----- Original Message -----
From: "Shawn Yarbrough" <shawn.DeleteThis@nailstorm.com>
To: "The Larry Niven Mailing List" <larryniven-l.DeleteThis@larryniven-l.org>
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2004 9:18 PM
Subject: [Larryniven-l] Mote
> How sad... a whole ancient race with such bad luck that they consider
> hope to be a form of insanity. Yet they can't adapt to their
> environment because hope is an essential part of intelligence. So they
> stay unhappy.
>
> But the blockade can't last forever. Knowing the universe is somehow
> accessible, Crazy Eddie will escape thru normal space if necessary.
> Eventually they will try something that works. Maybe they could think
> of a way to kill a star and send it thru the jump point. Or maybe just
> a ship with a powerful Field but so small that the blockade wouldn't
> notice it.
>
> Looking forward to The Gripping Hand.
>
>
That was essentially the Moties whole problem, they very close to the
Murcheson's Eye in space, and closer to several other dwarf stars other than
New Caledonia. They are adapted very well to living and working in free
fall. How much easier would it have been for them to launch the lightsail
ship to any star closer to them than New Caledonia? Much easier of course!
If they had done so how much sooner would they have arrived at the target
star? Depending on the star they would have arrived 10 to 50 years sooner,
when the Second Empire was smaller and weaker. If they had picked a star
that was not visited or rarely transited by mankind so much the better.
Murcheson's Eye is described as a red giant and I don't recall any details
about its system of objects in orbit, but at the very least it will have a
comitary shell, and probably a kuiper belt. It is likely to also have
several large gas giant planets with their attendant moons and Trojan
asteroids, and also likely to have an asteroid belt of some sort somewhere
inward from them. To Moties all of this is very valuable real-estate, much
more so than it is to humans. It is only the fact that the Moties think
inside the box and don't believe that they can really escape that sets them
up for failure. They sent their lightsail ship, which cost a huge amount of
industrial effort, to a star they knew had intelligent life. They also
designed the lightsail ship to kill its passengers and crew if they
discovered a space faring alien intelligence. They came from a system where
one of the mediators claimed that since they had entered space the Planet
and the Asteroid civilizations had not both fallen at the same part of the
cycle, so the builders of the lightsail would think it normal that either
the asteroidal or planetary civilization of New Caledonia would contact the
lightsail ship when it arrived. In other words they built and launched a
ship at huge cost that was designed to be a failure. The same ship sent at
less effort to any of the stars closer to the Mote than New Caledonia makes
the lightsail ship a total success. They fall inward braking on the light
pressure, scan the sky all the way and find a large asteroid, or a gas giant
moon, and match orbit with it. They land, using the material of the light
sail to make a pressure dome, start digging and colonizing. In 10 years the
moon/asteroid has a large enough resource base and population that they
begin sending out master groups with a pair of masters and a set of
retainers to take over other moons and rocks in orbit around the target gas
giant planet. In 100 years with there population growing unchecked they
have colonized all the moons of the first planet they reached and are moving
on to populate every other object in orbit around the star they have
reached. By 200 to 300 years after arrival the star system is fully
inhabited with Moties and their technology is higher than the Second Empire
of mankind.
How many stars can they aim at to achieve this result from the Mote? There
are at least 2 stars other than New Caledonia which they could have targeted
the lightsail, and both of them are closer to the Mote and would have been
reached sooner. They don't even need to use the lightsail to reach
Murcheson's eye, any ship that accelerated to 5% of light speed would reach
Murcheson's Eye before the lightsail could reach New Caledonia at 10% of
light speed. HISN ships can reach at least 8% of light speed in normal
space, the Macarthur did just that chasing the lightsail towards the sun New
Caledonia, and still have fuel to brake almost to a stop. If they
accelerated to 5% they would have fuel to stop and a comfortable margin of
error. If they were clever they could accelerate on normal drive at one
Mote gravity until they escaped the Mote system, go into hibernation for the
long coast, then wake up and deploy a solar sail for the braking maneuver
when they arrived at Murcheson's Eye.
Allen W.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
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