Mission: Ark-Ships

In order to colonize the Gliese 1061 system, 14 ark-ships containing each 2200 colonists were built for a total population of 30 800 settlers. While the creation of fewer but larger arks would have reduced the number of redundant expensive system, the engineering challenges of bringing such large ships to an acceptable speed where deemed too important. Smaller designs were then preferred, each with the systems that are described below.

Solar Sails

The main propulsion system of the fleet, solar sails are large reflective canvas, that gain momentum reflecting light the way regular sails get pushed by wind.

Regular solar sails use the light provided by the sun to move. This however makes them extremely inefficient the farther away from the sun they are and therefor, in normal circumstances, would make for very poor interstellar propulsion.

The Gaia Initiative however created extremely powerful lasers in orbit around the sun that would be able to aim with outstanding precision at the ark-ships to provide the light needed in interstellar space. This ingenious solution allows for the most complicated and heavy part of the propulsion system to remain in the solar system where it can be easily maintained by earth while the ships need to carry only the sail and can still fully exploit the power of the sun through the lasers.

To be effective, the material making up solar sails must be extremely light. This usually makes them weak to tearing and prolonged stretching. With the size of the sails required to bring one of the arch-ships to a satisfactory speed, most standard construction materials could only guarantee an effective sail for 20 years. The Gaia Initiative however, uses the latest in living plastic technology to build its sails. On the surface facing Earth, lives an ecosystem of A-Life engineered extremophiles. These use part of the energy from the lasers and nutrients stored on the ship to survive out in space with a special form of photosynthesis. This process has as byproduct the material from which the sail is made. These extremophiles act therefor as a billion tiny spiders all working on one web. Any tear made by micro-asteroid or stress is quickly patched and the sail is maintained for the many decades required by the mission.

Fusion Torches

The fusion torch engines are the secondary propulsion system of the fleet. Since the solar sails can only accelerate the arks away from the solar system where the laser are, it was necessary to come up with an alternative propulsion system to slow down the ships. Without this the arks would merely flyby the Gliese 1061, going too fast to be captured by its gravity well.

While net gain nuclear fusion was achieved in the mid 21st century, it never proved to be quite the clean and endless power source some had hopped. Fusion reactors proved to be too big and expensive to be economically viable. The nail in the coffin of fusion as a power source was brought when A-Life made bio-fuel extremely inexpensive to produce en masse.

Fusion reactors however still found use in space explorations. The process of fusion requires to bring the fusion fuel to **** pressure and temperature. By the leaking this compressed heated plasma, it is possible to produce a thrust just as with chemical engines. This process can even be amplified by pumping other chemicals in the way of the plasma jet where it will rapidly expand upon heating. These fusion propulsion system have proven to be heavy and not particularly powerful. They are however extremely efficient, being capable to accelerate a craft constantly for years on very little fuel. This is the quality that makes them perfect for long duration missions

Stasis Pods

Even with the most advanced propulsion system out there, space probes can only hope to reach around 20% of light speed. This means that any expedition to the Gliese 1061 system would take around 120 years to complete. Since the life support required to sustain a population for that amount of time would prohibit such a mission in the first place, it was deemed that stasis technology had to be developed.

Created specifically for the initiative by Genetica, stasis pods create an artificial type of "hibernation" in the human body. The pods begin by putting their occupants under a medically induced coma. A cocktail of various A-Life organisms is then introduced into the pod; these serve the role of "caretakers" of the patient's body. They stimulate regular body function all the while lowering its metabolism and slowing down aging. The end result is an **** state that requires much less nutrition.

This process is not without risks however. The A-Life organisms in the pods cannot prevent all ills and so patients are always at risk of succumbing to a degenerative disease while they are in stasis. This risk is increased for older patients and in consequence, only people 30 or younger were allowed to sign up for the initiative with exceptions up to 40 in the cases of individuals deemed to have unique talents. Even then, the majority of people selected where in their early 20s.

Gravity Rings

While the engineered ecosystem of the stasis pods may be able to prevent or slow the problems usually associated with a medically induced coma, they cannot prevent bone loss and muscle atrophy due to prolonged stay in zero-g. To combat this problem, the stasis pods are placed inside gravity rings; large circular constructs that spin about the ship's main axis in order to simulate gravity through centrifugal ****.

While such methods of artificial gravity have been proposed as early as the 20th century, problems with the design have precluded their utilization before. For one, the difference in gravity between the ground and the height at which the head sits would make any who crouched, got up or in any way changed their height, extremely dizzy in all but the largest rings. A similar problem, this time due to the Coriolis effect, would make those attempted even a light jog lose balance. The radius needed to effectively counteract these problem is so great, that to date the only other gravity ring in use is the massive 1km diameter structure of the 3rd international space station. However, since the colonists of the Gaia Initiative are not actually expected to live in these ring but rather simply be stored there while in stasis, these problems did not need to be addressed.

Since the spinning of a gravity ring generates angular momentum and that this angular momentum must be conserved, using a singular gravity ring would cause the main body of the ship to spin in the other direction. As this would make it difficult to manoeuvre, all the ark-ships are not equipped with one but two gravity rings, each one spinning in a different direction as to cancel out angular momentum.