, the problem that the population they held was simply not large enough.
Plan B had done the opposite; one really big design, to hold everything and everyone. That had also been rejected, again on account of efficiency issues, though this time because it meant that everything was in one basket and managing the logistical nightmare of what was basically going to end up as a small moon was... Undesirable.
Plan C mixed the two. A small fleet of large vessels, each one intended to hold two hundred and fifty million people, with the industrial capacity to match. Such a fleet would have been attended by scores of lesser Stone Ships, autovessels that would guard and retrieve resources for it as was necessary.
Plan C had won out. It was considered the right mix of factors to be the most efficient option with the highest chance of success. That it would also allow the fleet to split up as needed, while maintaining enough of a population that I could act with considerable freedom was a bonus.
These ships still required a lot of resources. Competent design and advanced enough technology let you fit a lot of people in a fairly small space, but two hundred and fifty million was a big number. And fitting two hundred and fifty million people comfortably required even more.
The main habitation modules ended up being an approximate cylinder thirty to forty kilometers long and ten kilometers wide, the entire volume utilized with clever design to fold a city in on itself while still create a still surprisingly spacious zone with plenty of area for the people in order to avert claustrophobia and over-concentrated population.
And that was just the habitation modules. The industry and science modules were significantly more dense, but still quite large. Then there was the ship itself, without the modules closer to a mobile, skeletal station; with reactors, Void Shield Generators, weapons bays, sensors, and a dozen other things that all combined to create an extremely well protected and well-armed vessel, sufficiently powerful to make any would-be attackers regret their decisions.
And then, there were the autovessels. All significantly smaller than the main one, but 'significantly smaller' still meant scores of ships that ran the gamut from escorts hundreds of meters long to battleships measuring at multi-kilometers.
The initial plan required two hundred of these civilization ships. The attendant fleets didn't need to be built with them, as the ships could build them afterwards, but they were still extensive.
The requirements to build all of this made one wonder how it was possible. Even with what among the most advanced technology ever created, it still seemed a stretch.
That?
That was the tyranny of scale.
That was the kind of resource expenditure that would need half the planet ripped apart in order to get the materials, if not for nucleosynthesis meaning they just needed the raw mass. Two hundred had further dropped to forty, with the completion of the Man of Platinum augmentations dropping the necessary population, but even then, we were still talking petatonnes of material.
Does it sound like it a lot? It's quite large, yes, but the thing is, this planet's mass was sufficient to build tens of billions of such ships.
And in space? Planets were small, compared to the true giants of systems; stars. Typical stars made up ninety nine plus percent of the mass of a system. Sure, we didn't have a star, but there was still more than enough.
It just took time to get to that point.
And again, exponents? Devilish things. Simple math; a single drone takes an hour to build another itself. How many are there, ten hours later? Over a thousand. Ten more hours, and those have multiplied into over a million. Another ten, and they're at a billion.
Reality complicates this, of course. For starters, Collector Drones don't self-replicate, being Stone Technology rather than Iron. There were several additional steps in the chain of production; Collector Drones are deployed by factories, go out into the environment, harvest matter, and bring it back to refineries. Refineries take the immediately useful elements, and the rest goes to Nucleo-Synthesizers for a much slower transformation into usable materials. Every step needed to be expanded at its own pace, drastically slowing the entire thing. Further, consuming available resources made it harder to get more resources, meaning that you eventually had to swap from Collector Drones to other sources- or expand the size of operations.
It slows the entire thing, yes.
Ten years was still more than enough time to get ready for stage two.
Again, testing. The designs existed, having been made when Project Moth was first suggested. They had not been tested, and even more importantly, they hadn't been made with more modern techniques in mind. When one was going to fling themselves out into space where a damned Warp Storm was waiting, that was especially important.
The megafactory, after having achieved its minimum required resource flow, was promptly turned to that purpose. Parts of the ship were built, tested one by one, at large and in minutiae. Damn near everybody with even a hint of engineering or architectural ability had been involved in it at one point or another; from simple artists to genius engineers to Stone Minds to Timaeus himself. The data the experimentation generated was pumped directly to purpose-built processor farms, where it was checked and worked on over and over again, the designs refined with the same relentless drive that they'd optimized their own genetic code with. Errors vanished, oversights were corrected, faults removed, perfection sought until ultimately...
What was left was flawless. Glorious and superb, an exquisite design worthy of the Age of Technology.
They called it the 'Lightchaser'.
Production of the skeleton was finished by twenty years. The industrial module was finished three months after that. The science module was complete by the fourth. The habitation module, which was responsible for nearly a third of the ship's mass, took longer, though only by another year.
The launch of the first vessel had been watched by almost everybody in Sanctuary, commemorated through cheer and sheer joy. Watching the silver-white ship rise into the sky had filled the world with enough emotion that I could literally taste it.
Moving everything over took even more time. Sanctuary, by the time that the Lightchaser was complete, had been host to some eighty six million people. By the time that the population transfer had finished, they were up to eighty eight.
Everybody had been pretty happy about it. All that extra space, the fact that they were no longer underground...
Then, there, they finally took a name. Became... more than a group of survivors, living in a bunker. They became, in a real and final way, an actual civilization again.
The name itself had been subject to a lot of back and forth, suggestions coming in from everyone. The ultimate winner, though, had been fairly simple.
Starseeker Compact. The Compact, for short.
Good for morale, that was for sure.
Of course, with all of that said, they weren't the only ones growing.