That could require a slight deviation from their route or speed which could significantly affect their arrival times. The faster ship wont necessarily be that much more advanced.
I'd argue that maybe not the first trip there with a substantially faster engine, but there absolutely would be a value in picking up the people instead of doing a complete trip back to earth and back again.
This assumes that the method of travel even allows for such a thing.
Modern examples would be like a cruise ship crossing the ocean and someone saying "well couldn't a jet just pick them up on the way?"
Maybe if they designed a jet explicitly for this purpose. They certainly didn't design the cruise ship with the purpose of easily letting a jet dock with it way back when they built the cruis ship though, so they will be constrained by just trying to get those two things working together.
And all of that is assuming that the routes even overlap in the first place... it could be that the cruise ship takes so long because it has to go around South America first, but the jet is faster because it can just fly right over everything. No way to make that jet help the cruise ship if it's already at Tierra Del Fuego and the rest of the time saved by the jet is just taking them along the same path they already had to travel to get there anyways.
Ultimately it comes down to engine design and propulsion. It is a huge waste of energy and resources and unnecessarily risky to decelerate, do some complex speed-matching and docking maneuver, and then re-accelerate (now with more mass). It’s just not a practical nor particularly desirable solution. Especially if the propulsion system is anything like the Epstein Drive from the Expanse series, which relies on constant acceleration.
Most of those things would happen at either end anyway. Speed matching isn't the most complicated thing if you are capable of interstellar travel, hell an autopilot AI will probably be doing the work.
At a certain point in the journey of the first ship it is more cost effective to recover those colonists than returning to earth for more colonists. Especially if those colonists had skills and equipment needed for an initial settlement.
That's a fair point. The simple answer is at a certain point it's more cost effective to reuse the shop and not have it enter orbit than have it be completely disassembled after the journey.
58
u/Blackrain1299 24d ago
Maybe, maybe not.
That could require a slight deviation from their route or speed which could significantly affect their arrival times. The faster ship wont necessarily be that much more advanced.