Talk:Exodus Fleet
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Isn't that a bit speculative? I admit it may be a reasonable speculation but there potentially could be other possibilities. For example, the archival images we have seem to show Heinessen as a mine worker, but we don't know how closely supervised these exiles were on the frozen wasteland of Altair VII. It may have been like the ice prison planet in Star Trek VI, where there are only a handful of guards (that can be overwhelmed by numbers) and the planet's environment itself serves as prison. If the Empire thought an icy planet might not offer the raw materials for ship construction, the serfs might have been left there to mine with only occasional material pickups by Imperials. If the serfs overwhelm the guards, they may have a window of time before Imperial forces check in on them again, and during this window they might build their ice ship, which was only really a short term thing to get to a more remote place. Once among asteroids, there would be nickel iron asteroids to use as raw material for the Exodus Fleet. We know that in LOGH construction seems to proceed as extraordinary paces due to automation, and they were using well known (perhaps even considered primitive) technology. As a labor camp and place of exile, Heinessen and his fellow serfs may not have all been uneducated manual laborers, but instead intelligentsia sentenced to hard labor. That would explain how such a small population is able to create a functioning society when they found the Alliance. Perhaps also they managed to secure technological databanks to bring with them so they could recreate an industrial infrastructure quickly. Iracundus 10:29, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
- Even taking the possibility of the Ion Fazekath being an hastily-built, temporary ship wholly created on Altair VII, I have a hard time seeing the Exiles able to build the 80 ships of the Exodus Fleet completely unaided. Each ship carried 5,000 people (400,000 / 80), which is four times the crew of the Rio Grande, an enormous flagship. Given that there had to be basic living facilities, sufficient hydroponics, at least some livestock - for the colony - as well as some basic entertainment facilies, and considering that the archives show that at least a few rooms had some large amount of space, its easy to deduce that one Exodus Ship dwarfed the Rio Grande. Now, the Rio Grande was a flagship which took, according to the databooks, 12 to 18 months to build in a dedicated, highly-automated shipyard filled with trained people whose job is actually to build ships. Its hard to see 80 ships larger than Rio Grande built without some ressources coming from elsewhere. I mean, yeah, they hid at a remote asteroid, and they at least assembled the ships there. But that doesn't mean they didn't at least gather the necessary ressources and technologies. I do agree, however, that the Exiles' level of education was likely high. Historically, what has frightened governments the most were often intellectuals, as they could convince the masses if given the opportunity. Its fair to say that Heinessen and Kim Hoah, given their leadership roles, were likely very educated themselves. FPA Forever
- There are a few noteworthy differences between the construction of the Ajax-class flagships like Rio Grande and the 80 Exodus Fleet starships constructed by Ale Heinessen's men. Namely:
- 1. Rio Grande was a battleship. Meaning that she was built with a reinforced hull, and extremely advanced technologies. She required complex and expensive multi-meter-thick armor, plus dozens of heavy guns, high-output engines, and other extremely efficient technologies, because she had to stand in battle against the Empire. It's not unsurprising that military ships built to exacting standards, higher than those in the civilian market, take much longer to build. Compare the 1.5 year construction time of the MS Freedom of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world, to the late-model Nimitz-class carriers, of similar size, but which took more than five years to complete. On top of this, I imagine that the shipyard workers in the Alliance worked a normal schedule, 40 hours a week with perhaps a bit of overtime; a WWII-like extremely fast pace of construction can't be sustained for 150 years. Over time, the general trend toward complexity, especially in military applications, makes construction take longer and require more skilled workers.
- 2. The Exodus Fleet ships were ships of necessity. They were guaranteed to be extremely spartan, and even relative to the other ships we see from that time period, look pretty primitive. The Exodus Fleet ships look more like the ships that first left Earth than the colony ships used by the USG to claim the stars. By then, that technology would be so old, it was probably readily available in public databases. Working in a mining colony, most probably picked up at least basic engineering skills. All 80 starships appear to be of a single, simple design. Livestock would not be necessary; it's a luxury even today, and it seems that Heinessen already had local wildlife. The ships were likely extremely thinly built, with low safety margins, and built around the clock by the workers almost without rest. A good deal of the machinery could probably have simply been cannibalized from the Fazekath, and they may have brought some extra machinery with them to set up the yards.
- Ultimately, without any other sort of information, I'm willing to chalk it up to the sort of handwavium that permeates the series for the sake of telling the story. The sort that allows FTL travel, liquid metal at near-zero temperatures, and Seffle particles. The one092001 01:58, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
- Fair enough. FPA Forever
Pykrete Spaceship theory
User:Gregornguyen
Pykrete is essentially a material made from wood and ice combined together, and because of its slow melting rate along with its low thermal conductivity, its hardness is quite close to a piece of concrete.Its also more durable than ice and melt slower
In WW2 a British engineer proposed a plan for a large unsinkable carrier made out of such materials, sadly his idea never see any practical use.From my PoV, Heinessen used Pykrete for the construction of his spaceships, although pykrete took more times to form than concrete, their potential durability is something that would be very useful for the long journey of the Exodus Fleet, not to mention the abundance of ice and possibly the accessibility to wood pulp or sawdust on the planet.( Pykrete is 14% wood and 86% ice)
So my theory is that, Arle saw a child playing with an ice boat,but thrusters tend to melt ice quickly so he devised the use of Pykrete for the construction of his fleet, not only the resources are available, the spaceships which was built upon these materials would be quite durable to endure such long journey through the Iserlohn corridor.
For the durability of Pykrete, here is a vid from MythBusters
