[TML] Noncanonical TU 3D.

[Thad Coons]

On 1/4/08, Timothy Little <tim at little-possums.net> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 09:00:39PM -0500, Thad Coons wrote:
> > The third was a combination of jumpsickness and life support
> > failure.
>
> In a society with more than 200 years experience with space
> exploration, and at least 100 years of permanent space habitation?
> That is indeed very bad luck, on top of some very good luck that some
> did manage to survive.


> The fourth has always been a baffling mystery. "What really happened
> > to the Arcodian?" is a favorite pastime of armchair historians.
>
> That's the one that returned with tons of data making the mission a
> complete scientific success, isn't it?  There were no recordings of
> *anything* inside the ship itself?
>
>
> On the whole the series of missions sound like some rich kid's high
> school science project rather than actual science and exploration.
> Given some major cultural and economic shifts I suppose they could
> well have been exactly that :-)


The half dozen or so wealthy visionaries who drove and partly funded
the  exploration and colinization of Alphacen did in fact push for speed
orver prudence. Their followers were slower and more cautious.

There was information gathered from inside the Arcodian about what
had happned, from messages left by the dying crew to instrument
recordings. Unfortunately,  it was all contradictory, ambiguous or
 incomplete.

It was the fact that people went out and didn't come back that
created an attitude of caution on the part of decision makers.  That
none of the well publicized failures  or near-failures as actually due to
lack of fuel was, in many minds, an insignificant detail.

The collective experience with space-appropriate industry and
technology wasn't really all that deep. Total populaton of the Solar
colonies at the first alphacen expedition was, I'd say, still under ten
thousand people. Callisto and the Moon are not exactly prime
real estate.