Vehicle Research

Since the whole concept of the series revolves around traveling great distances relatively quickly it seems to me that an important first port of call for research is to find a way that our crew could do so quickly and practically.

This of course means that the series will have to be based sometime in the future, and although this element of the series will be fictional I would still like to base these things on fact. For example; using methods of travel / propulsion that are either currently in development or have already been theorized. 

Now then, this is an extremely large subject for research and considering I have until December 16th to complete this whole project, you'll understand if my research of theoretical propulsion systems and physics isn't entirely comprehensive... If that's what your looking for I believe you should have stuck to wikipedia or NASA... Not an animation blog. I will however be doing several posts on the matter...

Now to business!

Let us look at what will be required for the sake of series:

We need to be able to travel extremely large distances very quickly, if not instantaneously.

We need fuel to not be an issue. 

We need the ship to be practical to live on, for a large crew.

We can borrow from other well-known science fiction for the energy source, an on-board reactor seems like a pretty good idea... As long as it's safe, and since this is fiction, achieving that is as simple as me saying it is.

In order to sustain a crew for a long time the living conditions are going to need to be comfortable, there will need to be an on-board doctor, and supplies need to not be an issue. We can take some liberties here of course. For example, materials or even food could be 'replicated' much like in Star Trek, possibly from a bank of elements (I'm having fun!). And these elements could be extracted, mined or filtered from various sources or even traded with any species. The possibilities are endless!

Here are some examples of the 'replicator' from the Star Trek series':

We can probably assume that if it is possible to assimilate objects from nothing, or a collection of elements and causing it to appear in front of you, then it only makes sense that we be able to apply that as a method of transportation, but on a larger scale.

Much like the ships in various science fiction stories, the ship will have to be very self sufficient. Examples that immediately come to mind are, again; Star Trek and a game I played recently called Mass Effect. I'll show some examples of the ship in Mass Effect, The Normandy (SR2):

The Normandy is a good example, because the crew is much smaller to the ones used in Star Trek, similar to the size of the crew that there will be in the series. The design of the Star Trek ships is much more comfortable, so I'll also need to find some reference from that too.

With the design of the ship slowly forming now I have to decided on the method of propulsion... I'll do a separate post specifically about methods of propulsion etc.

Hope you enjoyed!

Matty out.