I'm reading Tale of a Spaceborn Few, the third Wayfarers book.
The first book is on a family merchant Firefly-esque ship, trying to make ends meet.
The second is on a station, about an AI learning to become a person.
The third? Spaceship. Giant goddamn colony spaceships.
These spaceships are built from hexes, which is cool. Each home is seven rooms that're six hexes, which is itself a hex - the center room is a living room, plus four bedrooms, a foyer, and a bathroom. Each home is part of a "hex" of six homes, with the middle being shared services like kitchens. Six of these is a neighborhood, with things like a grocery store. Six of these to a district, with such combined services as recycling and hospitals. 36 of these form a triangle giant hex, with manufacturing, big farms, and the "centre" that turns the dead into soil. Four of these decks to a segment, six segments to a homestead.
And because I'm me, I've got a spreadsheet trying to figure out how big these are, the size of the homes, etc.
By my math, roughly 186,000 familes per spaceship. Each family in a 4-bedroom home, so call it 1.5 million people per spaceship.
The homes are described as relatively large. There's other space besides homes. The total space is proportional to the size of the room - if each room is 8 ft on a side, so 166 sqft. That's a total square footage of something like 400 million square feet. Or 14 square miles, all four floors high.
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That's not quite right: It's 3.5 square miles, times 4 floors. It'd be 14 square miles if it was one floor.
ReplyDeleteManhattan is 22.7 square miles, so like 6 times larger and, of course, more floors. And Manhattan was 1.6 million population (at night).
ReplyDeleteI guess big families make sense for a colony ship, but 8ish people families just seems... huge to me... but that's probably because I have a weird dynamic with my family.
ReplyDeleteThey describe the first generation families as three generations. Grandparents, parents, kids. All living in the same space.
ReplyDeleteI'd make a horrible colonist...
ReplyDelete166 sq ft
ReplyDelete* 7 rooms per house
* 7 house spaces per hex
* 7 hexes spaces per neighborhood
* 7 neighborhood spaces per district
* 36 districts per deck
* 4 decks per segment
* 6 segments per homestead
--------------------
344,361,024 sq ft=12.35 sq miles per homestead.
Misha B You are right about the houses. For the rest, there"s a "center" that has shared functions, so the center of each chunk isn't the same.
ReplyDeleteYou've added that in for each house / hex / neighborhood, but I don't see it for the decks. Decks also have shared spaces, so I upposed that 36 to 42 to get 400,000,000 square feet -- which is what I get when I include all the middle space.
So is it actually 42 district spaces per deck?
ReplyDelete36 dstricts that act like districts, estimated 6 (1 per 1) that have centralized services: manufactering, big farms and, in true generation-ship style fashion, where the dead are turned into soil.
ReplyDeleteMatt Johnson What is the rooms are BIGGER? Make a hex side 10 feet, and you get rooms of ~250, so houses of 1800 square feet -- larger than most American houses pre-1950.
ReplyDeleteNote: I also assume the bathrooms are divded into, at minimum, three compartments. Predctably, this is not defined in the primary text.
ReplyDeleteHeh, sorry William. My comment has nothing to do with the size of the housing units. It's pretty much that my family is 2 people. 4 if you count my cats. 6 if you you count my mother and mother in law, but please don't. So 8 people families living together sounds huge to me... hence my "I'd make a bad colonist".
ReplyDeleteIt does kind of make me wonder what happens as time passes on these ships. If a family doesn't have children what happens? Are there laws saying they have to? What about people that are sterile? Or in non-reproductive capable relationships? Colony ships would probably have to have some pretty draconian reproductive laws in order to keep populations stable... maybe they could have child quota sharing, families with fewer members giving slots to ones that have more... but how do you deal with the space issue, everything is the same so you can't just get a bigger house...
Not yet specified to that degree.
ReplyDeleteThat being said: The society is an anarcho communism, near as I can tell. The laws of the society are:
- No one goes hungry. Everyone has a home.
There's private property, sure. If you get a thing of beans and bring it to your home, it is yours. If you make bean cake from those beans, that's yours and you can trade with it.
I see little enough reason not to do the same thing with access to your home. Barter seems to be the rule, rather than currency.
So, for ex: If I have zero kids and you want four kids, I could for sure loan you the extra room in my house for your kids. Then everyone's more or less happy.
I expect the novel to cover this at some point; afterall, the author goes out of her way to use zhe/zheir as the default pronoun, so she's likely more aware than many.
Update: One of our protagonists is single, and she takes visits with a sex worker. This is entirely legal and free, and available for all adults. So, there's that - you don't need to be in a relationship, because hooray for sex workers.
ReplyDeleteinteresting. Does the writing give a good sense of how usual/unusual that living situation is? If it's common, it would push the population estimate down. I suppose with a population orders of magnitude above the "magic number" for stable genetic breeding you don't need to be overbearing with the population rules.
ReplyDeleteIn the fiction of the novel, we're at a point in history where the Fleet has interaction with other worlds. So, it is no longer entirely self-contained and there's the ability to leave, for others to show up, etc.
ReplyDeleteI betcha during the time when there was no contact, it was a different matter.
That being said, we're dealing with a population on order of a million per ship and 30 ships, so there's no worry about genetic diversity.
I'm an idiot: One of the protags is a woman married to a woman. The society doesn't make a BFD out of it, and I only realized at the end that this is, probably, a non-reproductive relationship.
ReplyDeleteWhich says something great about how little novelty such relationships have nowadays.