If space travel has the problem that newer colony ship would overtake older colony ships, couldn't they just attach new engines to the old ships?

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A lot of space travel theories raise the problem that it's always better to wait longer to send off a colony ship, as it's bound to be overtaken by a newer colony ship that can go faster.

But wouldn't it make more sense that, providing earth has a vested interest in the colony ship, to simply send engine platforms to the colony ship to be attached to make it go faster? assuming that matching speed is doable. Could you have a colony ship that receives shipments from Earth over tiem that grants it new technologies and replacements for dwindling resources, or if it has self fabrication abilities be given blueprints to new technology?
 
it's always better to wait longer to send off a colony ship, as it's bound to be overtaken by a newer colony ship that can go faster.
No one can know the future in advance. Counting on development to continue is a risk. For all we know the earth will be wiped out before the second ship is sent. This means that relying on it for resupply is a risk and that the first colony ship may have advantages over the second one, because disease, war or a meteor may change our ability to send another one.
 
No one can know the future in advance. Counting on development to continue is a risk. For all we know the earth will be wiped out before the second ship is sent. This means that relying on it for resupply is a risk and that the first colony ship may have advantages over the second one, because disease, war or a meteor may change our ability to send another one.
Like a hybrid approach, where the first colony ship is planned and operates under the assumption that there won't be any resupply ships, but the original company or group will send whatever they can depending on their goals? If the ultimate goal is to colonize other planets and put down stakes of ownership, then it would make sense to use as much of the old ship as possible
 
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Like a hybrid approach, where the first colony ship is planned and operates under the assumption that there won't be any resupply ships, but the original company or group will send whatever they can depending on their goals? If the ultimate goal is to colonize other planets and put down stakes of ownership, then it would make sense to use as much of the old ship as possible
If the ship is self sufficient, why spend money again for a resupply ship?
 
Its not necessarily going to be practical to do an in-flight retrofit. I'd say if its not that big of a difference in time of flight, just make them sit out the extra few months. Otherwise, might plan a rescue mission or tell them to turn back and come home if either of those things would be faster.
 
If the ship is self sufficient, why spend money again for a resupply ship?
depends on how important that colony is. If FTL communication or flight is discovered, it would be significant to drop a tech package tot he ship
 
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It's never going to happen. Space colonization is just some capitalistic escapism. Those billionaires will rot in this shithole with the rest of us. They know this civilization is not going to last long and are just coping and wasting tax money ( like space X, what a fuckin failure)
 
It's never going to happen. Space colonization is just some capitalistic escapism. Those billionaires will rot in this shithole with the rest of us. They know this civilization is not going to last long and are just coping and wasting tax money ( like space X, what a fuckin failure)
Someone’s found Reddit :)
 
By that time the difference might be like comparing a horse carriage and a plane. If the travelers and whatever is one board are valued they should just send an empty ship over and let people move there.
 
New, better engines would probably still weigh a lot, which means that the resupplying ship would need to accelerate them and itself to catch up to the colony ship. That'd mean it has to be able to accelerate to a speed that's appreciably higher than that of the colony ship (to reach it in a reasonable timeframe) and then to decelerate to dock with it and transfer the engines, then go back to Earth (assuming we're talking about a reusable or crewed ship).
The above assumes that the new engines use the same fuel that's present on the colony ship and they can be powered by the power source that's on the colony ship. If not, then the resupply ship has to carry all that too which makes things even harder.
If the resupplying ship is to be capable of all that, why not just build and send a new colony ship? Or do what @Glossy Paper said and send a newer empty ship to switch to.
 
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This will happen, and that's why generation ships are almost certainly retarded because if we ever get self-assembling factories and the ability to emulate a human mind as data, we can just send swarms of tiny ships at 50% or more the speed of light (look up Breakthrough Initiative and scale that shit up)--possibly more, I've seen predictions that 90-95% of lightspeed is doable. Then these tiny ships use light pressure from the star to slowly assemble lasers and slow the other ships down and then they land on a planet and build an antenna that receives a signal and transmits the data that is a human mind and then they build robot/biological bodies and download AI brains into them. That's not any more science fiction than shit like a 1 gigaton spaceship going 1% the speed of light for 500 years with thousands of people aboard.

But it's probably possible in some scenario where you have people retrofitting a planet as a ship and shooting it out of the galaxy to go to another galaxy. The ship is so big and travel times are so enormous that it actually would have the industry to improve its engine somehow and then gain that little bit of speed. You'd probably need a ship that big to colonize another galaxy, even if you were a robot.
It's never going to happen. Space colonization is just some capitalistic escapism. Those billionaires will rot in this shithole with the rest of us. They know this civilization is not going to last long and are just coping and wasting tax money ( like space X, what a fuckin failure)
I wish you were right, but it's going to happen because the elite are control freaks and will eventually launch trillions of tiny mirrors to dim the sun in the infrared spectrum about 1-2% thus cooling the Earth. If you can warm/cool the Earth on demand, congrats, you have a goddamn weather control system.

To support this industry you have to either have huge launch capacity like Starship times a million or need factories on the moon (probably automated), which means you have all the infrastructure needed for space colonies. My theory is the elites will use this weather control system and shit to drive everyone off the planet and into space colonies, which are the single most controlled environment possible. If you think the 5G 15 minute smart cities they have planned for us are bad, they're positively free places compared to a space colony which has to account for every molecule of air. The elites want the max control possible, therefore space colonies are the solution. Eventually the Earth will become a giant nature preserve where the Ted Turners of the future can do whatever they want. They'll also build their own space colonies which are Epstein's Island in Space, where they can splice themselves with animals and live out their transspecies fantasies raping kids all day.
 
Hm, basically this would only apply if something really groundbreaking was invented.

By realistic standards, such a colony ship would already be a ginormous investment, a work of decades by a superpower.

The enormity of such an undertaking would have nothing comparable in history.

Reducing travel time from 300 to 250 years would not be worth redoing it again, amd then spending a decade to refit the ship.
 
Reducing travel time from 300 to 250 years would not be worth redoing it again, amd then spending a decade to refit the ship
What about from 500 years to like six months, and the new technology was developed 300 years into its journey?
 
In Star Trek, which admittedly plays fast and loose with what’s possible in their universe, they have tractor beams and generic “tug vessels” that are warp-capable and tug damaged starships that can’t move under their own power. I doubt we’ll develop anything as miraculous as a tractor beam, but having a faster “tug spaceship” show up and pull it to a destination faster seems logical. It would be easier than retrofitting an entire vessel too — just tug it to the Deneb system (or wherever they’re going) and retrofit/dismantle there.
 
What about from 500 years to like six months, and the new technology was developed 300 years into its journey?

Unless we talk ftl at that rate of peed increase, the hull might not survive that. Remenber they need to watch out for tiny debris too. Would be easier to just build a second ship, and ferry the crew over.

Project Orion is said to be theoretically able to achieve 10% lightspeed, which would be 50 years to Alpha Centauri.

Trappist is 40 LYs, so it would be around 500-600 years if we factor in slowdown and acceleration. So I think your math means FTL, as they would need to do around 10-15 light years in 6 months.
 
It would make more sense for the engineers on the ship to develop better engines, plus you wouldn't get there anyways, or be frozen in cryo/uploaded to PC so the time spent is meaningless.
 
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